7 ways to spot an impending crap sequel - Games Radar. I personally have seen very few sequels and I’ve enjoyed as much as the original. This article makes a nice little list of hints that you can expect to ruin a future sequel. I especially like the Sonic bit, it’s totally true.

Things the Force Unleashed Won’t Unleash - Games Radar. LucasArts is one of those funny “family friendly” companies now that makes everything stupid and for 8 year-ohh i’m olds. THE ORIGINAL STAR WARS GENERATION IS OLD ENOUGH, I THINK WE CAN HANDLE SOME DISMEMBERMENT AND BOOBS. Screw Jar-Jar.

Yes, Even Oprah has Purchased a Wii - Kotaku. This just further proves the Wii’s worthlessness. I pretty much hate anything Oprah likes, because, well she’s dumb.

Madden NFL ‘09 - Gamespot. Now I’m not a huge fan of sports, but i love sports games. I don’t really know why. Either way I love football and video games, and can’t wait for this to be released on the 12th. You can probably expect a review!

From a Distance

When coming up to an engineer’s sentry gun, the distance can be your best friend. When out of the range of the sentry gun, whip out your pistol and take it out. If there is no engie repairing it, you can take it out rather quick. If there is an engineer on it, try to aim for him so that you can THEN take out the sentry. Other than that, keep your distance!

Rubbing Noses

Getting up close and personal with an engineer’s gear can be hazardous, but you can take it out if you are fast enough. The trick is to “pop out” of corners, blast the sentry with your scattergun, and run back behind the corner. Doing it right you will get your damage in while the sentry is turning around to shoot at you. When doing this though, stay away from any walls behind you. A level 3 sentry can get rockets off pretty fast, and if you are next to the wall they hit you will take damage.

The “Boink” Report

Getting a bat kill on anything other than a level 1 sentry without an uber is pretty impossible (or just really really really rare), but to do it you need to employ the “Pyro Spin”, which basically means just circle the sentry hitting it with your bat. Hopefully if you don’t go too fast you will keep the sentry spinning towards you but never ACTUALLY hitting you. Good luck though, I just keep to my scattergun on this one.

Mediocre Game Babes - games radar. This is a good list of the game babes that we have forgotten. Everyone remembers Lara Crofts delicious figure and the ass load of crazy Japanese babes, but these are the forgotten babes who just aren’t quite the hotties they should be.

The 8 Worst Game Character Makeovers Ever - GamePro. Funny list about game character makeovers that went bad. I agree with all of them except Lara Croft. I found a more realistic English beauty more enjoyable anyways. The original Lara’s ta-tas looked like breast augmentation done in a Vegas alley.

Attack of the Women Gamers - Cafe. Turns out the number of women playing video games is increasing. That is a good thing! That means less “stop playing games and come cuddle with me and talk about feelings” and more “okay whoever wins this round has to do the dishes”. I can’t wait.

AVGN Batman Part I - GameTrailers. The Angry Video Game Nerd (fresh off the horror that is Superman64) takes on Batman games in honor of the Dark Knight release. Quote of the Episode: “I AM BATMANNNNNNNNN”.

and to finish off this rediculously male-oriented clix0r:

Top 10 Most Ridiculous Undergarments Worn by Women in Video Games - Heartless Doll. This is pretty bad. When you look at this you can tell that a large percent of games out there aim solely to give boys boners. I think the velvet strip across the nipple character was made by a sexually frustrated 13 year old.

From a Distance

If the heavy has a medic on him, GET OUT. There is no good “tip” or method I use to take care of a heavy with a medic, especially from a distance. Sometimes if you are lucky you can pick the medic off with the pistol, but I wouldn’t count on it. If you find yourself pinned by a heavy, try to keep him spinning his gun up and spinning it down. When his gun is actually in the process of spinning up and spinning down the heavy is completely vulnerable. What I suggest is to pop out of a corner and blast him with your scattergun, this will cause him to spin his gun up to try and kill you. Hide around your corner again until you hear his gun spinning down. The second you hear it spinning down, pop out of the corner again and get a couple shot on him until he starts spinning up. Keep this up and he’ll either ditch the minigun or try to run away, that is when you swoop in for the bloody, bloody finish.

Rubbing Noses

Rubbing noses with a heavy is where you can really have some fun with the scout. First, if he has a medic, you have to off his healer. Once he is solo, your scattergun can do a surprising amount of damage up close to this big guy (especially since he is so big, you don’t have to try VERY hard to aim and hit). Once his medic is done, be sure to keep moving around the heavy while blasting him from all angles, but you need to sneak up on him. If  heavy sees a scout coming for him, he’ll spin up his death machine and waste you in no time. Once you begin attacking the heavy, make sure to stay ABOVE him. Most heavies have 2D tunnel vision, they hardly ever shoot above or below them. Often times when a heavy is assaulting I’ll actually hop and stay on top of his head, shooting down hot lead into his cranium.

The “Boink” Report

Getting a bat kill on a heavy is a badge of honor, but the only really good strategy for getting one is to hit a heavy when he is down. A great time to try and get a bat kill on a heavy is when his medic has just died and he is retreating back to try and link back up with him. The heavy is really slow and the scout is really fast: hunt him down and bat his ass! When you actually do catch up with him, again try to move around and keep him spinning.

My tactic on 2fort as a scout is to run across the top of the bridge, waste the snipers on the enemy battlements, and then make my run for the intelligence. Often when I do this, snipers start to take a couple scoped shots at me, then run into the spawn with thier smg blazing. When snipers do this I will sometimes pull out the bat and wait by the door for them to return and get a nice melee kill when they do. Recently I was playing 2fort on a server and was doing quite well as a scout (doing my usual tactics) when a sniper exclaimed “stop spawn camping!” This upset me, let me tell you why:

THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH SPAWN CAMPING. IF YOU ARE MAD THAT SOMEONE IS “SPAWN CAMPING” IT IS BECAUSE YOU AREN’T SKILLED ENOUGH TO  TAKE THEM OUT WHEN THEY DO.

Originally spawn camping was a problem in games because people would immediately spawn and be killed with not even a chance to repel the assult. TF2 takes care of this by putting doors on the spawn areas in which the enemy can’t get to. If you can’t coordinate your team enough to repel them (or even figure out a way to get out of your spawn yourself) then they have outsmarted you, and deserve to kill you.

What ever happened to the challenge of online gaming? It seems anymore when a challenge is presented to online gamers they get mad and want an admin to take care of it for them. Well on the Montana Fragfest server I go ahead and challenge you to outsmart me. If I can’t take care of the challenge you present to me then you deserve to win and I give you kudos for that. Stop complaining about “spawn camping” and get creative!!

Being that E3 is cranking, I’ll attempt to stay away from E3 stuff and what E3 stuff I do mention isn’t the “huge” releases that you will see everywhere. This week we have a little crappy youtube video, TF2 spoofing, good ideas implemented poorly, nickel and diming gamers, and some classic crappy games.

E3 08: Duke Nukem Trilogy trailer is the worst trailer ever -  destructoid. They aren’t lying. This trailer tells us nothing about the “Duke Nukem Trilogy” other than the trilogy consists of Proving Grounds, Chain Reaction, and Critical Mass. Other than that there is just a bunch of hard rock with double bass and a bouncing Duke Nukem logo.

Neat Community Creations - Official TF2 Blog. Apparently someone made a fake website detailing the “Spy Update” which had the TF2 community quite confused. The creator’s fake site mockup is perfect and even fooled some of the folks at Valve.

Zero Punctuation: Alone in the Dark - The Escapist. Again our favorite Australian reviewer rips into a game with poor implementation. I of course haven’t played Alone in the Dark, but then again I don’t have ass-loads of money to blow $60 on games that almost everyone says is terrible.

Nintendo MotionPlus hands-on: blah - engadget. What? Nintendo announce ANOTHER peripheral for the Wii? I think thier plan with the Wii was to release it at a lower price with less graphical power and then nickel and dime the owners to death with peripherals that make it somewhat as useful as an Xbox360 (or god, dare I say) the PS3.

Angry Video Game Nerd: Superman64 - Gametrailers.com. The Angry Video Game Nerd reviews what a large amount of people consider the WORST GAME EVER. He doesn’t even get past two levels, which is saying something.

Hey guys, I sliced up my finger today with a kitchen knife, so articles will be on hold for a big as it took me 5+ minutes to write this. As soon as I can type again, I’ll get back to putting them out as scheduled.

Here is a picture of a smurf that is hurt like me. Not really sure how he hurt his hand though. Maybe he is the homicidal smurf they neglected in the cartoons. . .

Team Fortress 2 Dispenser Mod - bit-tech.net. Some guy made a dispenser for TF2 designed to hold a computer. Why would you do that? I would make a dispenser that was designed to dispense sandwiches or SOMETHING. Regardless, pretty cool and I tip my hat to him.

Diablo 3 - blizzard. The speculation was right, Blizzard announced Diablo 3. They also have plenty of gameplay videos and other fun stuff. Just don’t be the whiney internet bitches complaining about the environment. It’s DIABLO man.

Call of Duty 4 Coming to the Mac! - #!/usr/bin/m3mnon. Props to a platform getting a game seven months after it was released for everything else. I mean seriously. I’ve already been obsessed and gotten over this game. But hey! It’ll run at 13 frames per second! Kind of sounding alot like my Wii. . .

Video game reviews: The best of 2008 (so far…) - telegraph. A good synopsis of some of the better games on the list. Although, I found it funny that Brawl was on there. I bought it, played it twice, and haven’t touched it since.

Zero Punctuation: LEGO Indy - the Escapist. Everyone’s favorite angry Australian Yatzee gives his thoughts on LEGO Indiana Jones.

Why was ctf_well so bad? Because was one LONG ass ctf map. I mean the travel time from intel point to intel point was massive. This caused two problems. The first is that when you have that long of a travel point you get used to your intel NOT being in your base. You just assume it’s either at large or dropped somewhere you don’t care about. The second problem is that the large size of the map got rid of the intensity of getting intel from one base to the other. On 2fort for example, if you have a well organized team an enemy trying to cross the bridge with your intel should have one hell of a fight waiting for them.

What Changed

What changed with the new version of well? The biggest alteration is the removal of the middle building and the subsequent removal of the middle water to that building and an overall shortening of the map. The removal of the middle building is great idea for this map. Now, there is a much sorter, straight shot between each of the spawn buildings, making a great zone of carnage in the middle (with, mind you, still a train rolling in and out at random intervals). The removal of the water path was also great, although now spies might lament because they no longer can get to the enemy intel completely with a minimum of enemy interactions. The removal of the middle train station also gave them the ability to shorten the entire map, which is so helpful. It creates a sense of urgancy and excitement when your intel is taken, because you know there are limited paths to take it back. You feel like you have the ability to hunt down the intel thief, and defend your intel long enough to return it to where it belongs: in your base!

Overall, I’m really pleased with this map’s update, but unfortunately i think its already poor reputation amongst players might keep people from realizing how much fun this map actually is.

TF2’s Heavy Class Next To Get Achievements, Unlockable Weapons - shacknews. Valve just now released that the next update will be to the heavy class. Specifically, trying to make the big guy more useful without a medic. This sounds perfect, being that when they release the update you won’t be able to find a medic within three miles of the millions of heavies running around.

Angry Video Game Nerd - ScrewAttack. The Angry Video Game Nerd reviews games that are. . . well crappy. He does it with comedic flair, beer, and usually nonsensical tirades of swearing. Give him a look, and for the love of god don’t get a Sega 32x.

Duke Nukem Forever Devs: ‘E3 is Irrelevant’ - wired. That is right, the developers of 3D Realms have such a good pulse on the gaming industry that they decided E3 was irrelevant and won’t be attending. I guess you have lots of time to know what is going on in the gaming industry while you are busy taking 10+ years to make a single FPS.

Wii Top7 - Most Anticipated Games - GameTrailers. This has to be the worst “top” list I’ve ever seen. Most lists like this go in increments of 5, but this one does seven. Why? BECAUSE THERE ARE NO GOOD GAMES COMING OUT FOR THE WII EVER. They would probably be lynched if they threw 3 more games on there because they would have to put games like “Billie’s Bar Darts” or “Another Wii Tennis Game”.

Ohio LIbrary Now Loaning Video Games - Joystiq. This. . . is awesome. A library in Ohio is adding video games to the list of mediums they will loan out. Unfortunately, it looks like they are only doing more modern titles. When I can go to the library and check out old NES and SNES games I will be a happy, happy boy.