aabicus

I write articles! I also make games, release videos, voice act and lots of other cool things.

Cops & Zombies 3: Shotguns

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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]

Cops & Zombies 2: SMGs

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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]

Cops & Zombies 1: Sniping

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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]

Cops & Zombies

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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]

Last Day to get Fractured Space free on Steam!

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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]

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

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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]

April 16th – 23rd

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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]

April 9th – 15th

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With post-Easter candy on sale and taxes looming on the horizon, perhaps Valve can be forgiven for not doing a heck of a lot this week. Lord knows none of the game teams for whom I’m developing ever do anything of merit around this time; save creativity for a time where it won’t get you audited. Back in 2009 on March 13th Valve did push a minor Sandman nerf; stunned players now took 50% less damage. This gave you a slightly better chance of not insta-dying just because some Bostonian twerp nailed you with a baseball while you were trying… [Continue Reading]

April 1st – April 8th

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The first week of April has always been a busy one in Azeroth! Blizzard traditionally spends at least one day each week rolling out some bug fixes, or “hot fixes” as they like to call them, to separate them from traditional updates. April 3rd, 2007 was focused on fixing some pathing exploits. No longer could players exit the bubble in Eye of the Storm before triggering the match and gaining an unfair advantage. They also fixed an exploit where a player could use the Auto-unstuck feature as basically a Eureka effect. Now there’s a 1-hour cooldown for using the feature. Likewise, the gate… [Continue Reading]

April 1st – April 8th

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April Fools! Originally, I was going to write the article on patch notes for League of Legends, following the theme, but there doesn’t appear to be an online archive of every League update since 2009. Even their official blog only goes back 2 years, and posts tagged with actual dates beyond “posted 2 years ago…” But anyway, it turns out TF2 actually has had things happen this week, and I would be remiss not to skip some of these landmarks, the largest being April 1st 2009. See, Valve doesn’t normally do April Fool’s jokes (unlike Blizzard), but when they revealed a sneak peek… [Continue Reading]