Maybe we do need deathmatching after all?

Team Fortress 2 has a LOT of game modes, not all of them successful. Territory Control, Arena, Special Delivery, Medieval, all rather tired and ignored, lacking in maps or players or both, while King of the Hill, Capture the Flag and Attack/Defense flourish. 5CP and Payload play along, trailing behind slightly. The most popular servers around have always been 24/7 Dustbowl or Teufort or something like that. Why? Because we all really like deathmatching. That’s the one thing Team Fortress 2 has never really had – a pure killing game mode. While every single game mode requires you to kill… [Continue Reading]

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Ways TF2 Could Have Been Designed Better

TF2 was the first online game I really played full-time hardcore srs-bzns style. Before TF2 entered my life, I’d occasionally get to try games on my friend’s N64s and I had vague memories of Oregon Trail and Humongous Entertainment games growing up, but I’d been largely sheltered from the gaming world due to my parents thinking that games rotted your brain. So once I left for college and experienced newfound freedom, The Orange Box seemed a logical first purchase, since I’d also played Portal when it came out for free in 2007 and (somehow) passed my parent’s “nonviolent and educational” criteria.… [Continue Reading]

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How to understand your Medic

Occasionally, a really good SPUF thread will pop up out of the blue. It’s up to us to keep these threads safe. One such thread is Understanding Your Medic by chibi_charon. While the thread covers the basics incredibly well, I felt it was worth expanding this concept a bit, especially since the thread is two years old. Although little has happened in that time, it’s always good to refresh people’s minds. Because I’m a sucker for homages, let’s stick to the question and answer thing. Here’s a bunch of ways to better understand your Medic buddies. Q. Why is my… [Continue Reading]

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Beings who would be great friends with the Medic

It must get boring being the Medic sometimes. Especially during times of peace. You’re stuck there with 8 other men, many of whom are often sweaty, stupid or both. It’s not fun. You could be at home with your wife. Instead you have to babysit a bunch of morons because Engineer’s working for the Administrator and Spy’s a prissy little bitch who you want to punch repeatedly. What can you do? Not much, really. You’ve got to stick around because no one else is going to hire you. Well, apart from the Team Fortress Classic team, but that’s beside the point.… [Continue Reading]

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Tips on how to defeat Minisentries

If anyone hasn’t noticed yet, I’ve been making a bunch of articles based off my very old posts. I never realised how many threads I used to post on a regular basis. But one that stood out was a thread I made when the Gunslinger hatred first started up and really got going (and when _Star used to go around saying how evil they were), back in 2012. It was about how to defeat minisentries. Maybe it’s worth looking over some of these tips? First things first, the Gunslinger DID receive some changes. The hitbox is larger and the minisentry… [Continue Reading]

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On Blood

Ah, blood. If guns are the protagonists of the first-person genre, blood is the deuteragonist, the damsel-in-distress the player needs to liberate from his opponent’s bodies. It’s a character like any other, a liquid life-force with a relationship to both the player and the world around him. The shooter genre seems almost unhealthily obsessed with it. As this mini-documentary covers in great detail, gore has been a cornerstone of gaming for decades, harking almost back to the beginning: But in this article I’m actually more interested in blood as a game mechanic. Because blood is often more than just a… [Continue Reading]

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Sham1 talks gaming : Tetris

All right, time for everyone to take their ushankas, go to the Red Square and start calling each other with the word “comrade” as we are gonna talk about a Soviet hit game, Те́трис.   History of Tetris Tetris originates from the east-side of the Iron Curtain in 1984, a 28-year-old Alexey Pajitnov along with his colleagues at the Moscow Computer center created a game for the Russian computer Elektronika 60 called Те́трис (screenshot below). Soon after, Alexey and his colleagues Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov made a version of the game for the IBM PC and after the port the game became very… [Continue Reading]

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Let’s talk about the Sun on a Stick

The Sun-On-A-Stick is a very queer weapon. It was released alongside the Sharpened Volcano Fragment when RIFT came along, and it’s remained fairly unused ever since its first ever appearance. It’s not a sun on a stick at all, more like a wonderfully crafted ball of lava on a stick, certainly one of the more detailed and pretty weapons in TF2. Unfortunately for the Sun on a Stick though, it’s a victim of awful stats, rendering the poor thing nigh unused. Why? Well, it’s obvious really. The idea behind the Sun-On-A-Stick is simple. You team up with a Pyro to… [Continue Reading]

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A potential future story

The photo on the wall stared back at him, just like it had done every other time he’d stared at it. It was the only picture he had kept when he fled America and rushed back to his home land. The picture itself was old and tattered, but the scene embedded in it still shined as if it was taken yesterday. In it stood nine men, all of different shapes, sizes, ages and nationalities. They were all cheering and waving and holding bottles of beer. He couldn’t remember who took the picture, but he remembered how much of a pain… [Continue Reading]

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TF2 is not dying, but its spirit is tired…

Team Fortress 2 isn’t dying. It has had its ups and downs, but there’s still people playing this game and it’s still up there on Steam’s top ten played games. The game still works for the most part. It’s not dying at all. There are issues though. The problem is deeper than simply a game taking its last breaths. The spirit of Team Fortress 2 is ill. What do I mean by spirit? I mean the population of TF2. Its blood and mind. The community. The middle of the road people. People like you and me. Team Fortress 2 owes… [Continue Reading]

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