I promise: this is the last post about Starcraft 2 for a while

I finally beat the campaign, and it was a glorious ending! That sure was a tough final mission, though. I felt like the difficulty helped make it feel epic, and therefore fitting... but boy am I glad to finally have it behind me.

Now on to hard difficulty! Ugh, or maybe I'll take a few days off. Raynor's given his Raiders some R&R for a job well done. Maybe even more than well done... maybe burnt. Maybe even charred.

So, my final thoughts now that I've dabbled in the multiplayer and finished the singleplayer: Overall, the single player experience is a very fun and well-created campaign experience that would bear at least two play-throughs, and possibly more depending on your personality. Once you complete the campaign, there's plenty of challenge missions that help prepare you for multiplayer by familiarizing you with various units and counters, along with more advanced strategies.

When you're finally ready, you can hop into the beginner's league and play 50 unranked matches that give you a feel for how to play online. They include a very cool utility at the end of a match; you can see your opponents build order, along with income rates and troop production/army strength.

Players that actually care about getting better can reverse engineer a better strategy and incorporate it into their own. Even better, replays are very easy to save and watch now, giving you the perfect opportunity to study strategies that have proven more effective than your own.

Although multiplayer seems to be fairly well balanced, it is still the 90's insofar as actions-per-minute are what wins a battle. It is all about micromanagement, and that doesn't particularly appeal to me. I'll likely wile away most of my hours on Battle.net in the comfortable embrace of the use-map-settings category. Already there are plenty of impressive game-types, including tower defense and even a first-person-shooter mod!

Truly, what we'll see done using the Starcraft 2 map editor is going to be a veritable wealth of tangible fun. I can't wait to see what happens in the coming months.

Captain Malcolm Reynolds is Jim Raynor

One of things I really noticed about Starcraft 2 is how they created a very vivid theme. It is most definitely a Western, which may be what they were trying to do with the original Starcraft? Unfortunately, all I really felt was "rednecks in space" for the Terrans in the first game.

What I'm pretty sure is a violin, used to just set the tone of the adventure, occurs regularly throughout most of the campaign. It reminded me very much of Firefly. Several times, in fact, I very much got the feeling that the writers had at least seen Joss Whedon's Space Western. Not that I'm complaining, mind.

I think it works very well, and although I see a similarity it could just be the natural result of anyone who knows what a Western is, and then adapts it into a Sci-Fi adventure. In any case, it is a damn good theme and really creates an enjoyable and vivid video game experience. I'd truly liken it more to an interactive cinematic experience, as I said before.

The multiplayer, on the other hand, seems to be a bit lackluster as far as innovation goes. Then again, Starcraft didn't originally become the multiplayer RTS due to innovation; it was the perfectly calibrated balance between the units and teams that created such a legacy, and I have every confidence that they will continue their proud tradition.

Of course, success in Starcraft depends very much on the number of your actions per minute. In other words, it is all about the micromanagement... something I'm not a huge fan of personally. In fact, I've long maintained that the Real Time Strategy genre was a bit misnamed; seems like its mostly a focus on tactics, with minimal strategy necessary.

In any case, I love the theme and overall storyline to Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty, and I can't wait for the next installment in the series!

Now to try my hand (yet again) at the final mission of the campaign. Been stuck for days now! :(

Starcraft 2 - First Impressions

Having done little else for the past 36 hours, I thought I'd write a quick post talking about Starcraft 2. So far my experience has been quite fun! I've had three crashes, (two lockups requiring a restart, and one crash to desktop) so I feel like it is pretty damn stable for a newly released game.

The game-play is fun, familiar yet innovative. The storyline is amazing, in my opinion truly more like a cinematic experience than a video game story. The voice acting is superb, the animation is excellent, and the characterization is almost universally very well done.

I really enjoy the way the campaign is set up, too. It is very fun and offers some choices in way of how you proceed, as well as the order you take various missions and campaign-wide unit upgrades. There's a lot of small touches that make it really come alive, too.

My favorite thing so far is just the sheer number of different mechanics they built into the campaign. Most missions are so completely fun and unique that it is really an experience to play through them. I'm excited at the possibilities, and can't wait to see some awesome user-made custom maps.

All in all, if you were on the fence about buying it, I'd highly recommend it. Even if you don't like RTS games in general, there's a casual mode and the story itself is so good that it'd be worth it in my opinion.

And with that, it is past time I get back into the game and try to figure out a strategy that'll help me beat the last mission!

RPGs - Part 1

No, not that kind of RPG...

When I was a little kid, we had some table-top role playing games and some Nintendo cartridges. Do you remember the joy of the original NES games?

Blow on it, put it in, doesn't work, push it up and down repeatedly for twenty seconds, doesn't work, take it out and blow again, doesn't work, push it in and out five times, light some incense in front of Nintendo Power Magazine, say a prayer to the Game Master, turn it on, and finally rejoice! After 30 minutes of hard labor you can enjoy your video game of choice. Kids today are spoiled.

Anyways, RPGs generally had some basic elements: levels, experience, hit points, statistical values representing strength, intelligence, etc. They tended to be fairly linear, and usually involved an entire planet to explore.

Nowadays, the label RPG has evolved to take on a plethora of meanings. We have FPS-RPGs, Puzzle-RPGs, MMORPGs, Sports-RPGs, and I could go on. What ever happened to a good old fashioned game of Fighters and Red Mages who are trying to save the world?

It seems like the idea of what an RPG is continues to evolve. I find myself less interested in playing the latest offerings, such as Final Fantasy 13. I just don't want to feel like I'm on rails, watching a story unfold while fighting a bunch of bullshit random encounters in between cut-scenes. I'll watch a movie if I want to see a story unfold.

No, what I enjoy are games where you truly have choice. Where your actions impact the world. I'm a fan of the open-ended sandbox style of role-playing game. Apparently, there now exists two camps in the world of RPG creation. There are the highly linear, rigidly defined J-RPGs (so called due to the Japanese inception of this design), and there are the open-ended, loosely defined Western RPGs.

We'll take a closer look at the differences next time.

For now, I must go and prepare for the coming storm. Upon wings of liberty do Heaven's Devils approach.

Cable - Why Pay?

The guy who wrote this article is emblematic of what the future holds for entertainment. I for one will never pay for cable TV when there are so many free legitimate options on the internet. Many people follow the legally questionable practice of downloading TV programs through bit torrent sites.

The creators of South Park recognized that fact, and took control of their show's distribution by offering it for free (with limited advertisements) on the show's official site. This seems like a progressive move, and the direction that entertainment is truly heading.

Adult Swim likewise faced the inevitability of preventing free distribution of their product, offering episodes available to watch through their website. They embraced the idea of hosting a fan-community, integrating forums and web games into their site.

I can only wonder how long it will be before these practices are adopted by mainstream media across the board.

This is the future?

I remember growing up, and there being lots of talk from the late 80's through the early 90's about how crazy and different the world would be in the next millennium. Flying cars, teleportation, giant robots... turns out none of that came to be. Here we are in 2010, and we don't even have sexbots?! I'm disappointed in the glacial pace of technological growth.

Then again, I read this article the other day and feel like its pretty damn exciting! Now that is a crazy high-tech futuristic change to the world that I'd love to see become a daily sight.

What about you, my faithful reader-legion? What sort of technological advances did you expect to see by now? Will there any other near-future revolutions in our daily lives?

What can World of Warcraft teach us about the inception of society?

I've been perusing the pages of Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee lately, and I will admit it has been a wonderful read so far. One of the things he touches on is how important longevity was towards the survival and increasing success of various ancient human tribes.

This was because of the phenomenal nature of personal experience in an era that predated record-keeping. From an example given in the book, let's say we have two hunter gatherer tribes. One has an average lifespan of 40 years, the other 60 years. They both inhabit a region in which food becomes scarce for a year.

The first tribe dies off due to not having enough nourishment. The second tribe has a few elderly members who recall a previous food shortage, and know that certain plants and nuts can be safely consumed for nutrition, in spite of their unappetizing taste.

And thus, longevity can literally be the difference between an entire tribe's surviving or dying off. Due to the simple ability to share their experience.

I often think about how powerful language is. The ability to communicate clearly and accurately to each other, to formulate plans and talk about past, present, and future. The ability to put emotions and feelings and other intangibles into symbolic form. Even the ability to just think is pretty much reliant on articulating your thoughts into words, no?

All of this came to my mind while I was learning some new raid encounters in ICC 25 the other night. For those of you who avoided getting hooked on World of Warcrack, basically there are "raids" where you join up with 9 or 24 other people, (there's two different sizes to every raid encounter,) and then you go in and participate in difficult "boss" encounters which are highly technical and require exceptional performance and communication from all members of the raid.

In order to learn these fights, we could go in and die 30+ times as we slowly learn the mechanics of each fight. That'd be a rough way to go about it, though. Instead, due to the power of communication, an experienced raider (elder tribe member) is able to explain the fight's strategy (strategy for survival) and prevent the inexperienced raiders from making mistakes.

Through the experienced person's communicating and sharing with the rest, we all are able to survive and prosper. Haha, probably a bit of a stretch as far as analogies go, but I enjoyed the idea when it first occurred to me and thought I'd share.

One last thing: I threw the word "inception" into today's title as homage; it is an amazing film, go see it if you haven't!