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.

Xiant: I found Top Tier Tactics through WiNGSPANTT’s Spy videos, as I assume many readers did. While I hate to beat a dead horse that is now nothing more than a pile of goo, it’s such pretty goo, and I want to make it jiggle. What I’m getting at is Spy strategy. Real strategy. After all, the Spy is more dependent on the mind than any other class in Team Fortress 2.

Yesterday, Binerexis and I had the opportunity to put our skills to the test not only in front of dozens of Xbox Live strangers, but also in front of a live audience at LiveStream.com. Behind a barrage of heckling, taunting, and an uncomfortable amount of praying, two top tier titans squared off to find out who would triumph.

In the end, I did manage to take the gold medal, finishing the two-hour marathon session with a lead of 13,360 points. But the real winner wasn’t me; it was one lucky reader who insisted on keeping a sad meme alive, wagering I’d secure victory with a lead of over 9,000 points.

This is the second in my little series on YouTube commentary, sparked mainly by a recent Sandy Ravage video. Its main thrust was this: Black Ops is boring, the videos containing it are boring, it’s too easy and… boring. Redundancy completely required. I put up my own 500 character thoughts, but I want to go [...]

What I propose is a monthly or weekly* take on the state of the YouTube community from an outsider’s perspective. I’m not a part of it, else I’d not have time for this or any real writing, but I watch a fair bit of it. If this is something all of you want, I’ll undertake it and cast my net wide, searching for the biggest names I’m not yet aware of, comb them for the overall feelings in the community as I see them, and report them here to you with my commentary on the commentary community (and I’m done with that word now).

I promised it and now it is here: an analysis of the weapons of Battlefield Bad Company 2: Vietnam, or at least, those in the Assault kit. For this series, I’m going to split the kits into five groups: the four main kits and general all-kit weapons.

Why? Because I know that my attention span is taxed just by looking at a web page for more than a couple seconds, so yours must be at least ten or so. You are reading this, I should think.

Let’s jump right in with Assault and begin with the ten ton elephant in the room: the Ak-47. I know Swordsman75 has already done his Briefing Room episodes on these, but I want to give a more specialized analysis of the weapons than he did. I plan to include ballistics, or at least, the ballistics as I see them…

My next post will be about the stats of Battlefield Bad Company 2: Vietnam, I promise. I had to get this off my chest. I can’t conceivably cover everything the title suggests, so instead I’ll do one of both, the extremes, as I see them. First, the good: uniqueness of combat. When I hop into Call of [...]

What Vietnam is doing is reenforcing this boring playstyle without a viable way for a Recon to use a sniper rifle up close. He has to either grab an automatic, flamethrower or shotgun… but then he’s really better off just playing one of the other three kits.

I plan to play the living shazbot out of Vietnam in the coming days, and when DenKirson, the man behind the stats, gets Vietnam’s source code, I’ll pull the data and analyze them in the context of the game. If it pleases the community, I’d also like to talk about the overall metagame in each of the maps, or at least the Rush ones. I’ll provide weapon reviews like I did on my personal blog, and I’ll weigh the strengths of each as I see them.

On the face of it, a solely multiplayer game like Team Fortress 2 or Blacklight Tango Down don’t really need a story. Team Fortress Classic didn’t, and there aren’t that many actual wholly multiplayer games out there. Sure, games like CoD, Battlefield and MoH are mostly multiplayer, but there’s a story behind the maps you play on. If you had the audacity to play the single player and enjoy it, you’d recognize some of the maps as set pieces from the game. Not so for fully multiplayer games. The maps you play on were built, ostensibly, for players with no regard for background or flavor. As long as they functioned for death match of CTF or territory control, who cares?