Tag Archives: Updates

Team Fortress 2 Spy & Engineer Update

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TF2 Engineer Closeup

While I simply haven’t had time to devote to much Team Fortress 2 lately, that doesn’t mean I haven’t been interested in it.  My game is up to date and ready to play, and I’ve been keeping up on all the sparse bits of official news, which have been released via the Team Fortress 2 Official Blog.

Their latest announcement reveals a few incoming updates for the Engineer and Spy, as follows:

  • Teleporters will be upgradeable to level 3. As the teleporter is upgraded, the cooldown will decrease.
  • Dispensers will be upgradeable to level 3. They will heal faster and generate metal faster as they are upgraded.
  • Spies will be able to recharge their cloaking ability by picking up ammo off of the ground.
  • We’ve made a bunch of minor changes by adding particle systems and upgrading the HUD to show things like deaths by critical hits, players that are overhealed, and giving more information to medics when people are calling for them.

The Engineer is my favorite class, so I’m happy to see him getting some love from Valve soon.  I’m not particularly good at being a Spy, but it is one of the classes I generally have a lot more fun with, and I am happy to see this change coming, as this is something I have felt you should be able to do from the very beginning.  With all other characters able to pick up dropped weapons for ammo, building, etc. it only makes sense to allow the Spy to pick up these lost armaments as well, especially since the cloak ability replenishes so slowly on its own.

I’m also excited to see the minor changes mentioned in the fourth bullet point.  Playing as a Medic should be even better, and it’ll be nice to see more information listed on the HUD for critical hits, overhealing, etc.

Just talking about these upcoming changes is making me hungry for some TF2.  Maybe it’s time to stop working on my new blog layout / games and start doing a little PC gaming again?

Image courtesy of TF Portal

WordPress 2.7 Looming

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Team Fortress 2

With the upcoming release of WordPress 2.7, I’m considering redesigning the look of this blog – especially if the current theme fails to be compatible.

The official release of 2.7 will be in 5 days (on December 10th), but I’ll probably change over to Release Candidate 1 before that, at which point I will disable themes and plug-ins so as to determine which will work and which will not without affecting the upstime of the site too much.  So if Marty Blog goes “vanilla” and reverts back to the default WordPress theme for a while in the coming days, don’t worry – it’s just Marty tinkerin’ with the new WordPress.

It’s funny how these sorts of things grow on you – a few years ago I had neither the time nor the interest in maintaining a blog.  When I finally came around and felt it might be an interesting endeavor, I entered into it a bit timidly, and spent lots of time trying to figure out which software would be the most versatile, and the easiest to use.  WordPress had a nice, clean look to it, and looking over the feature list and stumbling upon many sites that used it helped push me over the edge to try it out.

It turned out that my investigating paid off – and I’ve been enjoying WordPress for over a year now.  The amount of updates and the quality of the plug-ins available has always impressed me, and I hope that I can say the same moving forward into the big changes with version 2.7 over the coming weeks.

If you’re interested in blogging, I recommend giving WordPress a shot.  You’ll probably like it!

Whats New with Marty (Catorce de Mayo Edition)

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I just wanted to make a quick post to point out a new feature, an upcoming addition, and to talk about what’s in store in the coming months for my games and my web endeavors. I’ve got some neat stuff planned, and I hope that there will be something for everyone here when it’s all said and done.

User Registration at Marty Blog

This was actually a request of a friend of mine. I’ve now opened registration up on the blog, which means that, if you so choose, you can now register as a Subscriber, login, and have the site remember your user details for when you post. Frankly, I should have done this sooner. You can still comment without registering though, so if you’re not the type who likes to register, everything is just as it was before!

Games On the Way

If you’ve read up on the archives of this blog or poked around a bit, you’ve noticed that part of the reason why I created it was to replace my old games site with something easier to maintain and with broader use. You might have also noticed that, while my examples have made the jump from old site to new, my games haven’t – but I aim to change that soon. Within the next week or so I’ll be adding a special page to house my games, with better descriptions, control explanations, etc. so don’t forget to check that out (especially if you haven’t played all of the games yet!).

Reflect Games Site Update

It’s been a long time in the making, but I am slowly moving closer to releasing the new version of the Reflect Games website. The changes are a mixed bag of functional and aesthetic improvements, and will include a friends list, credit store, highscore page, improved stats and profiles, and a lot more. Though all the new features will not justify the amount of time it’s taken me to finish, I think the site will look more professional and will offer more reasons for people to create and use Reflect accounts. I’ll post more about this when I draw closer to the update.

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