Author: aabicus

Community Announcements Featured 

New Overwatch Hero Released!

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The first post-release Overwatch hero is here, and she’s the Crusader’s Crossbow personified. I know, I’m having trouble believing it myself! Ana’s sniper rifle will heal teammates or damage enemies; all that matters is who you hit. Likewise, her E-attack is an area-of-effect radius that heals teammates, similar to Soldier 76’s biotic field, but it also damages enemies in range. Finally, she has a sidearm she can fire every 12 seconds that temporarily knocks out any unlucky enemy in its crosshair, kinda like a mini-Reinhardt ultimate. Ana’s ultimate is a buff dart that grants one lucky teammate increased damage resistance, damage boost and… [Continue Reading]

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Featured 

Twitch Chat: The Beast with a Billion Faces

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The CSGO tournament ESL Cologne 2016 was this week, and despite the fact that each day began at my 1:30am, I’ve been staying up and loving every single day of it. It has all the highs and lows of high-level CSGO play, the shout casters are among the best in the world, and the production quality rivals traditional sports events. And yet somehow, one of my favorite parts of the tournament is the unfiltered meme-spewing echo chambers in the Twitch chat. Ever since Twitch Plays Pokemon introduced the concept of game streaming to me, I’ve spent countless hours watching various… [Continue Reading]

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Community Announcements 

ESL Cologne 2016 CSGO Grand Finals Today!

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In 14 hours, the last teams standing are going to butt heads in the ESL Cologne 2016 grand finals! If you have any motivation to watch top-level CSGO play, this is the time to jump in and watch. Of the 16 teams that originally came to fight for the 1 million dollar grand prize, it’s Team Liquid and SK Gaming who have survived the brackets and move into the illustrious Round 30. Team Liquid has had an amazing run this tournament. Despite getting off to a rocky start (though not without a resounding victory over EnVyUs), including losing pretty handily… [Continue Reading]

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Featured Now for Something Completely Different 

Planetside 2

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When I started playing Planetside 2 on Aug 14, 2013, my motivation was extremely straightforward; I wanted to participate in giant battles with hundreds of players slugging it out in first-person shooter combat. Far as I knew, Planetside 2 was really the only option if playercount was your single defining criteria, as it’s the leading juggernaut in the relatively niche MMOFPS market. I wanted to be a tiny pawn in a giant, unfathomable war machine, where powers larger than myself or the hundreds of soldiers around me waged a never-ending game of dominance. For that reason, I did almost no research before plunging in. I… [Continue Reading]

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Featured The SPUF of Legend 

A Look at Junkrat’s Traps

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I cannot stop playing Junkrat in Overwatch! He’s amazing, you can spam pills for days and almost everything I know about playing Team Fortress 2‘s Demoman ported over into Junkrat. His concussion mine is my favorite weapon in the game, basically being a single-clip Sticky Launcher that doesn’t self-damage, and his additional abilities such as the bear trap and the Riptire are new mechanics that perfectly complement his playstyle. Anyone who mained Demoman in TF2 definitely needs to try him out, though I hope you mained the grenade launcher like I did because it’s the cornerstone of the loadout, not… [Continue Reading]

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Now for Something Completely Different 

Why Does CSGO Purge Perfectly Good Content?

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Coming from TF2 and into CSGO, this question has been jarring me a lot. A couple months ago the Operation Wildfire pass went live, bringing some new maps into Valve’s most successful shooter and letting everyone enjoy the work of several community mapmakers. While only Cruise really left a lasting impact on me personally, I still appreciate new content, but it did cause me to wonder what was going to happen to the maps once the Operation ends in a week. So I checked it out and learned that Valve traditionally deletes all the maps from an Operation once it’s over.… [Continue Reading]

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Review Lakeview Cabin Collection

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(Heads up, Minecraft-graphics nudity and sexual content in the screenshots) I can’t believe it took me an entire half-year to finally play this game Dapper Apples got me for Christmas. It’d been on my radar since playing the original flash game, as the author showed he was more than capable of migrating the unique ontological sandbox horror gameplay into newer, larger settings. Lakeview Cabin Collection lives up to the model of its predecessor while expanding greatly on the player’s options; framing itself as a series of horror films, each episode traps 4 characters in a classic horror setting and the… [Continue Reading]

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Little-Known TF2 Mechanics

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In order to make this list, said TF2 mechanic needs to (1) heavily affect some aspect of playing the game normally, (2) be completely unexplained or hidden, and (3) be something I somehow only learned in 2016 despite my pathological addiction to analyzing every facet of this game. I’ve divided the list into three “major” and three “minor” mechanics. Major 1: Projectile Models on some weapons affect aerodynamics. Several of the projectiles in TF2 actually care about the drag on the fired projectile, which means that, for example, most of the grenade launchers fire even more differently than their stats… [Continue Reading]

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Featured Random Game Announcements 

Five Free Weapons in Payday 2 Every Player Should Try

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In honor of my favorite pistol (number 3 on this list) getting its first ever skin in the most recent Sydney safe, I thought I’d write a Payday 2 article designed for new players, showcasing a number of free weapons that you should definitely give a shot. This guide assumes you own none of the paid DLC, and are subscribed to the Payday Steam Group for the free community weapons. 1. Platypus Sniper rifle – Sniper rifles in Payday 2 come with infinite penetration, meaning that you can kill as many cops as you line up. Even more importantly, it can penetrate Shields,… [Continue Reading]

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Featured 

Wrap Assassin updates

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The updates hardly did anything, but I’m still immensely satisfied with the changes Valve made to the Wrap Assassin. Since my last article on this weapon, there have been two buffs. The first turned the ornament into a pseudo-explosive that deals area-of-effect but only bleed on a direct hit, which was driving me nuts because I didn’t actually know that when I recently picked the weapon back up, so I couldn’t figure out why I frequently got a hitsound but no resulting bleed hitsounds. But now that I understand it, I’m 100% okay with the entire concept. After all, previously nothing happened… [Continue Reading]

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