aabicus – Page 48 – The Daily SPUF

Flooricide

May 21, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments blood, ded, game, killing floor, new, non-tf2

Killing Floor 2 came out recently, and I’ve taken the opportunity to take my first steps into the Killing Floor franchise. For someone who’s spent a significant amount of my gaming time perfecting my ability and understanding of Left 4 Dead 2 and Payday:The Heist, it’s a bit odd for me to avoid the third member of Steam’s horde-based co-op triumvirate. But I’d never liked how the objective was literally killing the zombies (or Zeds, to be politically correct.) I prefer my enemies to be an obstacle preventing me from achieving a more global objective, like reaching the next safe room or breaking… [Continue Reading]

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Payday 2 and Things Lost in Translation

May 18, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments money, non-tf2, Not TF2, opinion, payday

I’m constantly having to explain to my friends how I could like Payday:The Heist better than Payday 2. The second game is a popular rollicking juggernaut with developer support, dozens of heists and weapons, customization options to rival TF2, and a huge player base. The first game has a mere nine heists, 13 weapons and nobody plays it anymore. It isn’t nostalgia; I had over 100 hours in the sequel before ever trying the first game. It’s not community-based; all of my friends play the sequel. I just really feel like Overkill Software lost track of some tiny things that hurt the whole package of… [Continue Reading]

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Ways TF2 Could Have Been Designed Better

May 16, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments criticism, improvements, original, unique, weapon

TF2 was the first online game I really played full-time hardcore srs-bzns style. Before TF2 entered my life, I’d occasionally get to try games on my friend’s N64s and I had vague memories of Oregon Trail and Humongous Entertainment games growing up, but I’d been largely sheltered from the gaming world due to my parents thinking that games rotted your brain. So once I left for college and experienced newfound freedom, The Orange Box seemed a logical first purchase, since I’d also played Portal when it came out for free in 2007 and (somehow) passed my parent’s “nonviolent and educational” criteria.… [Continue Reading]

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On Blood

May 12, 2015January 15, 2017 aabicus 0 Comments analysis, gameplay, history, On Shooters

Ah, blood. If guns are the protagonists of the first-person genre, blood is the deuteragonist, the damsel-in-distress the player needs to liberate from his opponent’s bodies. It’s a character like any other, a liquid life-force with a relationship to both the player and the world around him. The shooter genre seems almost unhealthily obsessed with it. As this mini-documentary covers in great detail, gore has been a cornerstone of gaming for decades, harking almost back to the beginning: But in this article I’m actually more interested in blood as a game mechanic. Because blood is often more than just a… [Continue Reading]

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Cops & Zombies 7: Melee

April 29, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments analysis, Cops & Zombies, guide, melee

And we’ve reached the last article in my Cops & Zombies series! Can I just say this was a wonderful night, and I enjoyed breaking my previous record for Most Articles Written in a Single Sitting. For the record, thanks to this video playing in the background the whole time, it appears I averaged two articles an hour. This is actually the eighth article in my seven-part series, because I’m awesome at counting like that. But I’d be remiss to end the series before talking about melee combat, one of the most exhilarating if also understated attacks in both games.… [Continue Reading]

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Cops & Zombies 6: Pistols

April 28, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments analysis, Cops & Zombies, guide, weapon

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

April 27, 2015April 5, 2018 aabicus 0 Comments analysis, Cops & Zombies, guide, weapon

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

April 26, 2015January 18, 2026 aabicus 0 Comments analysis, Cops & Zombies, guide, weapon

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

April 25, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments analysis, Cops & Zombies, guide, shotgun, weapon

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

April 23, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments analysis, co-op, Cops & Zombies, guide, weapon

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]