retrospective – Page 2 – The Daily SPUF

The Original Doom: Does it Hold Up?

February 7, 2021June 23, 2021 aabicus 0 Comments analysis, doom, doom II, retrospective

Since Team Fortress Classic was my first-ever multiplayer game, I’d actually never played the original Doom. Doom took the entire gaming industry by storm and forever changed the future of shooters. But thanks to the never-ending quarantine, plus getting addicted to speedrunning videos like the ones on Karl Jobst’s YouTube channel, I finally purchased and played through Doom and Doom II. While I know I’m not breaking any new ground with this incredibly-hot take, I think they may be two of the greatest games I’ve ever played. Still Badass It was truly eye-opening to go back and see these two seminal… [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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Dark Spooky Forest Week: Miasmata and Rake

November 5, 2020November 8, 2020 aabicus 0 Comments comparison, GIFs, miasmata, rake, recommendation, retrospective

On the surface these two games don’t have much in common beyond taking place in dark spooky forests. The main reason they’re sharing an article is that they evoke the same feelings when played; both are satisfying exploration-based games that immersed the player like few of their competitors could. The first title, Miasmata, was one of my earliest gaming loves and I spent hours working through my first playthrough. You control Robert Hughes, a plague-stricken scientist who washes ashore a remote tropical island seeking the cure to his illness. The core gameplay involves charting the island looking for rare plants… [Continue Reading]

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Dark Spooky Forest Week: Alan Wake

November 1, 2020October 26, 2023 aabicus 0 Comments Alan Wake, retrospective

This is not my first article to mention Alan Wake. (You’re gonna see me say that a lot about the games this week.) It’s one of only two games that I enjoyed enough to finish replaying on the hardest difficulty, and I’ve played a lot of games so that’s really saying something. (Though admittedly I did have developer commentary on). Alan Wake was released in 2010 by Remedy Studios, who are most well-known for the Max Payne series, and if you’ve played them you’ll feel quite at home with Alan Wake’s movement/shooting mechanics. The plot is unashamedly inspired by Stephen… [Continue Reading]

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Welcome to ‘Dark Spooky Forest’ Week!

October 31, 2020June 7, 2021 aabicus 0 Comments dark, forest, retrospective, spooky

Hey all! As described a while back, Medic has left me in charge of the Daily SPUF for a while, which is why you’ve been seeing more articles from me than usual. Last time this happened, I did a “retrospective week” where I discussed old games that weren’t really in the public conscience anymore. This week, I want to do something similar, but with a focus on my personal favorite video game setting: dark and spooky forests. I am a total sucker for dark and spooky forests. Perhaps it was due to growing up in the city, when my dad… [Continue Reading]

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Red Crucible Reloaded

October 13, 2020October 7, 2020 aabicus 0 Comments criticism, Filler, Red Crucible Reloaded, retrospective, review

Red Crucible Reloaded is, for all intents and purposes, an archetypical modern military shooter, and I don’t mean that in a good way. It has the bare minimum in every category to qualify as a multiplayer FPS, with almost nothing to give it any sort of identity beyond that. I first became aware of the game thanks to my brother, as its predecessor Red Crucible 2 was the first-ever online game he got really addicted to. So for me personally, my main motivation for playing was to spend time with him doing something he enjoys. The main perk for him… [Continue Reading]

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Hunting Yetis in Overwatch

October 7, 2020October 7, 2020 aabicus 0 Comments Filler, overwatch, retrospective, winter

Yeti Hunting was an old Arcade gamemode Overwatch released back in 2017. It’s now a recurring seasonal event that rolls out every Winter, which would also have been a much more appropriate time of year to write this article, but I don’t have the mental patience to wait that long. It was pretty much the closest Overwatch is ever gonna get to a Versus Saxton Hale gamemode, pitting five hapless Meis against a Winston who can temporarily turn into a ravenous killer Yeti by collecting 4 meats scattered throughout the map. I’m usually not a fan of Overwatch‘s seasonal game modes… [Continue Reading]

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Waking Up in Azeroth

July 18, 2019November 30, 2020 aabicus 0 Comments retrospective, review, warcraft, world, world of warcraft, wow

I’ve never really been an MMO kinda guy, even when my first job out of college was writing for one. I never had the patience to level up a character, and they’re always super boring at the early levels before you’ve unlocked anything of value. I first tried World of Warcraft in undergrad after it went pseudo-free-to-play, but didn’t get even remotely close to the level 20 cap before giving up on Kerychtyrr, my zombie warlock. The gameplay felt completely repetitive, just talking to NPCs and killing x amount of y enemies to complete quests. Bird, why you do this to me… [Continue Reading]

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The Way it Was: A Week of Looking Back

July 15, 2019July 12, 2019 aabicus 0 Comments aabicus, lack of updates, retrospective, Team Fortress 2

Hi everyone! aabicus here, and you may have noticed these days that I’ve been pretty much invisible on the SPUF side of things. My last article was in February (still haven’t caught a shiny Rattata…) and the SPUF of Legend‘s last video was 3 months ago. (That should change soon, though! Got another one in the final editing phase.) My main excuse, unfortunately, is money. In a nutshell, after graduating college I co-founded a gaming studio but got written out of the contract at the last minute. Without a backup lined up, I had to leave my apartment for financial… [Continue Reading]

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Retrospective 2, or what little I saw of it…

July 16, 2015 Medic 0 Comments 6v6, arena, competitive, event, fun, game mode, Highlander, ready steady pan, retrospective, tournament, Ultiduo

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]