retrospective

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The Sentimentality of Pokémon X/Y

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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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A campfire on an outpost in Sea of Thieves
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A Farewell to 2023

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2023 has been a year, and it’s now over. Like most years, a lot has happened. But let’s focus on some positive things. Like all the apps I use that are screaming at me to review what I’ve done this year. I’m mostly looking at you, Spotify, stop judging me. You too, Steam. Google Play Store on the other hand probably has nothing to say apart from the fact that I’ve played too much Pokemon GO. Speaking of which, despite what Steam says, Pokemon GO has been my most-played game this year. Mostly because I have needed the exercise. Although… [Continue Reading]

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Return of the Obra Dinn

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I seem to have a habit of abandoning games due to frustration with the core gameplay mechanics, giving it another go 5+ years later, and only then getting completely hooked. It happened with Just Cause 2, World of Warcraft, Stardew Valley, ARK Survival Evolved, and now it’s happened with Return of the Obra Dinn, Lucas Pope’s latest bureaucracy-themed indie game. Set on an 1800s ghost ship that mysteriously returned to dock with none of its passengers or crew aboard, the player controls an insurance inspector who boards the vessel tasked with learning the fates of all 60 missing persons. The core… [Continue Reading]

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Halo 2
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Halo 2 Broke My Heart

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Creating art can be the sum of all suffering. Priority Shift Welcome to February, 2004. Game developer Bungie has ten months to ship their most anticipated sequel of all time, Halo 2. The game is in shambles. Microsoft, Bungie’s publisher, expects the game in November. Staff morale is in the gutter, and some employees have stopped going home. To make the deadline, Bungie wasn’t just cutting, they were cleaving. “Rapidly approaching launch… The team had no engine, environments that couldn’t possibly work in any engine, features that were only half-implemented, a sprawling story that would eventually require two full-sized games… [Continue Reading]

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Halo 3
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Halo 3: ODST is the best in the series

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Game Developer Bungie has never been the type to take a victory lap, and had they the choice- Halo would’ve ended with 3. The last two Bungie Halo titles, ODST and Reach, probably weren’t games many people at the company wanted to make. Old guard at the studio certainly said as much. Back then, Destiny (Codenamed Tiger) was taking shape internally, and the largest portion of Bungie’s employees were working on Halo Reach. Halo 3: ODST was pitched small, and to this day it boasts one of the fastest turnarounds in Bungie development history: From concept to mastering, ODST took fourteen… [Continue Reading]

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Medic VS better Medic
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In Which aabicus Writes Articles

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While it’s mainly me who manages the Daily SPUF these days, we can’t forget about the genius who originally came up with the Daily SPUF. The idea was simple. Instead of complaining in various forums and being off-topic, people from the old Steam Powered User Forums could instead write their articles here, whether they were off-topic or not. Thanks to aabicus’s early dedication, lots of people posted articles, and we would probably not be here if aabicus hadn’t worked hard on the site. Even when I took over as chief editor and webmaster for the Daily SPUF, aabicus has been… [Continue Reading]

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A Review of Quake’s Expansion Packs (Part 2)

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I wasn’t sure whether to write this article. You see, I wasn’t quite as enamored with the concept of the new expansion packs as I was the old. Sure, it’s nice to have more Quake, but I was bummed that they only used the base-game content. Plus they ignored all the new assets/weapons/enemies from the expansion packs. But I wanted to complete the entire set, and was curious to see what sort of gameplay updates developers had figured out in the many years since the originals released. Dimension of the Past This first expansion pack was released in 2018, to… [Continue Reading]

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A Review Of Quake’s Expansion Packs (Part 1)

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On April 19 2021, the Steam version of Quake got a massive enhancement update. It added graphical updates, cross-play multiplayer, restored original soundtracks, and four expansion packs. Two of these, Scourge of Armagon and Dissolution of Eternity, were the canonical expansions released back during Quake‘s normal commercial cycle. The final two (Dimension of the Past and Dimension of the Machine) were added decades later, as free celebratory add-ons. This article will be focused on the earlier pair, with hopefully another for the latter two coming later. Quake For a Modern Audience Before I played through these, I re-completed the original… [Continue Reading]

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Wolfenstein 3D: Does it Hold Up?

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At the start of the pandemic, I finally learned why Doom is such a historically well-regarded game. After that, I moved forward and played Quake to see where the developers went from there. Now, my friend Ryo gifted me Wolfenstein 3D for Christmas, letting me experience where it truly all began. 90s Gaming At Its Height Wolfenstein 3D is one of the earliest first-person shooters, widely considered the game that popularized the genre. Everything about the experience is visceral and unashamed; your enemies are blatant Nazis who explode into puddles of gore when they die. Swastikas and portraits of Hitler litter the… [Continue Reading]

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The Arise Quadrology: A Retrospective

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On December 31st 2020, Adobe Flash offically died, taking with it a huge catalogue of ancient in-browser games. The sheer volume of animations, websites, comics, and other Flash-based media that disappeared that day is impossible to overstate. While there are countless titles I could have written this memorial article about, for some reason I decided to eulogize the worst quadrology of flash games ever made. Back in the early 2000s my brother and I regularly duoed escape-the-room games as it was a particularly good genre for paired-play. Every time one of you solved a puzzle/found another inventory item, they could… [Continue Reading]

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