alpha – The Daily SPUF

Deadlock’s Seven

May 24, 2026May 30, 2026 aabicus 0 Comments alpha, analysis, class, deadlock, early access, first thoughts, hero, moba, mobility, recommendation, seven

The first time you boot up Deadlock, you’re going to be prompted to play a tutorial to learn the bare minimum of how things work in the Cursed Apple. And this game is absolutely complicated enough that everyone, myself included, will highly recommend you indulge that offer. You will find yourself playing a cackling electricity-ridden scarecrow with a satellite dish for a head, and the first thing I remember thinking was, “aabicus, under no circumstances are you allowed to main the tutorial guy. Any other character, sure, but there’s nothing lamer than playing the easy class clearly designed for noobs.” I… [Continue Reading]

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Deadlock’s Ivy

March 14, 2026April 11, 2026 aabicus 3 Comments #GargoyleGaming, alpha, analysis, class, deadlock, early access, first thoughts, hero, ivy, moba, mobility, recommendation

When I was invited to join the Deadlock closed playtest in August 2024, I installed it and logged into the main menu with pretty much no idea what I was getting into. After starting up the sandbox to poke around, I was faced with a massive list of random heroes I knew nothing about, and chose the winged gargoyle because I figured flight would be useful for exploring the map. A year and a half later, Ivy is still my favorite hero in the game. She really has a little bit of everything, and I’m mostly just writing this to gush about… [Continue Reading]

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A Moment of Silence for Doom’s Assault Rifle

March 10, 2021January 10, 2022 aabicus 0 Comments alpha, assault, doom, mourning, rifle

Team Fortress 2 isn’t the only game that gave assault rifles the boot. The original Doom has one of the most iconic FPS rosters in history, but is surprisingly lacking the most famous generalist weapon of all time. Yet did you know it wasn’t always that way? Today I wanted to spend an article discussing the sordid history of the unluckiest weapon in the world’s most famous shooter. The Early Alpha Doom‘s assault rifle was there from the beginning, the very first and only weapon available in the early alphas released to the public (once the Wolfenstein 3D sprites were… [Continue Reading]

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Apocryph (Alpha) Impressions

November 28, 2017November 25, 2017 Medicinal Warlock 0 Comments alpha, apocryph

“Apocryph an old-school fantasy shooter such as Hexen, Heretic, Painkiller and Strife..” The video drew my attention, and that isn’t just because the title name dropped Painkiller. The aesthetic and the rather awesome minigun-staff is what made me pay attention to the video. And since the dev is giving out the alpha build for free, I decided to download it and gave it a spin. The first thing I noticed was that the main character’s picture on the HUD makes him look like a younger Geralt of Rivia who joined KISS as a backup drummer. The atmosphere was grimy and dark, and… [Continue Reading]

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An Alpha Version of Burning Skies

August 10, 2017September 5, 2017 Medic 0 Comments alpha, burning skies, dragon, mod, roar, Skyrim

Burning Skies is my second favourite mod in Skyrim, after the amazing mod that is Open Cities. It’s both a big, clunky mod and a small mod – not many people seem to use it despite its huge number of endorsements and downloads, and very few people seem to use it full time the way I do. At some point, I’ll do the dragon-based playthrough I promised I’d do after the Medic in Skyrim and Dawnguard Sniping series. But Burning Skies is a complicated mod, full of problems and bugs. It also has been a very slow process just to… [Continue Reading]

Featured Random Game Announcements

Digital Extremes Announces Keystone

May 24, 2017September 20, 2017 Medic 0 Comments alpha, digital extremes, new game, warframe

Digital Extremes, the weird people who made Warframe and filled it full of weird prepubescent space kids, are making a new game called Keystone. They announced the new game on their new Twitter account, @PlayKeystone. The announcement was on the 23rd of May, and there’s also a related website, PlayKeystone.com. The game is said to be a first-person, team-based shooter. It’s set in some other timeline, not at all related to Warframe, with ‘every move’ transporting you into battle. Keystone will apparently blend first-person action with ‘deck-building strategies’, implying there’s some sort of collectible card element to the game, perhaps… [Continue Reading]

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Very Early First Impressions of Dragon Souls and a Chat About UI Design

May 15, 2017June 4, 2017 Medic 0 Comments alpha, beta, dragon, dragon souls, free to play, how not to design UI, hud, open beta, roar, ui, ui design

So I’ve been eyeing Dragon Souls for ages. A free to play game where you play as a dragon fighting other dragons while collecting gold? One with a more open-world, traditional dragon feel rather than a weird futuristic match-made deathmatch objective game mode cloning monster thing like Time of Dragons? Sign me up! Well, kinda. You gotta keep an eye on the email address you sign up with. And keep an eye on Dragon Souls in general since it’s a very small early access in beta sort of thing. Well, alpha. I don’t think we can call it a beta… [Continue Reading]