aabicus – Page 38 – The Daily SPUF

Payday 2 and Old Memories

February 14, 2016 aabicus 0 Comments dlc, payday, payday 2, solo, speed run

Overkill’s monthly side job has updated for the new month, and this time it’s a brand new challenge. Old Memories reads: “Dallas is thinking about the good old days and he would appreciate if you did too. Complete Rats job on Overkill or above, using AMCAR and Chimano 88 with no skills and 2-piece suit.” This is a pretty clever reference actually, because Overkill knows players are going to speedrun the map in order to minimize the risk of going in nude, which is exactly what people used to do back when Rats was a treasure trove of XP in the… [Continue Reading]

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Painted Weapons: A Sordid History

February 13, 2016 aabicus 0 Comments economy, paint, suggestion, weapons

For 99.9999% of TF2 weapons, paint doesn’t enter the picture. You paint cosmetics, not weapons, because paint would absolutely destroy the ability to recognize weapons on sight, right? But what the hell, let’s just add it in by this point. There’s gotta be a way to make Decorated weapons paintable. After all, that remaining .0001% of weapons consists of an elite few weapons that have in one way or another been painted. The most famous of course are the painted Cow Manglers. Two Team Spirit and one Balaclavas are Forever, they all came into existence in 2011 during an extremely short… [Continue Reading]

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4 Even MORE Reasons to Bind a Key to Suicide

February 10, 2016 aabicus 0 Comments glitches, strategy

When I wrote “4 Reasons to Bind a Key to Suicide“, I was certainly expecting that to be a one-off article. When I surprised myself by finding 4 more, I once again figured that had to be it. How many different competitive advantages could TF2 possibly have for dropping dead on the spot? Well, as my recent video shows, the new weapon-pickup mechanic has introduced a whole host of new ways a player can have fun with their loadout slots by granting themselves multiple copies of weapons to pick up. As its preceding article noted, two major exploits involve the Demoman… [Continue Reading]

Community Announcements Featured The SPUF of Legend

Announcing the SPUF of Legend!

February 7, 2016 aabicus 0 Comments 1000, aaby, awesome, celebration, daily spuf, medic, party, SPUF

Wow! We’ve reached the quadruple digits! Back when we started things in 2013, adapting SPUF threads into articles and relying mostly on Gen. DeGroot’s loadout thread for pictures, I had no idea we’d ever reach this far. And we didn’t just reach it, we kept new articles coming every day! Medic’s already got an article talking about how awesome this is, so my focus here is to showcase some cool new additions to our content-creating repertoire. As mentioned, we’ve created a Youtube channel, The SPUF of Legend, and my goal is to create new videos for said channel on a regular basis. I’m aiming… [Continue Reading]

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Windows in TF2

February 4, 2016 aabicus 0 Comments competitive, design, maps, TFC

No, not that Windows. I’m talking about the ones that even Mac and Linux players have to deal with. Many maps in TF2 feature glass windows, which surprisingly are something of a new feature for the TF series. Going back into Team Fortress Classic, I can’t find any examples in official maps of transparent screens allowing the user to look but not interact with further parts of the map. They were consciously included in TF2’s design, as the Gravelpit developer commentary explains: “Height is a useful feature when designing defensible buildings. For instance, the cap B building needs to be defended from… [Continue Reading]

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A Syringe Gun Update

February 3, 2016 aabicus 0 Comments economy, festive weapons, medic, request, syringes

On my birthday in 2014 we published an article talking about the lack of cosmetic love for the stock shotgun. Since then, Valve’s kicked it up a notch and actually given us both a festive shotgun and Decorated shotguns, so they’ve kinda redeemed themselves. (we really still need an Australium one though.) And that means that the Syringe Gun is now the only stock weapon that goes completely unloved by Valve’s texture artists. I can kinda understand why, since it’s an underpowered and unremarkable attempt at a self-defense weapon that every Medic ignores because at least one unlock (usually the… [Continue Reading]

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aabicus tries to CS:GO part III

February 1, 2016 aabicus 0 Comments counter-strike, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, CSGO, non-tf2

The more Counter-Strike:Global Offensive I play, the more interested I get in its version of asymmetrical multiplayer. Despite being a competitively-ranked player vs. player military shooter, it does not follow the common trope of giving both teams similar arsenals. Instead, the terrorist and counter-terrorist ordnance are differ from each other in several very distinct ways, encapsulated best by the two signature rifles of each team. Like other games, CSGO chose to differentiate these two guns primarily through emphasizing either damage or accuracy. The AK47 hits much harder than the M4A1-S but at the cost being far less accurate, a distinction that… [Continue Reading]

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Juggling weapons: the new TF2 meta?

January 29, 2016 aabicus 0 Comments analysis, glitches, weapon balance

Red Robot sparked some interesting conversations in various social medias including SPUF when he released this video, commenting on a new ‘playstyle’ he’d discovered: Using the new weapon-dropping mechanic, he had the very Counter Strike-esque idea to juggle multiple weapons of the same loadout slot and carry them through the battlefield. His first idea was to pair the Crit-a-cola with the pistol, and I can definitely see the appeal in that combo. The pistol’s a half-decent jack-of-all-trades with middling accuracy, firepower, and firing speed, so giving it a damage boost and falloff-immunity could be godly in the hands of a pro scout.… [Continue Reading]

Featured Now for Something Completely Different

Optimizing Your Panda Express Strategy

January 26, 2016 aabicus 0 Comments food, heavy, I don't know!, I have no idea!, orange chicken, panda express, scout

Everybody has a vice, and mine is Panda Express. Their orange chicken is impossibly delicious and definitely my favorite food on this planet. Thank god I move so often and never seem to be anywhere near one, otherwise I’d be eating there all the time. The Panda Express at my old college campus was a place of many memories for me. It was where I first met my future wife in a study group for Dinosaurs class. I was its mayor on FourSquare before FourSquare revamped its mayorship system and made it stupid and pointless. I was there for all… [Continue Reading]

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Landfall: The Newest CTF Map

January 23, 2016 aabicus 0 Comments ctf, maps, tough break

The new maps in Tough Break feel super generic, but they’re at least very well made. And after the oddity of themes like aliens, halloween and PASS Time, maybe its good for TF2 to take a step back and support some tried-and-true game modes with new gimmick-free maps. Nevertheless I’m surprised to find myself liking ctf_landfall as much as I do. It’s Capture the Flag after all, a legendarily poorly-designed game mode. But somehow, Landfall does a really good job of balancing the concept and avoiding perpetual stalemates. The map has a wonderful three-dimensional design with two designated layers of… [Continue Reading]