Tiny Little Arena_Byre

Byre. It’s a little map. A forgotten map. A lonely map. An Arena map. It’s actually a map I had completely and utterly forgotten about for a loooooong time. Unfortunately for the people behind the Invasion update, the whole thing was forgotten about since it was released just before Halloween, had very little going for it and had most of its items left unadded. There was also controversy in various payments and stuff but that was sorted out apparently. But yes, for some insane reason, an Arena map was made and added to the game officially, in a time where… [Continue Reading]

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Arena Mode needs urgent fixing

Bundled up with the Invasion update was something almost miraculous. For the first time in goodness how long, Valve added a new Arena map to our already-bulging map list. This is highly unusual because normally maps for unplayed game modes never get added. We generally only see KOTH, Payload or Control Points of some sort, or someone brings out something completely new that gets abandoned soon after. Arena was considered one of those things, but here we are, with a brand spanking new Arena map – Byre. But unfortunately, despite the niceness and simplicity of the map, people are soon… [Continue Reading]

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Retrospective 2, or what little I saw of it…

Retrospective 2 is a TF2 tournament, more like one we’d recognise, with eliminations and things like that. Normally, I see all these things advertised on the News section of the Team Fortress 2 website and I don’t honestly pay much attention to them. They’re tournaments I’m not skilled enough to play in, or they’re LANs which I’ll never be able to play in, or it’s an announcement about ETF2L. That’s pretty much it. I wouldn’t have given Retrospective 2 any further thought if it wasn’t for W0lk, the SPUF 6v6 roamer and 4v4… thing… asking me about it. You see,… [Continue Reading]

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Arena Respawn – Not at all serious fun

On Saturday 11th of July, Confusion hosted the SPUF Arena Respawn event with some help from Sham and Davjo and I got to try out Arena Respawn for the first time. Now, I’m a bit of a purist, I like things unmodded in TF2. Plus, Arena was my original game mode after 24/7 Junction, and I was quite good at it, particularly the Arena-only maps that no one else really plays. Not great, since I’ve always been bad at Deathmatching, but I’ve played safe and strategically and also know when to go “who gives a fuck”. So let’s have a… [Continue Reading]

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