Cops & Zombies 6: Pistols

Both games hold a certain reverence for pistols. It’s the first gun you’ll be seeing your character wield in the campaign/heist, it gets its own weapon slot, and it’s the only gun you can use while in bleedout. An emergency weapon through and through, no other gun is as certain to make an appearance in a given playthrough. Left 4 Dead‘s starter pistol, the M1911, is the only gun that didn’t migrate into the new game, its role instead being filled by the P220. A halfway-decent pistol with a respectable rate of fire and damage output, it can be dual-wielded at… [Continue Reading]

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Cops & Zombies 5: Special weapons

Left 4 Dead 2 has two weapons that don’t fall into the basic tiers: the M60 and the Grenade Launcher. Both guns have counterparts in Payday:The Heist and it’s honestly more for the second game that I’m writing this article. Let’s do the more obvious outlier first. The M79 Grenade Launcher is an oddity in both games; the only projectile weapon, the only explosive weapon and the only weapon almost impossible to main because it has severe ammo issues. It’s difficult to give recommendations on using it in Left 4 Dead 2 because it’s an unwieldy thing full of downsides. Your teammates won’t… [Continue Reading]

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Cops & Zombies 4: Assault Rifles

I don’t know how I managed to make it to the fourth article without discussing the assault rifles, but they’re the bread and butter of the FPS genre so I can’t leave them on the backburner forever. The archetypical jack-of-all-trades, assault rifles are a community favorite and I doubt that philosophy is ever going away. They have  respectable damage output, moderately fast reload, moderate accuracy and higher-than-average firepower, and the real question becomes: Now that you’ve decided you want an assault rifle, which one should you pick? Both games have a super vanilla “literally no downside” rifle and an AK-47 (actually… [Continue Reading]

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Cops & Zombies 3: Shotguns

On one side of the spectrum, we’ve got the long-range super-accurate sniper rifles, in the middle we’ve got the midrange medium-accurate assault rifle, now to round things off here come the short-range screw-accuracy shotguns. Not that these guns can’t hold their own in mid-range combat; horde games always give players some of the best shotguns that can wreck the enemy even outside their favored range, and keep the damage coming indefinitely due to the quick single-shell reload system. Left 4 Dead 2 has a larger variety of shotguns available to the player, with the Chrome Shotgun and Pump Shotgun among the earliest… [Continue Reading]

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Cops & Zombies 2: SMGs

Both Left 4 Dead 2 and Payday: The Heist have two ‘tiers’ of non-pistol weaponry. Tier 1 is generally less combat-effective and consists of weaker shotguns and submachine guns, whereas Tier 2 is where the more varied heavy-hitters enter the picture. To me, this makes Tier 1 sound much more interesting from a balance perspective, as the devs had to make sure they were combat capable without feeling like primary weapons. Nowhere is this more clear than with the SMGs. Both games have two SMGs with pretty predictable roles. There’s the accurate one with low damage per bullet (Uzi in Left 4 Dead… [Continue Reading]

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Cops & Zombies 1: Sniping

Assault rifles felt like an obvious place to start this series, what with assault rifles being the generic all-purpose middle ground of the gun spectrum, but personally I’ve always found sniping a more interesting balance challenge for a co-op horde game. You’re being flooded with a bottomless wave of bad guys, why on earth would you want a semi-automatic long-range weapon when an assault rifle can clean an entire courtyard faster? Because you’re on a team, that’s why. If your three allies can keep the bulk of the enemy down, you become something of a specialist who excels in picking specific targets,… [Continue Reading]

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Cops & Zombies

Our Medic has been doing a fine job running this blog. Seriously, she’s amazing. For almost two years now, The Daily SPUF has published a new article every single day, and Medic is personally responsible for both the majority of articles and pictures! SPUF cannot give her enough kudos, but, lately, she’s confessed to being tired. Running a daily blog longer than anyone on Friends held a single job is a repetitive chore with an ever-respawning deadline. So I’m giving Medic a week-long break! And I’m going to do this by writing seven articles in one night. This night, to be exact. I’m turning this video on… [Continue Reading]

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Last Day to get Fractured Space free on Steam!

Do you like space combat games? Or do you just like getting free games that other people will have to spend money on? Well, Fractured Space has been free to download for the last two days, and if you get it before the free weekend ends, you get to keep it forever! Fractured Space combines the frantic fast-paced combat of a shooter with the global forward-thinking elements of a real-time strategy. In the one game I played, the strategy mostly manifested in a guy named Nanda cursing endlessly at his team of level 1 captains who wouldn’t leave home base. I’m… [Continue Reading]

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How an FPS Should (and Shouldn’t) Reward Experience

While I’m not the Valve-only gamer I was a few years ago, I do seem to always find myself coming back to Valve’s pre-eminent titles. No matter how many times I grow tired of their old games and branch out in the hopes of finding similar but fresh content, I always eventually come crawling back for more Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress or Counter-Strike. Recently I took a bit of time to try and puzzle out just what exactly Valve had done to continually attract me so. And I think I’ve figured it out. The single best thing about Valve games in… [Continue Reading]

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April 16th – 23rd

Taxes are due everybody! Hooray! If you’re anything like me, taxes are a long and laborious chore, and I’m even more qualified than most because I worked as a tax preparer for over a year. I’m only 24 for god’s sake, I’m supposed to be spack-dab in the middle of the part of your life where you look forward to cashing out your W-2s after work and buying a round of drinks with your refund. But the IRS is not a fan of entrepreneurs or freelancers turns out… But I digress. In the world of Team Fortress 2, taxes don’t appear… [Continue Reading]

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