history – The Daily SPUF

The Sentimentality of Pokémon X/Y

July 19, 2025July 19, 2025 aabicus 1 Comment history, pokemon, retrospective

The other day I was scrolling through my Pokémon Home account looking at all my old Elite Four teams. I’ve played every generation of Pokémon (though Red was a bit of an oddball run), and almost every member of my final teams survived the various transitions into modern day. My original goal, in my nostalgic boredom, was to choose the most sentimental “companion” mon of each team, the one I bonded most with and remember the quickest and most fondly. And indeed, I was able to identify one pretty much every time. Until I got to Pokémon Y, a game that… [Continue Reading]

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2013-2023: 10 Years of Daily SPUF

August 19, 2023August 19, 2023 aabicus 1 Comment articles, celebration, history, milestone, SPUF, The Daily SPUF, writing

Phovos’ Nightwave critique yesterday clocked out 10 years of articles on The Daily SPUF! That’s right, on August 18 2013 we published our first article, a rant about Team Fortress 2’s Half-Zatoichi. Over the past decade since, we have published a new article every day without fail (except once), covering a huge swathe of games and topics from all across the Steamosphere and beyond, and we couldn’t have done it without each and every one of you who read, commented on, or submitted articles over the past 3,652 days. In order to commemorate the occasion, I wanted to write another… [Continue Reading]

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The 5 Most-Impactful Steam Trades in My Life

July 28, 2023July 16, 2023 aabicus 0 Comments Filler, history, inventory, items, steam, trade, trading, weapons

There’s something kinda nice about having all my years of gaming stored on Steam. For people like me who got into the scene late, I can pretty much track my entire life through my Steam history, traipse through old screenshots and reviews to see what I was into during those phases of my life. But at least personally, the tab with the most nostalgia is somewhat hidden away in a dusty corner of the inventory screen. Expanding the dropbar near “Trade Offers” lets you see an itemized list of everything you’ve ever done to alter your inventory across Steam’s many… [Continue Reading]

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Planetside 2 Breaks Its Own World Record

November 7, 2022November 6, 2022 aabicus 0 Comments event, history, planetside 2, recap, record, shooter, world record

Last week Planetside 2 made a bold announcement. On November 5th, they invited everyone to connect to the Public Test Server and break their own record for “Most Players in a Single FPS Battle.” The current record, 1158, was already held by them and achieved in 2015. For anyone who missed that milestone, this was an exciting opportunity to play a part in Planetside 2 history. Now, despite playing Planetside 2 since 2013, I’d skipped the previous world record attempt and knew I didn’t want to miss this one. So I preloaded the test client and generated a PTS character in advance.… [Continue Reading]

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Disney’s Jungle Cruise: The Real-Life Conquistadors Behind the Villains

May 11, 2022May 3, 2022 aabicus 0 Comments Disney, film, fluff, history, jungle, movie, movies, random

So I just watched Jungle Cruise, the newest adventure movie released by Disney and starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. It was a good popcorn flick, fun for the whole family etc. I was intrigued by its use of historical figures in the villainous roles. I guess everything below this line is technically spoilers, though they’re pretty tame in the grand scheme of things. The two main villains (Prince Joachim of Prussia and Lope de Aguirre, the 15th century conquistador) are both real people taken straight from the history books. And most of the internet has already discussed how thoroughly-fictionalized these… [Continue Reading]

Now for Something Completely Different

aabicus’ Baseball Career: The Highlights

June 5, 2021June 5, 2021 aabicus 0 Comments baseball, Coaching, Filler, history, looking back, outside, real life, sports

This is not a sports blog and I am (in no way) a baseball fan. But pretty much everyone on reddit got to witness one of the funniest plays in living memory last Thursday: Cubs Shortstop Javy Báez somehow turns a guaranteed third-out into a run scored while also reaching second! He himself scores on the next hit, and those two runs cinch their victory over the Pirates 5-3. Can’t help but feel embarrassed for Pirates’ first baseman, Will Craig. But whereas most can only sympathize with Craig, I can empathize, for I also had some less-than-illustrious moments in my… [Continue Reading]

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Dark Spooky Forest Week: Trespasser

November 7, 2020March 7, 2021 aabicus 0 Comments dinosaurs, history, retrospective, trespasser

This article concludes Dark Spooky Forest Week! Medic and I hope you enjoyed this walk through some caliginous conifers of the gaming world. This final article is a bit different from the others, in that I do not recommend you play the titular game. Jurassic Park Trespasser is one of the most infamous trainwrecks in gaming history, a broken cash grab so nakedly unfinished that the final product was already unplayable from the moment people were buying it off shelves in 1998. Back in college I partitioned an entire drive on my computer just to get an emulated version to… [Continue Reading]

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The Medical Necessity lore nobody asked for

March 15, 2020March 8, 2020 aabicus 0 Comments aabicus, Filler, history, medical necessity, roleplaying, soldiers

Remember Medical Necessity? It was a game development project where I had my first ill-fated experience as a project manager. In the end, we got canceled due to lack of progress during the first quarter of production. The only surviving product is the purchasable sprite sheet on itch.io. The design document and production wiki note that the default names for the player’s allied soldiers are Homer, Berenson, Collins, and Cunningham. And while digging through a lifetime of old boxes preparing for my move to Portland, I found the original action figures those names came from. Their plastic has gone gummy and… [Continue Reading]

Featured Now for Something Completely Different The SPUF of Legend

My Early Years in Videography

March 14, 2020May 27, 2020 aabicus 0 Comments aabicus, history, The SPUF of Legend, video

Today’s article is very self-indulgent, so apologies in advance. I’m just in something of a self-reflective mood because yesterday I chewed through a lifetime of old storage boxes in one evening. I didn’t really have a choice. The Goodwill van was coming in the morning, and lord knows I didn’t want the donatables sitting around for another two weeks before the next time they’d swing by. But I’m honestly glad they spurred my hand and made me sift through it all, because I found a bunch of diamonds in the rough. Old things I’d long lost and never thought I’d… [Continue Reading]

Spinda and Charmander hugging for warmth

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4 Pokemon Who Never Found a Home

February 24, 2020December 27, 2020 aabicus 0 Comments aabicus, charmander, Filler, history, magikarp, pikachu, pokemon

While I only started writing articles about Pokemon when Pokemon GO was released, I’ve been playing the core games since 2009 when my boyfriend gifted his copy of FireRed to me. The single best part of Pokemon is how it eases the player into falling in love with their own personal monsters, and subtly guides you to create a unique team that will wind up completely different to everyone else’s. Pokemon has also gone above-and-beyond at making sure players can always port their beloved teams forward through new generations of the games. Through features like PokeTransfer, Pal Park, and Pokemon… [Continue Reading]

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