Making Halo 2’s Hardest Encounter Even Harder – Vidmaster Forever

The only thing worse than Jackals. First Recon Among First Person Shooters, it doesn’t get much more difficult than Halo 2 Legendary. Twenty years later and the game still finds ways to surprise and infuriate its players. Halo’s Legendary Difficulty has always been a little mean. Halo 2, however, is interactive malice. Most Legendary playthroughs end in Cairo Station’s first Pelican Hangar, but an equally nasty surprise lies in wait on Halo 2’s second mission, Outskirts. Perched on New Mombasa’s rooftops, Jackal Snipers are bastards, and are easily the most polarizing portion of Legendary Halo 2. Legendary Jackal Snipers have… [Continue Reading]

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The Scaling Level of Pointlessness When It Comes to Cosmetics

It’s funny how some things come to you. I’ve got a good 1500+ hours playing Team Fortress 2, and it took me a good part of them to realise that cosmetics are actually almost completely pointless since you never actually see them. They are only ever seen by other people, unless you use that weird console command that shows your body. But even then, your head isn’t visible and you don’t even get to always see unusual effects. Aside from one obscure console command though, you’re dressing yourself up so you can look at yourself in menus. Any cosmetics you… [Continue Reading]

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Role Queue is Finally Coming to Overwatch!

Rejoice! (Or doomsay, if you’re on the other side of the fence.) A special edition of the Overwatch League tie-in show Watchpoint just happened, and they’ve formally announced the worst-kept open secret in Overwatch: role queue is finally coming to our favorite Blizzard shooter. Since the early days of Overwatch, players have been able to pick whatever character they want, and the game simply trusts all 6 to pick things that contribute to the team comp as a whole. If your team wants to go 6 supports, you could. No tank? No problem! However, this has led to some problems that… [Continue Reading]

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Renegades IEM Sydney Title Hunt

The recently dominant Renegades aim to win their first Major event, IEM Sydney 2019, which will begin this Tuesday April 30th.  We have seen a new contender rise in the last 3 months, with the Counter-Strike world being shocked with the recent performances from the prominently Australian lineup, boasting a recent Semi-Final achievement at StarSeries Season 7, being knocked out with a narrow 2-1 loss to Na’Vi. This run of form can be attributed to a massive team improvement, but specifically to Rifler Justin ‘JKS’ Savage and AWP player Sean ‘Gratisfacton’ Kaiwai, who have shown their skills off with brilliant… [Continue Reading]

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I Attended IEM Oakland!

Hi everybody! I’ve been a bit silent on the blog recently, mostly been working on my first quarter of schoolwork at the UCSC Games & Playable Media Master’s program. It’s a lot of work, but it’s very rewarding, and I’ll be updating you all as soon as the quarter ends and I can catch my breath. One of my favorite parts of the program are the other students; they’re all  driven game developers who look out for each other, and love to play board/video games together! Several of them are frequent Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players, and recently we got the exciting… [Continue Reading]

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Why TF2/CSGO comp pisses me off

So, recently TF2 got its competitive mode update. That’s all fine – even though I don’t believe competitive in TF2 can work for balance reasons. What really pisses me off though are the eligibility requirements. For that I have to go back to where competitive started. Back in CSGO, initially everyone was eligible for comp, besides the lobby limits on rank disparity. However, issues arose. Issues mainly being smurfs. So Valve had the brilliant idea to use the profile ranks to make it harder for smurfs to be eligible for comp. The idea was okay, because you can only get… [Continue Reading]

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If TF2 Competitive wants to ever get off the ground, it needs to stop being so pretentious

That’s a long title, I know, but this is a problem I’ve had for ages with competitive TF2. In all competitive games, you are going to get some snobbery based off ranks and the like, but here, in our tiny little competitive community, we can be incredibly snobbish and pretentious. I want to start off with a personal story. I played in 4v4 EU Silver. Most of my matches were against platinum or gold 6v6 or Highlander teams, playing casually for fun. My team on the other hand had only played a season of 4v4, and were at the same… [Continue Reading]

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Why is Competitive Matchmaking coming out of beta?

After 11 mediocre stress tests, TF2 Competitive Matchmaking is coming out of beta. And tons of little things that we’ve complained about don’t seem to have been addressed. The game doesn’t run much better on DX9, so those needing DX8 (some of whom may be on plenty strong enough computers that just don’t play nice with TF2) are locked out of competitive. Other graphical settings, mostly ones only accessible via console commands, are also turned off. Matchmaking seems to have trouble matchmaking people of varied ranks. The issue of class limits and class composition is still… an issue. Those ‘small’… [Continue Reading]

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Butting Heads in the Apocalypse

I’ve always loved watching competitive eSports. There’s nothing more electrifying than watching the absolute top players of a community murdering each other with insane reflexes, top-tier strats and telepathic teamwork, all with a pair of announcers following you along for the ride. But for the first time, I’ve found a competitive mode that really bears serious analysis just because of how creative the community had to get to even translate the base game into something eSport-worthy. I’m talking about Valve’s greatest asymmetrical shooter, Left 4 Dead 2. (A short crash course for people unfamiliar with L4D2 versus: Each map on a campaign, one… [Continue Reading]

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TF2 Competitive has a lot to steal…

Let’s face it, competitive Team Fortress 2 isn’t nearly as popular as anyone had hoped. Apart from b4nny, who is essentially the god of TF2 and can turn almost any invite team into a winner, most people don’t get many views. All the big leagues, ESEA, ETF2L, UGC, AsiaFortress and so on, get a few thousand views for their big grand finals, which doesn’t sound too bad, except when I tell you that a person being banned from League of Legends and sulking got just as many views, if not more. Despite the competitive community’s enthusiasm, the general populace and… [Continue Reading]

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