Author Archive
Scoregasm, or how to make an awesome game and ruin it
If you are a stereotypical horny 13 year old male, you’ll find absolutely nothing wrong with Scoregasm.
It’s a fun dual stick shooter where you aim with your mouse in the general direction of enemies, and when you’re surrounded you can click to activate your close range attack and annihilate anything in the circle around your ship. This means that even if you’re surrounded by all sides in tight patterns of bullets, à la curtain shooter, you can always click yourself out of trouble; actually, you want to do that as much as possible.
Killing adds to a combo meter, but click-killing does so twice as fast, and while you can’t just spam your attack you can certainly use it generously. The combo meter drains with time and resets on death. If your high water marker for combo is high enough you’ll unlock exits to harder levels. End a wave with the combo above the required level and you’ll enter frenzy mode, where you’ll get even more ships onto you for a chance to get a crazy high score.
Basically, a bullet hell game that tries to be a little more accessible than the monsters out there, and thus has something to offer to everybody. What’s not to like?
This:
To be fair, the above is a cut out from four minutes of gameplay. You can watch the whole thing here, but the moaning is pretty much a constant throughout the game.
An unnecessary, unjustified, annoying, obnoxious, tasteless constant. And there’s no obvious way to turn it off. Even as a white male in his youth, the “porn sounds” became old real fast.
FallenAngelEyes has contacted the developer and we’ve learned that, luckily, we’ll be able to turn off this constant on and off with the next game update.
This game was part of the second Indie Royale bundle, and probably is the most fun game of the bunch.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Quickfix

"please use normal uber"
Perhaps the most controversial item that we got from the Uber Update (yeah, old news) is the Quick Fix. There’s a vocal bunch of people that actively dislikes it and ask medics to switch to one of the two classic medic guns, and well, it is undeniable that the quickfix does have a few major downsides in respect to the regular medi gun.
Namely, the #1 reason why people oppose the use of the quickfix is its uber does not grant you invulnerability. Well, invulnerability definitely is every bit as cool as it sounds. Yes, if you use the quickfix too late you’re going to die shortly after using it, and your patient is going to follow you and more people are going to say, “told ya, stop using the quickfix.” And perhaps they have a point.
A less heard of, but just as critical downside of the quickfix is, it can’t overheal. This is huge when facing pocket medics from other mediguns: a heavy healed by a quickfix gun isn’t going to win in a 1v1 vs a heavy overhealed and healed by a normal medigun, unless the quickfix medic pops the uber and the other medic doesn’t. You’ll have to bring more gun.
Aside: if the patient is already overhealed, however, the quickfix will let you hold that overheal; it won’t replenish it when it absorbs damage, however. Dispensers also do that, so next time do stop by and overheal your engie by his nest.
So, you can’t overheal and you can’t give your team invulnerability, and you can’t give your team guaranteed critical shots. Let’s see what you can do though.
50 Items You Want to Stick With in TF2
So you just installed TF2, and you started playing, and you like it! However, your one page of loadout goodness is barely enough to keep up with your first few weeks of drops. You have to prioritize. You’ll have to discard some items to make room for others.
Certainly you’ll want to try each item before deleting, but some items are objectively better than others.
Here’s, in my humble opinion, the items you want to stick with, plus other alternatives that didn’t make the cut.
The Very Condensed Guide To Novice Engineers’ Construction Strategy So That You Never Again Build A Sentry Gun Right Outside Your Spawn Door For The Love Of God Please Stop
Originally posted on Reddit in a moment of frustration. Check the comments for some helpful gunslinger tips. Also check out my previous post on the topic.
tl;dr: Teleports teleports teleports teleports teleports teleports. Teleports teleports teleports teleports teleports teleports teleports teleports! …yes! more »
Engineering in TF2
So you are tired of getting owned by those darn accurate sentries standing in the way between you and victory, lurking around the corner, more vicious than a spy. You want to get some action. You want to get kills without raising a finger. You want to heal people without holding your left mouse button, or, hell, healing more than one person at the same time! Or, your latency is too high and you’re tired of getting without giving.
You want to be an Engineer. So do I. And well, how can I blame you! The Engineer class in TF2 is awesome. Think of what a great engineer can provide to his team:
- Teleporters! shuffle people from spawn to the action in a fraction of the time!
- Dispensers! stationary medics that also replenish ammo and can treat more than one person at a time!
- Sentries! kill people without lifting a finger! Create a no stabbing area for enemy spies!
- Alternatively, Minisentries! Annoy the hell out of the other team with small, inexpensive grief generators.
Indeed, you’re so awesome for your team that, for balance, your life is pretty awful.
- You and your toys become the #1 targets for the enemy team, only bested by ubers.
- Speaking of ubers, you’re mostly powerless against them. You can’t uber a sentry.
- You are pretty useless on your own. Your weapons suck. Your health is low. Your wrench is average, until your toys go online.
- If you aren’t careful, any enemy classes can bring your 3 minutes of engineering into dust in matter of seconds. And you don’t have to take my word for it; that sucks.
Is the frustration you’ll have worth it? Let’s see what the rules of the game are.
SpaceChem
It’s rare to find games that have the right mix of deceptive simplicity, devilish difficulty and subtly addictive gameplay. SpaceChem gets pretty close.
The game idea is pretty simple. You have molecules made of atoms. You must turn them into other molecules. You have two “waldos” that manipulate atoms making “science!” happen. It’s so simple it’s hard to put it into words; the official introduction video makes a good job of it, however:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk8JwvtVs38
There are a few things that make this game stand out. Since however you’ll find a dozen reviews on the usual places, I’ll just focus on the one that struck me the most. That would be the performance report. more »