aabicus

Magebrawl tournament is in thirty minutes! We'll be broadcasting player 1 from my Twitch (with announcer's commentary from myself and Ahmitt, the Creative Director) and player 2 from Ahmitt's Twitch (sans commentary). Thanks to everyone who shows up to watch!

Today's SPUF of Legend is on today's Payday 2 patch that added the new Death Sentence difficulty and explosive headshot Sniper skill!

This week’s SPUF of Legend is a lecture I gave at school about the development, gameplay, and legacy of Team Fortress Classic!

Left 4 Bed is still the best L4D2 mod in existence

Endless War 3 was one of the games I made my team play to teach them how top-down shooters work. I played so much of that game in high school. Ready to have your mind blown TOGE? Watch this GIF of Endless War 3 and then highlight the spoiler text one chunk at a time: After they watched it, I closed the GIF and asked my team how many animations the player character demonstrated in the GIF. Try to answer the question yourself, how many animations did you just see? - My team ultimately guessed four: shooting, idle, moving up/down, moving left/right. The correct answer? Zero. - Now watch the GIF again. The player's walk cycle is created by making two little black ovals jiggle underneath the sprite. The gunfire is just muzzle flash. That game managed to completely avoid having to make animation cycles, which is part of why they had so many different sprites for the various factions and levels. Genius animation trick that somehow works perfectly without the player noticing.

Yesterday Medicinal Warlock covered Experimental Games, and today Medic talks about the troubles with Trials and why Warframe doesn't currently give veterans enough to do. I totally agree that mobility puzzles sound really fun, Warframe's very detailed movement systems were one of the funnest parts of the game. Regarding Aspie Life and its assertion that every gameplay decision was intentional, that's a dangerous game to play for the reasons Warlock describe. One thing I'm realizing as I make more games is just how important user control fluidity is; you really, really want to make it so the player can perform whatever action they desire with as little conscious thought as possible. I get that some games will break that rule, especially a game with Aspie Life's stated goal, but there are ways to do it while also subtly cluing the player in that the mechanic is supposed to be difficult. Camera angles are a good way to indicate that something shouldn't currently be your focus, as is poor lighting or designing the level to draw attention away from the sprite. If the game makes a big deal out of something (or even worse, locks progress until you figure the thing out) to the point the player is wondering whether a bug is preventing some sort of desired action, there's a very good chance they're going to stop playing and never start back up. In other news, somebody Let's Played a game I voice-acted in and I'm super excited because that's never happened before :D

I made another in-browser game! This one doesn't use my own art (I only had a few days to make it) and the assignment was to practice level design so I needed to make a bunch of maps with different themes. I wish TF2 Workshop was like the L4D2 workshop, where you could subscribe to something and it'll appear in-game clientside. I'd love to use certain reskins of TF2 weapons, and it'd stramline the ability for people to play specific maps together. As it is, there doesn't seem to be much point to going on the workshop beyond occasionally voting for something that looks nice.

I wrote that article because I'm hoping to convince my professor to add Half-Life to the syllabus for the Critical Genre Analysis class' section on first-person shooters. I needed to show that everyone in the class could play it for free, hence why I'm covering really basic stuff y'all already know, like installing Steam accounts. You never know with grad students.

Also new SPUF of Legend video, looking at Killing Floor 2 in 2018 and how that game's held up!

Today's SPUF of Legend is an Overwatch round where I got 14 boop kills, the first one of which was the 1000th of my Lucio career!

I didnt see anywhere to select specific maps, only game modes. I played on casual Koth, PLR, payload hoping to mapvote to a new map, but none of the new maps came up for voting. Lemme jump back in and see if I missed somewhere where you can choose by map instead of game mode

So I attempted to record footage of the new TF2 maps for the YouTube channel, but I literally couldn't find a single populated server playing the new maps. It didn't help that the new Quickplay herds you into whatever map the server decides, there's no way to choose your map in Casual. And I searched for each map name on the server browser and couldn't find a server for any of them with more than 3 people. So...unless there's some other way to find people playing those maps, I guess I'm not making YouTube reviews and analyses of them.

The CS:S weapons treated as a booby prize for exactly two countries has always struck me as one of the most bizarre decisions Valve ever made. ”Hey Gabe, turns out Germany and Australia are forcing us to ship L4D2 gore-free.” ”Hmmm. Let’s rig, animate, and code an entire range of new weapons just for those countries. Let’s give some of them abilities that don’t exist in the base game, like the SSG’s tactical zoom and the AWP’s ability to two-shot Expert Tanks.” “Wow, those are some awesome weapons. You sure the rest of the playerbase won’t want to use those?” ”Nah. Also, delete the fully modeled and functional Riot Shield while you’re in there.”

I love the fifth player glitch! I should really stop being asocial and find a group to run Realism Expert with, I'm sure I could hold my own on a team. I agree that a T1 sniper would be amazing, right now the Magnum is the closest thing. I always thought a Winchester lever action rifle would fill the slot really well. Or if they wanted to be super lazy, the Steyr Scout is already in the game and a straight downgrade to the Hunting Rifle, they could have easily used that.

I’m too scared to read this article because I haven’t seen the film yet and so far I’ve avoided being spoiled D: Yesterday’s article is called A Rant About Loot Boxes, and today’s article is Some More Warframe Tips and Advice! There’s also a new SPUF of Legend called 4 Ways to Make Boring Left 4 Dead Pubs Fun!

It really sucks to see Hi-Rez do it again. I was warned several times when I first started playing Paladins that they would probably ruin the game like they had their older titles, and I never really got into the game because of it. It's going to be extremely hard for them to revert the reputation they've built up after gutting so many of their beloved franchises for a short-term buck.

>be me >before heist begins, guy says "you sure you want that loadout aabicus" >i reply "yeah, its a stoic build" >do the heist >heist goes to shit, everyone captured except me >i'm pinned in a corner and cops have me completely locked down, all out of meds >captain winters is stopping me from respawning them >guy in chat: "but it was a stoic build tho" >i sprint through the cops lines, replenishing my health with stoic >I reach the safe end of the map, replenish ammo at an ammo bag and start singlehandedly taking down winters >im already composing the shade i was gonna sling that guy when I resurrect the heist >internet hiccups, im disconnected from server >from their point of view i ragequit > https://gfycat.com/ConsiderateAgedKitten

Android users should try out Swype, I found it really amazing. You feel like you're casting a Harry Potter spell every time you type

New SPUF of Legend discussing the relationship between the new Payday 2 perk deck and converted cops! I was thinking of getting back into TF2 by making my next few videos map reviews on the Jungle Inferno maps. Those who still play, any suggestions on which maps I should review first?

The main reason Overwatch lootboxes don’t bother me is how quickly you level up. You get around 4K experience for every game assuming you’re playing a group, so even an hour of gaming gets you another loot box. However, I have to note that I have 17,000 unspent coins that I’d been building up since I started playing, and I’ve been incredibly lucky with the skins I want dropping out of level up loot boxes. (Plus I only play Lucio so I don’t care what any of my other characters look like). Plus I have the Twitch prime free loot boxes and was one of the lucky NA players who got 16 free lootboxes during the South Korea chargeback fiasco, basically I’ve never purchased a loot box because there’s nothing they could drop that I’d want. That being said, Blizzard’s lootbox system has gotten greedier with updates. Ever since duplicates became rare, my coin income has plummeted and I would be so frustrated if I were an ordinary player saving up for stuff and trying to buy skins with coins. None of my friends can comfortably afford the skins they want even though they play about as much as I do, especially since Blizzard has apparently decided that new event skins are legendary and always cost 3000 coins. I’d say that the current lootboxes do not release enough coins to afford a fair amount of event skins, and there is almost nothing else ever released to spend your coins on.

Also, new SPUF of Legend on a Payday 2 skin that unlocks an otherwise rare DLC scope

He almost had peyote, but somebody at Valve realized it was culturally insensitive