history – Page 3 – The Daily SPUF

How to Explore Your TF2 Early Years

November 18, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments history, items, weapons

I only recently noticed that Valve revamped the backpack system at some point. Perhaps the rest you already knew this, but you can now sort your backpack by date. If you’re ever feeling pensive, I encourage you to do so temporarily, and go check out the oldest things in your backpack. It’s been a long time since you first played TF2. What’s the oldest weapon you still possess? For me, apparently it’s a self-crafted Vita-Saw, the third oldest item in my backpack. I have no idea why this Vita-Saw has survived this long, except I guess Valve has never given… [Continue Reading]

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A Truly Random Topic of Conversation

October 25, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments engineer, history, pyro, soldier, spaaaaaace, weapon

I couldn’t decide what to write about, so I hit “Random Page” on the wiki, and I’m gonna write about whatever pops up. Huh. Okay then. Grockets have by and large exited the public conscience ever since Valve removed them from the maps in which they crashed, but for a time they were the closest thing TF2 had to extraterrestrial contact. Birthed from a collaboration with Weta Workshop and Valve, the first Grockets crashed into 2fort, Badwater and Barnblitz on July 18, 2011. Two days later they were revealed to be teasers for the new Grordbort Victory Pack, which came… [Continue Reading]

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My first time in a first-person shooter!

October 18, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments experience, fun, history, Not TF2, portal

Medic wrote a very interesting article describing her early experiences with Left 4 Dead and how it shaped her future gaming career. I thought I could talk about my personal background in the same way. Unlike most of you, I did not grow up playing video games. My parents are awesome, but they were not comfortable with ‘brain-rotting activities’, and for that reason I grew up without a computer, internet, or any gaming consoles. This ‘forbidden fruit’ was likely the reason I’ve dived so heavily into all three cultures. (They let me have a TV, which I quickly grew bored of… [Continue Reading]

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Mixed up Valve Timelines and You

September 29, 2015 Medic 0 Comments analysis, fun, history, idea, lore, opinion, story, suggestion

Valve are known for their strange, confusing story telling, with mixed up, confusing timelines. The question that has bothered many is whether our favourite first person shooter series is connected to the other popular first person shooter, the fps storytelling cliff hanger, the puzzle game and the zombie survival game. Are Valve’s games all connected to one another? Sadly, right off the bat, the world of Team Fortress is not connected. The catch up comic starts in the 1800s, predating really any other game. Unless Dota 2 is set in the past, but the variety of magics and technologies, plus… [Continue Reading]

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The Cutting Room Floor

September 3, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments beta, history, medic, TFC

Not everything Valve playtested for TF2 made the cut. From the moment Brotherhood of Arms and then its replacement Invasion was completely excised, Valve showed themselves committed to the possibility of axing whatever needs to be axed in the name of quality. Through avenues such as item schemas and the TF2 Beta, us players have had the ability to witness a lot of these ideas get introduced and later bite the dust. Thing is, we don’t always get to hear the rationale behind why they didn’t make the cut. For every Repair Node and Facestab Knife that got a blog post… [Continue Reading]

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A Look Back at TF2 SPUF’s Non-TF2 Gatherings

May 31, 2015 aabicus 2 Comments discussion, event, history, non-tf2, SPUF

Traditionally, TF2 SPUF events have always taken place in the game to which the forum is dedicated. But that’s not always the case. Especially when the meeting is more casual or introduced by a relative unknown, we can get some esoteric spur-of-the-moment parties with some pretty impressive turnouts. This is just a fun recollection of some good times (and one pretty bad time) from SPUF’s history! 1) 100% Orange Juice. This one is less a single event than a recurring mini-community, but a lot of the old itsurblog crowd regularly play 100% Orange Juice together after hugthebed2 first commented on… [Continue Reading]

Featured This Week in TF2 History

May 25th – June 2nd

May 27, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments history, items, soldier, spy, sticky jumper, update

This article will wrap up Ketchup week. We’re back on track for “This Week in TF2 History”! Congrats everybody! I know it wasn’t actually a week, but the only alternative was to wait to fall behind an extra 14 days before starting, and that’s just the sort of logic that got us into this mess. Speaking of messes, the Spy weapons added as per Sniper vs. Spy were all decently buggy due to how strangely they messed with the mechanics of the game. The Dead Ringer in particular had more bugs than any other weapon before or since, and the… [Continue Reading]

Featured This Week in TF2 History

April 24th – May 1st

May 23, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments balance, glitches, history, medic, payload, spy, weapon

Well, ever since tax season ground me through the wringer and spat me out (I work in a tax place these days), I took a weeklong break from “This Week in TF2 History”, and now that it’s almost June I should probably dial myself back in. That’s right, this week is: And what a week to start with. April 29, 2008 brought the first major TF2 update ever: the Gold Rush Update! Payload immediately sky-rocketed to becoming one of the most-played game modes ever, the Medic class experienced a renaissance when he suddenly became fun, and future TF2 traders felt the… [Continue Reading]

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On Blood

May 12, 2015January 15, 2017 aabicus 0 Comments analysis, gameplay, history, On Shooters

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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5 Ways to Deal Damage with the Jumpers

February 24, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments demoman, glitches, history, soldier, weapon

What’s the first stat of the Rocket/Sticky Jumper that pops into your head? Probably -100% damage. But it turns out that these weapons have actually had a number of ways to bypass the restriction and deal the damage in weird ways. Some are fixed, some are not, all are here for your reading pleasure. 1. The Rocket Jumper could once hurt enemy Pyros: Who airblasted the rockets. This is probably the most famous one on this list. Supposedly this was fixed at some point, but it was never mentioned in any update patch notes so I didn’t notice when. 2.… [Continue Reading]