Everyone complains when there’s too many of one class, particularly if said class is a Sniper or a Spy, but what if every slot is taken and there’s an abundance of classes? What do you do then? My advice? Go Soldier. And here’s why.
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A Story – Spy’s Dream
Instead of the normal stuff, let’s take five minutes to pause and think about how TF2 would be like without respawn machines.
Using More Cosmetics to Your Advantage
Between the 742 hats, cosmetics, and visible action slot items in Team Fortress 2, Valve has in general done a very good job of steadfastly keeping them cosmetic-only. While it’s fun to deck your character out in crazy stuff, it’s not possible to actually use these items to gain in-game benefits, right?
Mod Showcase: The Hidden
Welcome to another episode of Mod Showcase! Brickinator’s back and this time we’ll be taking a look at The Hidden, a custom game mode that makes stalking people socially acceptable. The Hidden is inspired by a Source mod of the same name. It uses arena mode as a base and can be played on the usual arena maps. One team has one player who gets to be the titillating titular character and the other have to kill him. And wear his skin. The Hidden is forced to play as the Spy, but he has some very exciting abilities. Not only… [Continue Reading]
Sniping for those who hate scopes…
I never told anyone this, but I have a phobia. Vlepsophobia. The fear of scopes. Actually, that’s a lie, although the word I used is theoretically correct. But ever since I started playing First Person Shooters, staring with Left 4 Dead at 5 frames per second, moving onto Garry’s Mod and settling down in Team Fortress 2, I have always been troubled by using the scopes provided on certain weapons. It’s the tunnel vision, I think, that puts me off. Anyway, today, we’re discussing what to do if you want to snipe but hate peering down a scope.
5 things you may not know about stock weapons
The weapons that have been in the game since it came out in 2007. The oldest things in your backpack. Every player in the game has used them. Could there really be something you don’t know about them at this point? Maybe. Here are some things I didn’t know about several greytext weapons for a surprisingly long time. 1-Sticky Launcher nuances: Holding down right-click lets you charge up a sticky and shoot it really far. You already knew that? Shucks. How about that destroyed (not detonated) stickies leave 1 ammo you can pick up (or extinguish yourself, in the case… [Continue Reading]
How to Survive as a Spy
Some of us (read: me), are not very lucky at spy. We tend to miss the backstabs due to random movement by the target, we struggle with chainstabs and trickstabs, and since we hate the dead ringer, we feel like we gimp ourselves as spies. Well, maybe that last one is only me, but oh well… To combat this lack of talent and luck in the backstabbing department, some of us learned how to survive and try again. There is nothing more frustrating than missing a stab and then immediately dying because the heavy or the demo we were aiming… [Continue Reading]
Some Quick Fixes To Make The MvM Experience More Fun
Ever since the Two Cities Update, the face of Mann Versus Machine has been invariably altered. With the obscene buffs the Medic and Soldier received from this update (I’ll complain less about the Medic, because he really needed some love, and now he’s basically indispensable), MvM, for some, has come to an irritating middle-ground, where the older missions, namely Operation Steel Trap (and, to some extent, Gear Grinder. Yeah, remember them? Me neither) have become laughably easy, or something you run through with your friends as six Demoknights for a chuckle, and the newest missions are hair-pullingly difficult. To me, and hopefully at least one of you, this is bogus.
As someone who has sunk a considerable part of their TF2 experience into MvM, I remember the soul-crushing agony of trying to find a match on the night the update dropped, those encounters with blokes who had been on the same Expert Mission server for three hours trying to find a winning team, being a bloke who has been on the same Expert Mission server for three hours, and screaming in unison with the Announcer when an Engineer bot showed up (more on them later). And now, after slaving away at Empire Escalation for as many hours as I once had at Mannslaughter, I realized that, with all these updates to the Medic and Soldier, going back to those missions and still expecting a challenge would be impossible.
That being said, there are things that are positively infuriating about the way MvM currently works that could also make the experience more enjoyable. So, I’m going to propose some changes Valve could make to the way MvM works in order to keep MvM (all MvM) exciting for players at all levels, as well as improve the experience over all.
My favorite TF2 Glitches
As we all know, TF2 is a perfect game with absolutely no flaws. As a matter of fact, not only is it completely flawless now, but it’s actually remained a perfect game since the day it came out, with a grand total of zero glitches for the past seven years. That’s pretty impressive.
But every so often Valve feels the need to remove legitimate gameplay strategies such as “Taunt with Amputator, disconnect from server, your team regnerates health indefinitely until the server crashes or changes maps.” Here are the ones I miss the most.
1. The Level 2 Mini-Sentry
Is a regular sentry gun cute? Maybe a little, but not really. Is the mini-sentry cute? It would be if it wasn’t one of the most annoying things in the game currently. But this gun? It’s adorable. I want a plush.
My favorite TF2 unused content
As the devs of a seven year-old game, the Team Fortress 2 team has had a long time to come up with ideas for our beloved shooter. Obviously not all of them can make the final cut, but a good amount of them have been added in unfinished and relatively inaccessible states. Luckily the community has its ways of discovering this unused content, and here are some I feel a slight pang when I think of because they probably will never see the light of day.
1. “That Dispenser is a Spy!”
Valve is routinely adding new addconds to TF2. For those who don’t know, addcond, or “add condition” is a console command that changes the status of the player. For example, when a Medigun Ubercharges a teammate, the game initiates “addcond 5” which adds Ubercharge textures, negates all damage, and plays the appropriate noses and voice lines. “addcond 11” bestows the player’s weapons with guaranteed crits and the critglow effect, “addcond 32” is how the Disciplinary Action bestows a speed boost and the motion lines in the air, etc. You can get the full list here.
Well, many addconds aren’t tied to any weapons or in-game events, so you can’t use them. But we can see what they do, and there are some gems. To quote the Team Fortress Wiki:
addcond 49: Crouching causes the player to appear to be a Dispenser of the enemy team to enemy players. As a side effect, forces the player’s speed to 450 Hammer Units/second (diagonal movement is at 520 HU/s). Swapping weapons while in this state will cause the player to temporarily stop moving, then return to 450 HU/s.
You heard that last one right. At one point, Valve was toying with a weapon that disguised a spy as an enemy dispenser if he crouched. That has got to be one of the most hilarious, horrifying, and puzzling ideas. Imagine players routinely spychecking your dispenser. Imagine having no engineers on your team, but dispensers are everywhere. The situations are endless, and every one is hilarious. It’s probably for the better Valve didn’t follow up with this one, but I can dream.