Posts Tagged ‘Games’

Seyon and I enjoy Team Fortress 2 a lot. So much that we go beyond playing the game and begin to explore the realm of Screwing Around. Empty servers become playgrounds where we test oddities in game mechanics, rocket-jumping, Engineer buildings, ubers, Spy abilities, Scout accesses, achievements, etc. Yesterday we were messing around with our friends, Domino and Taco, on our own private fake LAN and came across a few neato facts:

• The Pyro’s Backburner (available after Pyro Milestone 2 with sixteen unlocked achievements) has a considerably longer reach than basic flamethrower. The animation’s draw distance for both weapons looks exactly the same and is not a reliable tell of fire range.*
• One of the newest additions to the Pyro’s arsenal, the air compressor, has the ability to blow back Pyro flares, Soldier rockets, Demo grenades, Demo stickies, and sentry gun rockets in mid-air. Each of these projectiles has its own associated kill icon, though you may have to squint to see them.
• Catching a flare within the compressor’s AoE is particularly difficult to time as it is a tiny target and rather fast. If you successfully reflect it, the flare will change to the color of your team.
• Demo stickies will not change color if blown away but will still show the reflected kill icon if he dies by them even some time later.
• The flare does little damage to the Pyro (~20 hp), so try aiming it back at one of his highly flammable teammates.

* Kudos to our buddy, Scrub, for informing me about this ninja update.

Giant robots, hobos, and mimes, Oh my. Penny Arcade fans may recognize these three bad evilnesses from the well-known webcomic, but to any other crowd these words should never be brought together without some kind of jam-retardant… bee suit. Yeah.

I first heard about this game from the PA website, being a reader and all, and was moderately interested in how the two authors could move their medium into a game format. Being skeptical about these Developer Nubs though, I didn’t really give it a second thought. The game was eventually completed and made available on XBOX Live and as a downloadable in Steam.

On a whim I purchased the game, being burnt out on all the failures of (MMO)RPGs being offered recently. Players are able to create their own personalized avatar and fight alongside Tycho and Gabe through comic-style panels of Penny Arcade art. Speech bubbles are employed to deliver the dry humored Big Words that readers have become accustomed to from the strip. It was quite apparent that the game is a port from console but a simple user interface and controls makes it a non-issue.

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