aabicus – Page 26 – The Daily SPUF

Overwatch and Killing Floor 2 Updates: Both Games Got a Machine Gun!

March 22, 2017April 6, 2017 aabicus 0 Comments killing floor 2, orisa, overwatch, update

March 21st brought big updates for Killing Floor 2 and Overwatch! Most of you probably already know about the new Overwatch hero, so let’s get that one out of the way first. Orisa is the newest addition to the Overwatch roster and the first post-release tank, intended to fill the role of ‘primary tank’ that currently only Reinhardt really succeeds at. While the forums can’t agree on whether she succeeds in this regard, I can say in practice that she is very powerful and I often felt quite safe hiding behind her and her disposable barriers. However, due to being a mid-long… [Continue Reading]

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Left 4 Dead 2 – The Sacrifice

March 21, 2017April 6, 2017 aabicus 0 Comments a week of love and hate 3, Left 4 Dead 2, map, zombies

Love and Hate 3 is themed around favorite and least-favorite maps, and even though I’m not eligible to win, I can’t resist an opportunity to talk about Left 4 Dead 2, especially since I can’t do TF2 because I’ve already written about my favorite and least favorite maps in the game. And while I’m going to need time to pick my least-favorite map in Left 4 Dead 2 (they’re all fun in their own way), my favorite is an easy pick. ‘The Sacrifice’ is so different from the other maps that it’s the only map I can replay immediately after a previous run… [Continue Reading]

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Payday 2 – Breaking the Stealth/Loud Dichotomy

March 15, 2017March 27, 2017 aabicus 0 Comments game mode, ideas, payday 2, spuf of legend

Was Skyping with Medic the entirety of editing this video, and we were talking about hypothetical heist designs that wouldn’t fit easily into either the “stealth” or “loud” category. Payday has steadfastly maintained those two categories of heists for the entire six years of the franchise’s existence, but at this point there’s so much content in Payday 2 that I think they’ve got the resources and the options to branch out from either “hordes of cops filling the building in waves” or “sneak around and avoid the security guards and cameras.” My first idea for breaking the mold was a heist… [Continue Reading]

Featured The SPUF of Legend

Roadhog Time

March 9, 2017March 27, 2017 aabicus 0 Comments analysis, character, overwatch, roadhog, spuf of legend, tank

As a Lucio main who offclasses Soldier 76, I’m pretty immune to the whole Overwatch concept of “competitive checks and balances”. Both of my mains are stupidly adaptable with self-healing, self-defense, mobility, and easy-to-use firearms rounding out their generalist kits. No matter who I’m fighting on the other team, its rare for any opposing hero choices to really cause me much difficulty beyond forcing me to play passively and maybe preventing me from easily doing my job. And then there’s this mother♥♥♥♥er. Roadhog counters both of my mains so badly that he’s now my tertiary main, for no reason other… [Continue Reading]

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Planetside, too

March 5, 2017March 27, 2017 aabicus 1 Comment GIFs, loadout, medic, melee, planetside 2, shotgun

In the interests of expanding our horizons, Medic and I are doing an exchange where we take turns picking a free-to-play multiplayer game that one of us hasn’t tried. Last week we played Warframe, which Medic wrote about, and this week we were gonna try my old college love, Planetside 2, but then the game didn’t work on Medic’s computer. (Update: It eventually fixed itself, and our co-op adventures will be chronicled in Medic’s upcoming article!) However, this did cause me to reinstall again, and soon I was teleported back to my 2013 dorm room–running through Auraxian landscapes, solo-capping control points and constantly reviving corpses. I don’t… [Continue Reading]

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Helix Jumping – Advanced Soldier 76 Mobility

February 27, 2017March 18, 2017 aabicus 0 Comments mechanics, mobility, movement, overwatch, soldier

As a Lucio main, I enjoy offclassing Soldier 76 because he retains (admittedly far less impressive) mobility and healing-focused abilities, letting me actually kill people while still filling a secondary role doing what I love best. And over time, thanks to my mobility addiction, I’ve found myself comboing the pieces of his kit in unusual ways to make my way around the battlefield. Because of the minor self-knockback on Helix rockets and the way Blizzard coded his sprint, Soldier 76 has the capability to reach some unusual places with what the community has dubbed “helix jumping”. But before we get… [Continue Reading]

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On Fortress Forever’s Huge Pyro Rework

February 25, 2017March 18, 2017 aabicus 0 Comments fortress forever, pyro, rework, team fortress classic, TFC

The Team Fortress Classic Pyro sucks. I don’t care what the person in the comment section of that article says, she has almost no role to serve on the battlefield and does a miraculously bad job of filling her supposed niche of area-of-effect damage. Valve made some big changes to the class when creating Team Fortress 2, but they also tried to stay loyal to Pyro’s afterburn-based roots. For the longest time, Fortress Forever likewise attempted to create a more versatile afterburn Pyro by giving theirs some interesting mobility tools: he could ‘fly’ through the air by firing his flamethrower behind him, and his afterburn… [Continue Reading]

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Paladins Update OB44 Disappoints Playerbase

February 24, 2017March 18, 2017 aabicus 3 Comments complaint, paladins, spuf of legend, update

Last year I reviewed Paladins: Champions of the Realm for our YouTube channel, and while my review was overall positive, I noted that many players were wary of immersing themselves in the new IP because the developers have a bad habit of ruining their older titles in the name of making a cheap buck. Well, as far as I’ve heard from my friends who took the plunge anyway, that day had sadly come. For those who don’t know anything about Paladins, it’s a hero-based shooter with gameplay very reminiscent of Overwatch. Everyone selects a hero and then both teams fight over… [Continue Reading]

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4 More Things I Miss From Saints Row 2

February 15, 2017March 9, 2017 aabicus 0 Comments criticism, Saints Row, saints row 2, saints row the third

Saints Row 2 is such a good game! I’ve said it before, most Saints Row fans have said it before, but I honestly have never played a better open-world sandbox game, and I recently got Grand Theft Auto V. The city is vibrant, the tone balances gritty gang violence with tongue-in-cheek game-y action, the characters and story are solid and the gameplay is bursting with variety and unbridled freedom. Saints Row the Third does a decent job of carrying this over, I’d give it an 80% in all, and most of the big things it missed were detailed in my last article… [Continue Reading]

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Twitch Plays Pokemon: A Legacy

February 12, 2017March 9, 2017 aabicus 0 Comments history, pokemon, reddit, twitch

Who remembers Twitch Plays Pokemon? It was exactly three years ago and one of the first massive online events I remember personally participating in. For those who weren’t there, here’s a quick rundown: on February 12 2014, a new Twitch stream opened up called “Twitch Plays Pokemon” that challenged the viewers to work together to beat the classic Pokemon Red. The game would recognize any commands input into the Twitch chat like “A”, “Up” or “Select” and would execute them in the order they were received. As TV Tropes put it, it was “over 100,000 people fighting over a controller.” And it… [Continue Reading]