Why Spy?

I don’t usually play Spy. Not that I hate playing Spy, I just don’t get much chances to play him. I mean, the scenario where having one more Spy is fine is something that will only happen once every twenty matches. The scenario where having another Spy is necessary? About as often as the Golden Frying Pan dropping.. And when I realized “hey we need another Spy”, by the time I got to switch to Spy I would already have three more Spies in my team. Still, at the rare moments that I get to play Spy, it was awesome.… [Continue Reading]

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Why Sniper?

Why do I play Sniper? Is it because of the thrill of precision elimination, of taking out a valuable target in a single hit? Is it the excitement of facing another Sniper, where a slight deviation on aiming or a slight hesitation on strafing will lead to your death? Or is it the small joy of picking off enemy players, who think themselves to be safe, untouchable, up until your bullet penetrates their cranium? Or could it just be the simple pleasure of taking out enemies one by one, showing the server your mastery and precision? Trick question, I don’t… [Continue Reading]

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Seedship

With these two lines, Seedship begins. Seedship is a text-based game on mobile, where you play as an on-board AI of a ship holding the last of humanity in cryosleep, along with databases of humanity’s scientific and cultural knowledge. You have various sensors and 10 deployable (but not recoverable) surface drones, and your job is to find a suitable planet for humanity to thrive again. You begin with all systems fully operational. When gameplay starts, the Sun is dead, and no signals came from that direction. For all you know, the thousand people laying dormant within the ship you control… [Continue Reading]

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Healer Woes

If you never felt that playing healer is frustrating in games, then you’ve never played a healer. Ever. Sure, you may have picked a healer class, but you definitely have been playing him as a DPS. Anyone who has played a healer will have experienced at least half of the things in the list below. Most of you who mainly play healers, like me, probably experienced all of them. Teammates wandering into harm’s way and expecting you to follow. Teammates abandoning you and leaving you to die. Teammates calling for aid when they are way too far away. Teammates calling… [Continue Reading]

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One-man D&D

Normally, I talk about video games, with most of my articles being about PC games and a significant chunk of them being about Team Fortress 2. Either way, my topics are largely about digital interactive entertainment. Today however I want to talk about something more physical. I recently recovered these two books from my bookshelf. As the tagline on the covers suggests, it’s an interactive book where you make your own choices in the adventure. Much like a choose-your-own-adventure book, except that these books also have a combat system. At the start of each book, you need to generate a… [Continue Reading]

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Bringing up the past

What you see up there is a piece of my past. You see, while the Game Boy Advance was out when I was six, I never had a proper handheld console until I got a Nintendo DS Lite six years later. And after more than a decade that thing is still working, I checked it a few days ago from the time of writing. Holy shit are those things built to last. But anyways, before the DS, the only handheld games available to me are these things, and the 9999 in 1 tagline is technically underselling it. There are 702… [Continue Reading]

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The Flaw in the Level 3 Sentry’s Design

This isn’t a gameplay discussion by the way, it’s a lore(???) discussion. In the TF2 lore, the Engineer is supposed to be a genius, having eleven hard science PhDs. He also managed to build these wondrous buildings that helps his team out a lot. However, there is one thing that really annoys me about the design of the Level 3 Sentry. We all know that the Level 3 Sentry is capable of shooting bullets and rockets. Bullets are hitscan in games and almost hitscan-like in real life. Rockets, however, are projectiles with travel time. Thus, aiming and firing rockets require… [Continue Reading]

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It’s Melting Men

The Manmelter is the most … different of all the flare guns. It’s definitely not the most unusual Pyro secondary out there, since that goes to either the Thermal Thruster or the Gas Passer, but among its subclass of Pyro secondaries it is definitely the most unique. But before I talk more about the Manmelter, I just want to talk about my one pet peeve of this gun, which I’ve mentioned in a previous article before: make the reloading more obvious. Seriously, making it more visually distinct when you are ready to shoot will improve the experience of using the Manmelter a… [Continue Reading]

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Once upon a time, I played Overwatch.

Last Christmas, I got Overwatch. I did tried Overwatch before that during the free weekends, but I never got to play much then due to real-life matters (i.e. swamped by work). I only got to properly play Overwatch after I got my own copy. Before I started, I made a promise to myself to stay as far away from Mercy as possible. I played quite a bit of Medic in TF2, and I am just sick of operating the mystery healing beam dispenser. I wanted to try something new, to see what Overwatch has to offer proper. I started off… [Continue Reading]

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“Honestly, kind of useless”

The title is pretty much the general consensus of the TF2 community when talking about most of the stock melee weapons. Out of all the nine stock melee weapons, five of them are universally considered pointless, and should be swapped out the moment a better unlock for that slot comes along. They are the Bat for the Scout, the Shovel for the Soldier, the Fire Axe for the Pyro, the Fists for the Heavy, and the Bonesaw for the Medic. The Bat, the Fire Axe, and the Fists are considered useless mainly because the primary weapons for the Scout, Pyro… [Continue Reading]

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