aabicus – Page 47 – The Daily SPUF

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]

Featured This Week in TF2 History

May 10th – 17th

May 25, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments crates, MvM, trading, update

Remember when last week I expressed disbelief that Valve cranked out so many patches the week after so many big updates? Well, apparently Valve waits two weeks to take some time off, because this is the week where not much happened. In fact, in TF2’s eight years of existence, only four of those years had updates during this week. 2010 saw the inclusion of a few tweaks to the new crafting system. The gunboats were flagged as a Soldier secondary, and the crafting requirements for tokens was reduced to only two items of the same class. This made tokens actually… [Continue Reading]

Featured This Week in TF2 History

May 2nd – 9th

May 24, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments crafting, replays, update

This week is going to have a lot of déjà vu if you just read last week’s, and that’s because almost all of the patches are either fixing bugs from the week before or adding onto stuff from the week before. May 2nd 2008 began a long week of Valve fixing all sorts of things with the Gold Rush Update, as to be expected. Crashes with equipping the Kritzkrieg, exploits with cheating the achievements, bugs with achievments not unlocking, two different infinite Ubercharge exploits…the finer aspects of the Medigun were also tweaked, as a number of subtle things weren’t porting over… [Continue Reading]

Featured This Week in TF2 History

April 24th – May 1st

May 23, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments balance, glitches, history, medic, payload, spy, weapon

Well, ever since tax season ground me through the wringer and spat me out (I work in a tax place these days), I took a weeklong break from “This Week in TF2 History”, and now that it’s almost June I should probably dial myself back in. That’s right, this week is: And what a week to start with. April 29, 2008 brought the first major TF2 update ever: the Gold Rush Update! Payload immediately sky-rocketed to becoming one of the most-played game modes ever, the Medic class experienced a renaissance when he suddenly became fun, and future TF2 traders felt the… [Continue Reading]