Godspeed, Satoru Iwata

It has been announced that on July 11th, 2015, Satoru Iwata, head of Nintendo Corporation, has died due to complications related to a bile duct growth. The gaming community, especially  Nintendo’s, has been wracked by this event, and has given their condolences. Satoru Iwata, born on the 6th of December in 1959, became interested in making video games early on, and eventually joined HAL Labratory, where he was responsible in the participation of many games, including Kirby, Earthbound, and Balloon Fight. Eventually, he was promoted to president of HAL Labratory, who became responsible for bringing the company out of bankruptcy. As the head of Nintendo, he… [Continue Reading]

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Medic’s Opinions on the new Decorated Weapons

Meh. Lots and lots of meh. Okay, let’s be somewhat serious here and have an actual conversation about all of these dramatic changes that have suddenly appeared in TF2. It’s clear as day that hats no longer sell. So Valve has turned to weapons and taunts, things that people do actually see, even while they’re killing people. Hats were going to have to die down at some point, we have over 1000 of them, not all of them technically hats, but still, that’s a lot. There’s not enough backpack space to actually own every hat in the game. So here… [Continue Reading]

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5 Things You Didn’t Know About Payday: The Heist

Okay, you might have known some of these already. But after talking to some of the best players in the community and getting engrossed in Youtube videos of high-level play, I’ve picked up a few little known facts about Payday: The Heist, enough that I felt like putting them in an article. How many of these did you know? ———— 1. You can dominate snipers. But it’s bloody difficult. I’ve searched a lot of profiles of the biggest names in Payday:The Heist and only ever found one guy who did it a single time, and all he could tell me was that it happened in… [Continue Reading]

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Arena Respawn – Not at all serious fun

On Saturday 11th of July, Confusion hosted the SPUF Arena Respawn event with some help from Sham and Davjo and I got to try out Arena Respawn for the first time. Now, I’m a bit of a purist, I like things unmodded in TF2. Plus, Arena was my original game mode after 24/7 Junction, and I was quite good at it, particularly the Arena-only maps that no one else really plays. Not great, since I’ve always been bad at Deathmatching, but I’ve played safe and strategically and also know when to go “who gives a fuck”. So let’s have a… [Continue Reading]

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The Scotsman’s New Skullcutter

On Smissmas 2014 Valve made my dream come true. The Scotsman’s Skullcutter became elevated from the dregs of poorly-optimized demoknights and Trolldemos to one of the best melee weapons for Demomen who treat their melee weapon like an emergency weapon instead of an intergral part of their loadout. Is it overpowered? Maybe. That’s a hard statement to make, what with the state of Demoman’s melee at the moment. The Ullapool Caber and Half-Zatoichi are pretty kickass weapons that fill the same role after all. And while the Skullcutter lacks the crippling downsides inherent in those two weapons, it also doesn’t bring anything new… [Continue Reading]

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The Light Machine Gun Plight

LMGs have always been a misunderstood and under-appreciated weapon genre in first-person shooters. Whereas mechanically they fill an obvious role in the sniper rifle>assault rifle>machine gun progression tree, in practice they’re often left off the list entirely or locked into specialist roles due to lack of developer support. Mechanically, LMGs focuses on spewing huge magazines of high-damage bullets very inaccurately. In theory its wielder assumes a suppressive fire role, ensuring that somebody is still firing while all the more-accurate teammates are reloading. Unfortunately its often the case that devs shoulder the LMG with a whole host of downsides; I can… [Continue Reading]

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On Reputation

SPUF is what one would call a forum or a bulletin board. Steam Community User Discussions (SCUD) is less of a bulletin board, more of a discussion board – it is a very trimmed down version of your standard forum software. Reddit is, well, um, something else. A strange, messy thing that has really taken off. Then you have a combination of the two, a bit like the League of Legends ‘boards’. Many forums just have basic features. You can make a thread. You can reply to threads. If you’re lucky there’s a personal message system. Some allow you to… [Continue Reading]

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TF2vOW: Scout versus Tracer

Welcome to the first-ever edition of the “TEAM FORTRESS 2 VERSUS OVERWATCH” series.  Inspired by the ongoing flamewars between the two fandoms and Screwattacks own “Death Battle” series on Youtube, TF2 vs OW is where I theoretically pit one or more of your favorite TF2 classes against their counterparts from Blizzard’s upcoming TF2 rip-off (and revenge for Valve stealing DOTA): Overwatch! We’re probably never going to be able to see this in this reality, so doing it here will be the next best thing!  I will try to go through each characters weapons and abilities as objectively as possible in order to decide who would win… [Continue Reading]

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Glitched Weapons

Along with all the cosmetic stuff and weapon balances and all that, the Gun Mettle update brought with it a HUGE amount of glitches and bugs and all sorts of stuff, some of which may or may not be fixed *cough*dropped Medi Guns holding Uber*cough*. A lot of bugs have already been fixed, but it’s worth going over some of them anyway, because why not? Sadly, I couldn’t get many pictures of these bugs, since I’m an idiot who fails to press the screenshot button quickly enough these days. The first and probably worst bug that’s popped up is the… [Continue Reading]

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GEOFF, NOOOOOO!

GEOFF! NO, WHAT HAPPENED? SPEAK TO ME, GEOFF, SPEAK TO ME! KEEP YOUR EYES ON ME, GEOFF! WE’RE LOSING HIM! HE’S FLATLINING… We’ve lost him. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m referring to the Vaccinator. The Fourth Medi Gun. The one that is now dead. I know Medi Guns can’t die, as they’re not alive*, but the Vaccinator has been driven into complete uselessness. Okay, the original Vaccinator, when it was released, wasn’t exactly helpful. It charged incredibly fast, but because critical resistances weren’t factored into the three resistance types as a whole, it didn’t see much… [Continue Reading]

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