aabicus – Page 45 – The Daily SPUF

The Scotsman’s New Skullcutter

July 11, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments balance, comparison, demoman, update, weapon

On Smissmas 2014 Valve made my dream come true. The Scotsman’s Skullcutter became elevated from the dregs of poorly-optimized demoknights and Trolldemos to one of the best melee weapons for Demomen who treat their melee weapon like an emergency weapon instead of an intergral part of their loadout. Is it overpowered? Maybe. That’s a hard statement to make, what with the state of Demoman’s melee at the moment. The Ullapool Caber and Half-Zatoichi are pretty kickass weapons that fill the same role after all. And while the Skullcutter lacks the crippling downsides inherent in those two weapons, it also doesn’t bring anything new… [Continue Reading]

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The Light Machine Gun Plight

July 10, 2015January 15, 2017 aabicus 0 Comments balance, gun, Not TF2, On Shooters, payday, weapon balance

LMGs have always been a misunderstood and under-appreciated weapon genre in first-person shooters. Whereas mechanically they fill an obvious role in the sniper rifle>assault rifle>machine gun progression tree, in practice they’re often left off the list entirely or locked into specialist roles due to lack of developer support. Mechanically, LMGs focuses on spewing huge magazines of high-damage bullets very inaccurately. In theory its wielder assumes a suppressive fire role, ensuring that somebody is still firing while all the more-accurate teammates are reloading. Unfortunately its often the case that devs shoulder the LMG with a whole host of downsides; I can… [Continue Reading]

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The New Eureka Effect

July 6, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments engineer, strategy, weapon, weapon balance

Edit: Written before the new update, because Valve won’t let me write about the Eureka Effect without immediately changing the weapon. I remember being awe-inspired by the rebalances of the Eureka Effect. You can teleport directly to your exit now! No more waiting for your idiot teammates to stop hogging your teleporters, now you can take your battlefield transportation into your own hands! Then I basically tried to play with the Eureka like I would the stock wrench and quickly got bored like I always do. The real kicker didn’t come until a friend let me know that it works… [Continue Reading]

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The 3 Best Payday 2 DLCs

June 11, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments advice, dlc, Not TF2, payday

(Updated Janury 8th to reflect changes to the game) Payday 2 has a lot of DLC. A lot of them cost money. One of the first things I had trouble figuring out after I decided that I liked the game was which DLC are worth the five-dollar price tag, and the first conclusion I drew was “none of them.” The base game has all sorts of cool options for the enterprising heister with a perfectly fine arrangement of weapon types, weapon mods, and maps to run around testing out your guns. Even then, you can play DLC maps by joining public… [Continue Reading]

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TF2 hasn’t gotten any promos in a long time…

June 9, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments cosmetics, economy, other game, trading

Apparently 2014 really was the Year of the Promo. While at the time, it seemed to be just another step in the logical progression of Genuine cosmetics flooding our fair shooter as developers everywhere ticked another box in their marketing checklists to get people to play the latest game from <insert company here>, it appears that 2015 is not following in those footsteps and the flood of promos that assailed TF2’s filesize for the last few years has completely dried up. Not counting competitive TF2 tournament medals, the last Genuine-quality promotional items added to TF2 as a cross-franchise publicity perk… [Continue Reading]

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Could a “Flare Jumper” work?

June 6, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments balance, pyro, sticky jumper, suggestion, weapon

Based on the Detonator of course, not the Flare Gun, though I prefer this name as “Detonator Jumper” is clunky and “Det Jumper” is unclear. This is almost certainly the most commonly-requested reincarnation of the orange-colored -100% damage concept, with the runner up probably being the Boston Jumper. (But seriously, why would you want to give up the best way to give your Medic Uber?) A lot of other people are understandably opposed to the idea, especially those who think the Jumpers we already have are useless enough. But I think it could work, especially if Valve drops the training… [Continue Reading]

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Game Design: Differentiating Your Baddies

June 4, 2015January 15, 2017 aabicus 0 Comments analysis, design, killing floor, l4d, Left 4 Dead 2, non-tf2, On Shooters

First-Person Shooters do a great job of naming all the guns. Whether borrowing real-world names like “M14” in the name of accuracy, generic names like “sawed-off-shotgun” in the name of clarity, or custom names like “Klobb” in the name of uniqueness, I can’t think of a single instance where I was disappointed in the dev’s firearm naming efforts. But this satisfaction does not always transfer to their naming of the things being shot. In a way, I think it’s almost more important that the bad guy units in a shooter be given decent names, especially if the devs are hoping a… [Continue Reading]

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A Look Back at TF2 SPUF’s Non-TF2 Gatherings

May 31, 2015 aabicus 2 Comments discussion, event, history, non-tf2, SPUF

Traditionally, TF2 SPUF events have always taken place in the game to which the forum is dedicated. But that’s not always the case. Especially when the meeting is more casual or introduced by a relative unknown, we can get some esoteric spur-of-the-moment parties with some pretty impressive turnouts. This is just a fun recollection of some good times (and one pretty bad time) from SPUF’s history! 1) 100% Orange Juice. This one is less a single event than a recurring mini-community, but a lot of the old itsurblog crowd regularly play 100% Orange Juice together after hugthebed2 first commented on… [Continue Reading]

Featured This Week in TF2 History

May 25th – June 2nd

May 27, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments history, items, soldier, spy, sticky jumper, update

This article will wrap up Ketchup week. We’re back on track for “This Week in TF2 History”! Congrats everybody! I know it wasn’t actually a week, but the only alternative was to wait to fall behind an extra 14 days before starting, and that’s just the sort of logic that got us into this mess. Speaking of messes, the Spy weapons added as per Sniper vs. Spy were all decently buggy due to how strangely they messed with the mechanics of the game. The Dead Ringer in particular had more bugs than any other weapon before or since, and the… [Continue Reading]

Featured This Week in TF2 History

May 18th – 24th

May 26, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments glitches, sniper, spy, update

The first notable date this week takes us back to 1996, way before TF2 was even remotely on the radar. Version 2.9 was released for Team Fortress Quake, and it turned out to be the last update that game got before Team Fortress Classic usurped it as the Team Fortress of choice. Fast forward 13 years, and TF2’s Sniper vs. Spy update was getting released on May 21, 2009. This time, Valve tried to fix a problem where every time they released a class update the entire game got flooded with 90% of every server playing the new class. To this effect, Sniper… [Continue Reading]