The Massive Crits comic competition, which involved readers explaining where the hell my comic was and why it was taking so long to produce, has ended, and Joe (he of Massive Crits) has picked the winner. Full details here.

I think we were both surprised, not only at how many entries there were, but how good they were. How good they all were. I was planning on entering myself, because I thought it’d be funny if I won, but once I started seeing what people were coming up with, I decided to stay out. You guys are way funnier than I was planning to be.

I’m incredibly pleased and impressed, you guys did a great job and there were really no bad entries. I don’t think Joe had a tough time picking the winner, but I’d guess he had a hard time picking just one winner. Excellent, excellent job all around.

Check out all the entries, including the winning one, by Josh (who submitted several great entries) in the comments on Joe’s site.

I finally got off my butt and updated my Living In Oblivion blog, with Day 25.

And with this update, I’ve actually caught up the blog with the gameplay, which is exciting for me because I’ll get to play Oblivion again and find out what happens to Nondrick next.  Frankly, I’m ready:  I think I’m gonna take a break from TF2 this week until the hot pyro action dies down a bit.

So, I farmed enough achievements to unlock all the alternative pyro weapons last night, and I’m feeling a little bad about it. Not guilty, per se, just bad, since I’ve got all the new content and don’t have anything to look forward to until the next Pack, which could be months from now. It’s sort of like wildly tearing all your Christmas presents open at once and then looking around and realizing there are no more gift-wrapped surprises until the next holiday.

I didn’t initially intend to farm them all. I played in actual matches for a few hours first, and wound up with about nine achievements to show for it, and just wanted the tenth so I could play with the flare gun. But by then, a few of my friends were on Mach4, and we started helping each other out, and, much like how having one shot of whiskey can lead to a night of heavy drinking, I eventually found myself on Achievement Box holding an axe I simply don’t deserve and realizing I overdid it. I binged.

Of course, it’s made easier this time around. There are thirty-five achievements, but you don’t need to get them all: the unlocks come at 10, 15, and 2o achievements, unlike the Medic Pack which required a full sweep.

Still, one achievement I’m happy I got in a real game was the OMGWTFBBQ. For a while, I’ve been hoping Valve would add one point of damage to the Pyro’s secondary haduoken taunt, but you can see why I’m a random blogger and they’re Valve: they think big. The taunt is now an instakill.

It took me a long time to get the achievement, during which I was completely useless to my team because, bomb carts and cap points be damned, all I did was slither around the map looking for someone to tiptoe up on and scorch. I first spent some time doing this on Goldrush, but with the chaotic, constant nature of the combat and the presence of multiple sentries, it just didn’t work out. I died. A lot. I did get a single kill with the taunt, after my team had lost a match, since the taunt still does damage even in the humiliation round. I saw an enemy spy knifing my teammates a few feet away, and taunted. He turned and walked right into my path. It didn’t count toward the achievement, but it was pretty funny.

Then we wound up on cp_Well. Ah, here we go. Plenty of ways to infiltrate and flank. I repeatedly swam below the combat on the surface and squeaked into the enemy base, climbing the newly added stairs to the second floor. I tried picking on a sentry until its engie ran over, and then taunting him to death, but this particular engie is a very good engie. He wasn’t falling for it and kept killing me before I could even get close.

Then, the moment I was waiting for — an enemy sniperdot appeared on a wall. Ah, yes! The slow-moving, scoped-in sniper, he shall be my mark! Even still, it took me a few tries. Finally, I got in behind him and began the taunt. He started strafing away to get a better angle on his target, and I thought he might slip out of range before the fireball burst forth from my gloves, but just at the last moment he reversed direction and stepped right in front of me. Taunt kill! I was pleased to no end. I’m pretty sure we lost that round, too, but who cares?

I think if I played pyro a bit more often, I’d probably liked to have gotten the unlocks legitimately. I think, also, if I played pyro a bit more often, I’d be annoyed at all the cheater pyros, like myself, running around flaunting ill-gotten weapons. Now that I’ve got them, though, I’ll go back to playing other classes, so at least there’ll be one less part-time pyro clogging up the works.

A great example of what I mentioned in the last post, with two pyros batting a rocket back and forth, on YouTube.

So, I played a few hours last night, and have a couple comments on the new Pyro Pack, all of them favorable.

First off, the new kit.  I haven’t seen enough of the new weapons to really judge them, except the first unlockable, the Flare Gun, which is an alternate to the shotgun.

The Flare Gun is great.  It’s adorable looking, has nice effects, and gives the pyro a long range weapon, particularly useful for harassing distant snipers.   While an engie can still work while he’s on fire, and a soldier can still fling missles around while engulfed in flames, the sniper can’t scope accurately once he’s been lit up, meaning he’s gotta go heal or wait for the flames to die out before he’s fully effective again.  Sorry, mate, your life just got harder.

It’s a projectile, but there’s not much of an arc to it — much, much less than the demo’s grenades –  which means it’s not that difficult to hit what you’re aiming at (if you miss, it fizzles out harmlessly).  And, for being a one-shot weapon, it doesn’t take much time to reload at all.

I can’t really say if I’ll definitely prefer the flare gun to the shottie in all cases; it will probably depend on the map and the situation, but I think it’s a great option and it’s a lot of fun to use.   It’s a great alt — it gives the pyro some flex and doesn’t override the importance of the shotgun, so I can see using them both at different times, which is the real goal of an alt weapon.  Cool.

The new flamethrower, the Backburner, guarantees crits when attacking from behind, and adds 50 points of health to the pyro using it.  The new fire axe guarantees crits against burning opponents at the cost of regular damage.  More on these new weapons when I’ve actually gotten to play with them.  I had them both used on me last night, however, and my comments are as follows:  Ouch.

The real belle of the ball last night, however, isn’t a new unlockable weapon but an addition to an old one:  the alt-fire airburst for the standard flamethrower.

Wow.  What a brilliant add.  First it’s crazy fun.  You can blast enemies away from you (not always a great idea, of course, when you’re attempting to burn someone to death), push them off ledges, throw them into the air, shove them back into their spawns, or just generally annoy them (at a cost of 25 ammo per burst).  On a game of Mach4 I pushed back an ubered medic-pyro duo who were attempting to take down a sentry.  We also had a fun game of volleyball with a cooperating scout.  Sometimes you can blast enemies so high they take fall damage when they land.  Very cool, both practically and for messing around.

Even better, you can use the air burst to deflect incoming enemy projectiles.  Very cool.  The first two times I tried it, in Goldrush, I sent an enemy rocket back into the soldier who had fired it for a kill, and a crit sticky back into the demo, again for a kill.  Beginner’s luck, because past that I didn’t do so well with it.  A projectile has to be coming right at you in order to send it straight back, and most soldiers fire at your feet.

However, a deflected projectile will change teams.  So, a BLU soldier shoots at a RED pyro, the RED pyro deflects… the rocket is now RED, meaning it can now injure or kill anyone on BLU, not just the player who fired it at you.  Very, very cool.

We messed around with this a bit last night, me and a couple friends, and it turns out that not only can rockets and stickies be rebounded, they can be re-rebounded.  So, a BLU soldier shoots at a RED pyro, the RED pyro deflects… the rocket is now RED… but a BLU pyro can step in and redeflect it, turning it back to BLU.  And so on.  With some practice, me and a friend of mine playing pyro managed to rebound the same rocket between us probably six or seven times in a row before it went off course or someone missed.

Very.  Very.  Cool.  It brings to mind, for me, the fights with Ganon in Legend of Zelda N64, the sort of tennis match you have with a sphere of magic, batting it back and forth between you.  It’s an exciting game mechanic to see in TF2 and it’s a lot of fun to play around with.

So, the pyro now has long range capabilities, can deflect and return projectiles, can push enemies around, and has two new weapons that can deliver guaranteed crits in certain circumstances. Wowzer.  Level up!  I’ve never thought the pyro was underpowered and I’ve always had trouble dealing with them, but now they are truly a force to be reckoned with.

I could see some potential tweaks, should the pyro turn out to be a little too overpowering.  Maybe the airburst could be weaker against larger players like the heavy and soldier, or maybe if you use it on a burning enemy it douses their flames.  It’s hard to say just how formidable the pyro is now due to the servers being absolutely crammed with them, and we won’t really be able to judge until things calm down a bit.

But, at first blush, I love the Flare Gun and think the air burst is a pure stroke of genius that will add a lot of enjoyment to playing the pyro class.

I’ll cover the achievements, the soldier tweaks, and the map changes/additions in another post.

I might as well close up shop, because a much more interesting and well-informed TF2 blog has arrived — one written by the giant pulsing brains at Valve.

Look to them for all sort of neat info in the future — gameplay philosophy, concept art, and all sorts of behind-the-scenes info on our favorite game.

The official TF2 blog is here.

Kick the tires and light the fires, the Pyro Pack is here.

Unless you’re some poor dope like me who will be at work for another six hours, you can restart Steam, download the updates, fire up TF2, and start cookin’.

*but I never answered your e-mail.

Fledgling gamer blog The Irish Gamers interviewed me this week, and they’ve posted all the lurid details.  There’s even some vague talk about whatever comic it is I’m supposed to be working on these days.  Something about a fort?  Check it out here if you can’t get enough of me, and let’s face it, you can’t.

While you’re there, why not check out their other entries?  Sure, they’re not about me, but it’s always good to have another gaming blog to read, and as long as they don’t become more popular than this blog, I recommend adding them to your favorites.

So, a lot of exciting shit going on this week, obviously.

My wife and I have both been having fun with the Spore Creature Creator (some of our creations here), and I just got an e-mail from EA letting me know I can now download the pay version (along with optional Extended Download Service for only $5.99 — thanks!). I’m sure the enhanced version will destroy my evenings 75% more than the trial version already is. If you’ve pre-ordered, check your e-mail because you might be able to download it right now and get creature creatin’.

On top of that, the Pyro Pack lands tomorrow which promises for a weekend of blasting and burning between playing Cruel God to all sorts of ugly and ill-conceived Spore creations.

All this activity is gonna hurt my productivity, which has already been pretty feeble lately. I’ve conducted an interview with the creator of cp_steel that I have to format and post. I need to finish up an interview that is being conducted with another gaming site (sorry, guys, I’m almost done), and of course, poor Nondrick has been completely negelected.

Plus, I apparently have a job and things are expected of me there. Can you believe that crap?

So, even with all the fun gaming stuff this weekend, I promise to carve out some time to get Nondrick through another exciting day of his thrilling life, and finish up those interviews on both ends. I promise!

First thing, the two community maps that will be released tomorrow are cp_Fastlane (which I’ve played but am not really familiar with) and ctf_Turbine (which I’ve played and don’t much care for — it’s not terrible or anything, I just think it’s a bit uninteresting).

Now to the real news: Pyro weapons, achievements, and changes. And there’s a whole lot to take in.

In terms of all new gameplay, alt-fire now allows the pyro to unleash a blast of air from his flame thrower. This allows him to knock back opponents, swat away and redirect incoming projectiles, and quickly escape enemies by, presumably, allowing the pyro to do something akin to a rocketjump. Airwalk, maybe? It’s hard to name it when we haven’t seen it. EDIT: Great Britain’s Great Tom Francis sets me straight on this — no airwalking.

It certainly sounds fun, and gives the pyro some more flexibility and responsibility. Blasting away stickymines and repelling rockets sounds like it’ll make the Pyro the engie’s best friend all over again. It’s a whole new game mechanic, which is exciting, and I can’t wait to see it in action.

As far as the unlockable weapons, the Flare Gun, which we spotted in yesterday’s “Meet the Sniper” movie, is an alternative to the shotgun. It gives the pyro a ranged attack, though it sounds like it’s either hit or miss (so I guess it doesn’t do splash damage?). This should give the pyro some legs against out-of-reach enemies.

The Backburner is the alt flamethrower, which raises the Pyro’s health by 50 points and guarantees critical hits when ambushing enemies from behind. Crikey. The downside is that it doesn’t have the new air-blasting mechanic. I think the success of this weapon will depend on how important the new alt-fire air cannon winds up being, but I’m gonna guess it’s pretty damn important — why else have the new flamethrower add a bonus to health unless giving up the airblast is really big drawback?

The Axtinguisher is the last unlockable weapon, a wicked battleaxe that guarantees crits against any enemy on fire (it’s been clarified that any burning opponent will suffice and it doesn’t matter if you’ve set him on fire yourself). The downside is that if an enemy isn’t on fire it does less damage, but something tells me for the next couple weeks everyone is gonna be on fire. All the time. Maybe cp_aqua will start getting a little more play?

I won’t list all of the achievements but they look like a challenge and most involve, unsurprisingly, setting people on fire. Spies sapping buildings, players who have just teleported, scoped-in snipers, rocket-jumping soldiers, and so on. Burn them all. It looks like they even added flame damage to the pyro’s secondary taunt, which is awesome and something I’ve been hoping for.

New weapons aside, it looks like the biggest impact on the game will be the new air blast. It makes the pyro more powerful and nearby enemies weaker. The ability to knock down and even send back rockets, deflect stickies and grenades, knock people off perches, scatter uber-partners… the pyro is suddenly a major pain in the ass and a much better defender.

It’s always a little scary when a change happens in such a finely balanced game, and this feels a bit more drastic than the medic update in terms of overall effects on gameplay. But the idea is to make the pyro more fun to play and thus played more, and the new mechanic sounds like it could easily accomplish that.

My main concern is with weapons that restrict other players from moving around and having fun. TFC had some of those: caltrops that slowed you down if you walked over them, drug darts and concussion grenades that skewed your vision and hearing, so you’d have to stop and wait until the effects wore off… anything that slows the game down I’m a bit leery of.

If the air blast is just something that knocks you back, like a soldier’s rocket does, well, we’re used to that already and it won’t be annoying. Will the airblast be able to pin me helplessly against a wall while someone else whales on me? That doesn’t sound like fun.

Overall, though, I’m optimistic and can’t wait to see how it all works. It’s gonna be a loooong wait until tomorrow.

EDIT:  Also gleaned from Tom’s article, you’re only required to get 25 of the 35 achievements to unlock all three weapons, a nice change from the medic’s task of completing them all.