I’ve been playing these using an emulator, and I’ve noticed something. The game does not provide enough ways to level up your team for the latter portions of the game. The first two gyms are cake (as long as you didn’t pick Chikorita), but after that, things get messy.

I watch too much YouTube. While on the one hand that’s probably why I’m here, on the other it allows me to learn a little about the mindset of people in the gaming video community. I’ve noticed something recently, a trend in how FPS YT communities evolve. I thought I’d share it here with you so that if you decide to create a channel of your own, you’ll have a little more luck picking the right way to go about it.

The first consideration is what game you want to post. For my purposes here, I’m going with the three top YT games: Call of Duty, Battlefield and Team Fortress 2. Coincidentally, that’s also their order of popularity. Not quite as coincidentally, that is the order of innovation you need to put forward to get your foot in the door. It’s interesting that the TF2 community is as old as the CoD one, but there’s much less effort (comparatively) to become a popular TF2 commentator than it is for CoD. No disrespect to our Omniscient Overlord WiNGSPANTT, whose videos always have high production values, but if you want to impress the sixteen year old masses watching CoD, you better really stretch yourself beyond the limits you thought you had.

Here at Top Tier Tactics, we are always on the lookout for new ways to deliver the best content possible. Reading our incoherent ramblings is certainly one way of contact, but our angelic voices are a more intimate way to converse about video games. To that end, we wondered if a podcast would be a viable way to bring you a little closer to us.

We call it the Top Tier Talkcast, and we hope to bring it to you as often as you’ll listen, assuming all our completely empty schedules manage to meet up. This week’s inaugural episode features WiNGSPANTT, Rabid Ferret, Serge and Space Hamlet.* In other words, it is awesome.

It’s happened to everyone. You’ve pulled the trigger for just under a second and seen five hit markers, blood spurts or however a game tells you your bullets hit. Your brain, used to seeing your foes go down in that many hits, instinctively turns away, and your very-not-dead-enemy shoots you in the ass. If it happens once, on consoles or PC, blame latency, twice a timing error on your part, thrice, rage mode! The problem does of course lie in part with the hit detection in the game and your connection to either the server or the host (which I’ll talk about shortly), but some of it’s in your head. The brain wires itself to recognize timings , and the instincts that allow you to pwn teh n00bs get you killed get you killed because of what the game allowed your brain to teach itself.

This week, Top Tier Tactics introduces a new feature, Relay Rant. The premise is simple: one writer per week gets to whine about whatever he wants. Then you, the audience, tell us which writer you want to see write next week’s Relay Rant and what it should be about! Since Xiant formed the basis of this idea… he’s going first!

So, we’ve started a Top Tier Tactics Twitter account, as you can probably tell from the FOLLOW US ON TWITTER OR SUFFER! sign on the right of the page. I just want to step up here and say why. First, we know that all of you are wonderful people whose time is precious and opinions important.*

It’s been out for around a month now, and if some of you can take time out of your day to stop playing Portal 2, we’ll have a talk about Homefront. Let me preface this by saying that this game is neither the prettiest nor the most polished game out there. There are only eight, that’s right, eight, maps, and you only get to play seven of them in one of only two fucking game modes. Battle Commander is not a game mode, it is what I’ll call a sub-mode or a tack-on that adds variety. There are only twelve weapons, and they are mostly assault rifles. To be fair, you’re better off with one of the two SMGs, or at least I find that to be the case. That is, of course, unless you play Team Snipematch, where the wookies get their camp on.

Griping aside, the game is a real blast to play when you have a team that at least knows what it’s doing. Can you carry a team in TSM? Sure. Build up enough BP and get yourself a chopper or a tank and go to town. Is it the same in Ground Control? No. You need a concerted effort, and here I’m going to tell you how to do that and what to use when. You can listen and maybe win a little more, or disregard and face the wrath of the eternal spawn trap.

This week, Xiant answers questions about the competitive Team Fortress 2 scene.

After hearing what the community had to say about my last Spy article, I thought I’d go a little more in depth with the various tools and playstyles available to the Spy. This won’t be an ongoing series like my YouTube update posts; instead, I’ll have four articles after this going over in detail what you see in Spy YouTube videos.

We’ll take some time to discuss: 1) The Spy watches, 2) Spy revolvers, 3) Spy Knives and Stabs, 4) Disguises. Today is watch day, and I want to delve into each watch individually. As a purely selfish touch, I’m going to go in order of my preference, starting with the Cloak and Dagger.