analysis

Four Things You Can’t Do With the Syringe Gun

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Recently I wrote an article on Four Things You Can’t do With The Crusader’s Crossbow, because the crossbow is amazing and complicated and lends itself well to causing exploits and that sort of thing. But the design of the Syringe Gun is no slouch in that regard either. Face it; we Medics have a pretty complicated and unique primary with those rapid-fire hitscan projectiles, and that’s caused some trouble for Valve in the past. Here are some things that have been deemed Too Awesome for the poor syringe gun: 1. You can’t boost teammates on a sea of needles. The most… [Continue Reading]

Guide on… walking out of spawn in TFC

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Hello, my name is eugensiman and I’m a passionate newcomer into the world of Team Fortress games (400+ hours overall). I quickly found out that I’m more of a theorist than a practicalist in these shooters. I can acknowledge the importance and strategical advantages of various rocket jumps, however sometimes I can’t even do some of the simplest wall jumps on Badwater. But we’re here not to talk about walls. As I’ve said, I’m a newcomer not only into TF2, but into all the Team Fortress games. That means that I also like to spam some grenades around, make sentries… [Continue Reading]

On Stealth

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Stealth and Shooters have always been strange bedfellows ever since they first met. On one hand the genres don’t appear to mesh well, what with your standard FPS starring a one-man army who plows through hundreds of mooks with an ever-increasing assortment of deadly weapons, and stealth involving slow, laborious sneaking past individual guards and relying on not making sound or setting off alarms. On the other hand, that’s exactly why stealth games have a dedicated niche fanbase, exactly because it goes against the conventions of the genre and uses the core elements of an FPS in a creative new… [Continue Reading]

Battle of the Firespitters: Pyro vs Toa Vakama

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Hello again. Are we all sitting comfortably? Good. You might want to stand up again, because your chair has just burst into flames. Along with the floor. Grab your computer and run, because two of the most hotheaded combatants in the universe are duelling just across the street. On one side is our masked, gloved and asbestos-clad Pyro. He/she is a very familiar being to us SPUFers. Specializing in ambush and close-range combat, the Pyro is a formidable beastie that skulks in the shadows. We don’t know very much about Pyro and probably never will. What we do know is… [Continue Reading]

On Melee

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First-person shooters have always loved the melee weapon, even as they render it essentially obsolete. No amount of situationality can prevent the visceral joy of beating something to death (especially something wielding real guns) with the bludgeoning instrument of the dev’s choice. Melee hasn’t changed very much since the early years of Doom and Wolfenstein. It often has the following upsides: · First or second weapon found in the game, if not just equipped from the beginning · no ammunition required to use · sometimes makes less noise than other weapons, or other unique combat advantages (usability underwater for example) · sometimes… [Continue Reading]

What Use Are Friendly Disguises?

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That above question has bugged me for years. Why would you disguise as something that does nothing but inspire the enemy to shoot you? I knew there must be a reason to it, else Valve wouldn’t have added it, but serious thought only produced “trigger Dead Ringer while looking like something else, so they don’t keep spychecking after that.” Which is a decent use (and clearly intended by Valve, as the fallen corpse will remain that of a non-spy enemy) but were there any more? Turns out that, after speaking to some spy friends of mine, the answer is yes.… [Continue Reading]

Why moving turning to the booties would be a terrible idea

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By Reima As a confirmed enthusiast of the knight, I want to put my official opinion piece on the pseudo-controversy that is the turncharge and the potential use of booties all together. Although turning has been recently recently green lighted, it currently remains under a conditional equip. I believe it’s a fair compromise, albeit a temporary fix. Still a step in the right direction. The public gets the equivalent of Vjoy being injected into the coding, and Knights are universally nerfed as they make that trade for maximum control. Turning knights are stripped of their heavy resistances and super shield… [Continue Reading]

On Fire

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  Flames are weird in video games. In real-life, they’re impossibly debilitating and would make continuing to do anything, much less fighting other people, an excruciating experience. Also, real-life flamethrowers can shoot yards of deadly liquid flames that put every video-game flamethrower to shame. In video games you generally want the players to still be functional and you want flamethrowers to fill the “close-range combat” role, so these aspects of flamethrowers are often toned down. You can read more about it on the TV Tropes page Video Game Flamethrowers Suck. Monolith Production’s Blood was the first game to have afterburn,… [Continue Reading]

That new Valve blog post.

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Since we get incredibly long gaps between blog posts, I can still call the recent one about bad weapon ideas new and still be fairly punctual even if the blog post was released a month ago. I suppose we should be thankful about getting a blog post at all, considering what Dota 2 has had recently… Anyway, spite aside, the blog post itself is fairly interesting. It’s nice to see that there’s someone in that office, possibly talking to another person about adding weapons for Team Fortress 2. Then again, I might be completely wrong and there’s just one person… [Continue Reading]

The Pyro should remain a mystery.

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The tagline for the Spy was that he is a riddle wrapped in an enigma, but it turns out we know quite a lot about the Spy. He fancies Scout’s mother and he had a full miniature meal in his teeth. The only thing that we know about the Pyro is that when fire is around, he sees everything as rainbows and candy. We don’t even know if he’ s a he. Actually, I say that, there is some stuff we know about the Pyro. We know it likes puppies and we know that it can actually run a business,… [Continue Reading]