aabicus – Page 49 – The Daily SPUF

Cops & Zombies 1: Sniping

April 22, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments analysis, Cops & Zombies, guide, sniper, weapon

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

April 21, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments co-op, Cops & Zombies, gun, horde, non-tf2, payday, weapon

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]

Community Announcements Random Game Announcements

Last Day to get Fractured Space free on Steam!

April 20, 2015April 21, 2018 aabicus 0 Comments announcement, free, free game, Not TF2

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

April 18, 2015January 15, 2017 aabicus 0 Comments analysis, experience, non-tf2, On Shooters, Team Fortress 2, valve

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]

Featured This Week in TF2 History

April 16th – 23rd

April 16, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments balance, cosmetics, crates, engineer, glitches, medic, pyro

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]

Featured This Week in TF2 History

April 9th – 15th

April 14, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments cosmetics, melee, scout, trading, update

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]

Featured This Week in TF2 History

April 1st – April 8th

April 2, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments Filler, fun

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]

Featured This Week in TF2 History

April 1st – April 8th

April 2, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments cosmetics, glitches, update

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]

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4 More Reasons to Bind a Key to Suicide

March 30, 2015 aabicus 1 Comment glitches, MvM, scout, soldier, strategy, TFC

Never thought I’d find another quartet of justifications to click a button and shuffle off one’s mortal coil, but it turns out dropping dead on the spot has more combat uses than I thought. And no, ‘cheating your way out of a Holiday Punch tauntkill or Rock-Paper-Scissors loss’ isn’t on the list. People who do that are insultingly lacking in sportsmanship. Reason 5: Give health to your teammates as Scout. Remember the Candy Cane? Some of wish we didn’t. But it has a little-known use for the scout literally willing to die for his teammates; when you hit the suicide button… [Continue Reading]

This Week in TF2 History

March 25th – March 31st

March 24, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments MvM, Strange Parts, TFC

This week gets the new record for ‘least-updated week in TF2’. Eight years of TF2 updates and a grand total of two fall under this set of seven days. I remember where I was on the day of March 28 2012, and that’s because it was the day Valve added strange parts to TF2. (For those of you interested, I was being driven home from soccer practice and checking the TF2 blog on my phone). Pyro got a new backpack bodygroup in preparation for the new Scrap Pack promo, the Cozy Camper was added to Medieval mode after a week of SPUF… [Continue Reading]