On Performance Enhancing Stuff

On December 2nd, there was a patch. In that patch came things to do with forcing people to use DX9 or higher for competitive matchmaking. This made me very angry. I am now going to proceed by complaining about this. DX 8 does lack some of the features that DX 9 has. You don’t get outlines around Payload carts and around whoever’s carrying the intelligence. You miss out on various cosmetic effects. Some things glitch out and have a strange fire texture on them instead of their normal textures, which looks awesome on Pyro cosmetics but shit on other things.… [Continue Reading]

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Autobalance Hell

Autobalance. It’s something we all hate. Some more than others. Often not as much as we hate random crits. But still, it’s a fucking bastard. And not just to Medics and Engineers, to every single class playing the game. You often don’t get any sympathy from your now former team mates either. Hence why comics like the one above, made by my dear friend Baxcaber, really hit you in the feels. It’s happened to pretty much anyone who’s played Team Fortress 2 for more than 10 hours. Probably less actually. Thing is, it’s a necessary evil. Team Fortress 2 has… [Continue Reading]

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On Blood

Ah, blood. If guns are the protagonists of the first-person genre, blood is the deuteragonist, the damsel-in-distress the player needs to liberate from his opponent’s bodies. It’s a character like any other, a liquid life-force with a relationship to both the player and the world around him. The shooter genre seems almost unhealthily obsessed with it. As this mini-documentary covers in great detail, gore has been a cornerstone of gaming for decades, harking almost back to the beginning: But in this article I’m actually more interested in blood as a game mechanic. Because blood is often more than just a… [Continue Reading]

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Medic’s first ever official non-sub 4v4 match

Actually, technically it’s my second, but the other team forfeited in the first week. So Friday the 6th of February was the date. My first ever match. Part of me was nervous. Everyone said I’d be fine. I was fine. Perfectly fine. The map was koth_stallone. It’s a map set outside a hotel complex near a beach, where the mercenaries fight over a cafe area. Both teams start in the kitchens and work their way out to the sheltered, roofed control point. There are tables and chairs and umbrellas all over the place. And a swimming pool! Unfortunately, reflective textures… [Continue Reading]

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