6 Things I Miss From Payday: The Heist

This article is basically a sequel to Payday 2 and Things Lost in Translation, but it’s going to be a bit more nitpicky. Like, little things that aren’t big deals like the ones from the previous article, but they help complete the picture. I know I’m harping on Payday 2  a lot, but hell I don’t think I’ve ever seen a sequel that made so many tiny baffling changes that missed the mark. 1. The HUD Payday: The Heist has a great HUD that tells you everything you want to know without cluttering up your screen. Your health is instantly recognizable… [Continue Reading]

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Couldn’t care less…

I could not care less about weapon skins. No, really. I never bought into the Gun Mettle contract because I have shit luck and, even if I bought into it straight away, I would have only made a few Steam bucks rather than any actual real money. Pretty much everything because worthless within three or four weeks, unless you happened to get a decent strange or an unusual weapon, and even just strange ones are pretty damn uncommon. Yes, you can trade up your weapons, but the damage had already been done. What for though? Medic weapon skins are all… [Continue Reading]

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Giving the Third Degree the Third Degree

Move over ladies and gunboats, it’s the only straight upgrade in Team Fortress 2! Man, considering it’s the one unlock in the entire game with absolutely no reason not to equip it you would bet it must be the high-rolling undisputed king of its weapon class, right? Right? No. Turns out the Third Degree sucks. Its only upside is pointless on a class that spews penetrating particles that engulf every enemy in melee range. You wanna kill somebody that has a Medic? Airblast them apart and go to town on the poor German sod. Pulling out your melee is only setting yourself up for… [Continue Reading]

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Spies – Out of Place?

Spy has always been a tricky class to balance. He’s designed to be a pick-class, someone who takes out key targets – generally a Medic or Sniper –  so the rest of his team can gain the upper hand. But unlike our other pick-classes, Scout and Sniper, Spy really struggles to do his job effectively. Really, when you think about it, Spy is incredibly out of place in the world of TF2. While Sniper sits on some ledge a mile away making his amazing picks (often baiting his team to distract the enemy so he can get those tasty tasty… [Continue Reading]

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UFOs spotted! The End is Nigh!

There are aliens in TF2! There had been hints of a possible Invasion update for some time now, but Valve has actually done a great job of keeping this one under wraps, perhaps having learned from the toxic effect all the End of the Line hype had caused. Indeed, if Kritzkast hadn’t deflected the June trailer leak by pretending it was merely a community model pack, we would have had 4 months of absolutely nothing for the hype to do but fester. Well played, Valve. But now that actual UFOs are appearing in the skyboxes of the most popular TF2… [Continue Reading]

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You should really try out the Scorch Shot

I’ve written about Pyro before (I’ve written about a lot of things before), but lately I’ve been playing him more and more, even outside of silly MvM matches. The Scorch Shot. The current secondary in my Pyro loadout. I’ve always considered Pyro to be the Anti Medic, but I know that opinion is wrong, because there’s a VAST amount of aiming required if you’re going to be able to actually set anyone on fire – flame projectiles have weird effects and can even just fuck you up for no reason. But while the similarities between Medic and Pyro are best… [Continue Reading]

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Killing Floor 2: Now With More Fire and Stuff Blowing Up

I’m going to be honest, I’ve been pretty ticked at Tripwire. Ever since Killing Floor 2 was first released in Early Access back in April, Tripwire had succeeded in adding a single map and no other game-changing alterations for over four months. I hate to be one of those people who clamor for new content, but when a game is released into beta you kinda expect additions and stuff since the whole point of a beta is to allow the devs to change and tweak content without worrying about needing to commit to anything. Even the graphs where they reminded everyone that developing new content takes… [Continue Reading]

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Help me! The importance of knowing where everyone is…

Let’s face it, I am a spastic twat with all the coordination skills of a donkey wearing ice skates. I’m bad. And in organized play, this is multiplied tenfold in my awfulness. No seriously, poor old Jensen so rarely gets healed because I can’t damn find him. Okay, to seem less cruel to myself, Jensen is a good old Scout who never stands still, which makes even just locking onto him very tricky, but you get what I mean. Knowing where everyone is could be considered the second most important thing in the entire game, the most important thing being… [Continue Reading]

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Confusing Comms: Health Callouts

An important part of competitive TF2 is communication. Being concise, clear and understandable are vital, especially as the environment you will be speaking in could have anywhere between 3-8 others all speaking at once while each listener is distracted by what is happening onscreen. It is no secret that the SPUF EU 6s and 4s team require improving with their co-op skills, so today I will talk about a simple aspect that is often overlooked: friendly health callouts. Enemy health callouts are well known, and the skills well practised. The term “lit” has entered even the vocabulary of non-competitive TF2… [Continue Reading]

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Pestilential Pumpkin Presents Part Two

“It’s pretty safe to bet that new cosmetics will have something to do with the next generation of presents, due to a “Scream Fortress 2014″ Workshop tag being the only clue we’d received up until the recent blog post, but for more specifics, we’ll have to wait and see. I just hope Valve’s execution doesn’t cause too many complaints.” ~aabicus, as Scream Fortress 2014 approached Valve’s execution caused many complaints. Honestly it was the worst possible interpretation of the present system yet. For those who weren’t there (or blanked the experience from their memory banks) Valve’s first clue as to how… [Continue Reading]

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