My 5 Favorite Mobility Tools in Gaming

Way back in 2010, Valve gave Portal away for free and it became the first game I ever owned on Steam. Ever since then, mobility shooters have remained my favorite genre in gaming, from PvE/singleplayer games like Quake and Warframe to PvP games like Loadout, Apex Legends and Rocket Arena. (I even made my own in college!) Also known as ‘arena shooters’ to differentiate them from ‘tactical shooters’ like CS:GO and Red Crucible Reloaded, I love their focus on parkour, explosive jumping, aerial control, and general physics abuse in every way the players can find. I’ve spent hours on empty… [Continue Reading]

Read more

A Brief History of Glass in Team Fortress

It may seem odd that I’m devoting a whole article to glass, an incredibly common and straightforward building material. Some games let you break it, others let you shoot through it, and many don’t. Within a few minutes of playtime, you’ll probably notice Team Fortress 2 is decidedly in the latter category. Case closed? Not quite, because glass actually has a more checkered history than you’d first expect. It first came to my attention when I started playing Team Fortress Classic and noticed that only one map had glass: Rock2, letting the flag-scoring player watch their pursuers die to toxic gas.… [Continue Reading]

Read more

On Fortress Forever’s Huge Pyro Rework

The Team Fortress Classic Pyro sucks. I don’t care what the person in the comment section of that article says, she has almost no role to serve on the battlefield and does a miraculously bad job of filling her supposed niche of area-of-effect damage. Valve made some big changes to the class when creating Team Fortress 2, but they also tried to stay loyal to Pyro’s afterburn-based roots. For the longest time, Fortress Forever likewise attempted to create a more versatile afterburn Pyro by giving theirs some interesting mobility tools: he could ‘fly’ through the air by firing his flamethrower behind him, and his afterburn… [Continue Reading]

Read more

Where is the TFC Medic?.. and other TFC Merc thoughts

The Team Fortress Classic mercenaries have long been thought dead, despite the fact that Team Fortress Classic itself is still playable (as is Fortress Forever, but that’s a whole separate thing!) and all that, with a tight knit community that will kick newbies’ asses from here to kingdom come. Point is, they’ve been alive the entire time despite looking like they came from the future. And the TF Comic series, which introduced us to more of the TFC mercs last time and proved that TFC Pyro was female, has been doing a fine job of getting them more time in… [Continue Reading]

Read more