A Shotgun Update

I adore the Team Fortress 2 shotgun. Sturdy, reliable, and intuitive, it’s the only weapon shared by four different classes and until the BASE Jumper was added, the only weapon to occupy different slots on different classes. I consider the shotgun TF2’s tenth signature weapon due to its ubiquity and recognizability. There is a sort of elegance in the fact that Valve has never added any sort of reskin or retexture for the shotgun. Every player since 2007 who’s wanted to make use of its six-clip buckshot backup has used the same simple gun; no golden, festive or botkiller variants… [Continue Reading]

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Tardy

For once, on December 3rd, Valve was somewhat on time. They actually announced the winners of the Tomb Raider promo item contest within a week of the end date that they promised. But that was just once. They’ve been constantly late and really, it’s getting silly now. Alright, we get it, Valve time and all that, but we can’t have Valve time forever, can we? Valve time is a very common thing, but recently I feel it’s being way more oppressive than always. The biggest upset as of late was with the TF Comics series, which was incredibly late and… [Continue Reading]

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Lara Croft is Disappointed

A while back, the TF2 team announced a contest in which we were told to make promo items for the new Lara Croft game. The only stipulations were that it had to fit inside TF2, it had to be related to a Lara Croft game and it could not be Heavy in short shorts. On December 3rd, they announced the winners, and as good as they are, it’s left a bad taste in everyone’s mouths. Three items made it as promos and a few more were accepted, to be added to the Mann Co. store at a later date. The… [Continue Reading]

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Popularity, Lore and Intrestingness

When you have a game with multiple characters, it’s hard to make sure that they all get equal amounts of usage, story and fun. Often one character will stand out ahead of the others, either because the developers like that character the best or simply because that character is the most popular or pliable. Or both. Team Fortress 2 is no exception to this. No franchise is. People need to sell this stuff to make money you know. The main character of Team Fortress 2 was always the Heavy Weapons Guy. Big powerful man with a silly Russian accent and… [Continue Reading]

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Gunslingers vs. Highlanders: an analysis

There was recently something of an upset when the Highlander team swept the Gunslingers in the recent tournament, and it rightly seems to have attracted something of an interest in the SPUF community. (I notice there hasn’t been a single thread arguing the Gunslinger is OP since the event…) Since I’ve participated in two of these events, playing Medic for Season 2 (the first time the Gunslingers won) and the most recent Season 5, I’ve got a pretty good perspective from which to analyze the two teams. On a fundamental level, the first major reason that Highlanders performed so much better… [Continue Reading]

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My first look into competitive Team Fortress 2

A while back (actually, the day before the Demoknights VS Highlander event), I was asked by Confusion to play Medic for a 4v4 match. After informing him that 1. I was not actually a very good player, 2. I was a mediocre Medic at best and 3. I’d never played an ounce of competitive TF2 before, outside SPUF events, I decided “what the hell” and agreed to play. Honestly, I didn’t even know that the SPUF-based EU 4v4 team was still alive, let alone still competing. It would have been a missed opportunity if I’d declined, and I’d have let… [Continue Reading]

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The Spoils of WAR!

Ever since Demoman lost the WAR! under some pretty spotty rationale regarding a propaganda contest, many people have asked that Valve migrate the Gunboats over to the Demoman, either through a wholesale migration, release of a Demoman-only reskin (the ginboats?) or a reworking of the Wee Booties. Sometimes this wish extends also to the other weapon tailored to explosive-jumping, the Market Gardener. After all, Soldier and Demoman already share the BASE Jumper and orange-painted Jumper weapons, why not go all the way? As a Demoman main, I’d adore them on a basic level. A Dapper Apple found the concept super powerful when… [Continue Reading]

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Some fun and useful console commands that are not so well known

The console in Team Fortress 2 (and other source games) is usually seen as a handy tool for abusing cheats on servers with sv_cheats set to 1, or as a way to change graphics options and do other helpful tasks. Today I am going to shine some light on some console commands that don’t really help you, but are fun to use as gimmicks or as ways to gimp your game to make your gameplay harder and possibly more fun. To start this article off, let’s talk about the console command “pda_click“. Pda_click is a silly command that can be used… [Continue Reading]

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Things TF2 still really needs

I wrote an article about things that Team Fortress 2 lacks before and none of those things got added, as far as I recall. In Valve’s eyes, I simply don’t exist unless I’m sorting out my brother’s stuff after he got phished. And even then it took a week for Steam Support to sort things out. So since Valve clearly doesn’t acknowledge my existence, here’s another list of things that Valve should add to TF2. Because why not? If you want, you can read the first article here. 1. Play testing before updates. The last few TF2 updates have been… [Continue Reading]

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Ah, Geoff.

Ah Geoff, the Medi Gun for the person who hates building Uber and overhealing and wants to make his life needlessly complicated. I’ll be honest, my relationship with Geoff has been veering towards the bad side of things more and more and more. It wasn’t until I completely and utterly fucked up my binds for the Vaccinator (I forgot that I no longer had reload bound to Mouse5) that I realised why no one else was stupid enough to use this thing against hordes of grenade-knights. I wasn’t even meant to play in that match anyway… Anyway, rants and stuff… [Continue Reading]

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