Starcraft 2… full of win!

So, I’m kind of a Starcraft fan-boy… have been for 12 years now.  It’s not that I’m a huge fan of RTS games, because I’m not.  In fact, the only RTS games I’ve ever really played are the Starcraft and Warcraft series.  However, Blizzard is a master at crafting epic and engaging stories to go with their games, and they suck me in every time.  The fact that they keep their RTS game play fun certainly helps though ;)

Anyway, it’s been 12 years since Blizzard released the first Starcraft.  My oldest friends (the ones I made in my ill-fated stint at Sewanee), remember how that game affected me back then.  Many people would lay the blame for burning out my junior year squarely on the feet of Starcraft and the Brood Wars expansion… They would be wrong, mind you, but I can see why they would say that (truth is, I was burned out either way and if I wasn’t obsessively playing Starcraft 2, I would have found some other equally distracting activity that didn’t involve doing my schoolwork).  Either way, I played a LOT of Starcraft back in my college days.  I was never a pro-gamer, counting my APM or any of that crap, but I spent a lot of time in that game.

So, with that kind of history, it’s no wonder that I got all kinds of excited when I heard that Blizzard was finally pushing out the sequel.  Blizzard being what they are, I knew it would rock story wise, and I had every faith that Blizzard would keep the game fun to play as well as engaging.  I didn’t pre-order the collectors edition (because they weren’t taking CE pre-orders anymore when I got to my local GameStop and ordered my copy), but when I went to pick up my copy on launch day, I found my GameStop had an extra CE copy, so I snagged it!  Bonus!

LAUNCH DETECTED!

Launch day was agonizing… I picked up my copy at 10:00am, then had to spend the rest of the the day at work.  The box was sitting in my car, just begging to be played, all day long!  I didn’t get home until around 6:30, and I had only gotten about an hour and a half of sleep the night before.  Still… for those of you who know me, you’ll know that I wasn’t about to let a little thing like sleep deprivation deter me from cracking open my shiny new collectors edition and fire it up!  The installation went perfect and a few minutes later I was watching the trademark Blizzard cut scene intro to the game.  I only intended on playing for an hour or so, because I’m trying to finish a research paper.  Before I could blink, I looked up and saw that I had been playing for 4 hours.  I did that again last night, playing until 3:00am without realizing it.  Nice!

So, the game itself is flat out fantastic.  The game play hasn’t changed much from the formula that made it such a success 12 years ago.  There are new units, new buildings, new tactics, and new tricks to learn, but largely the game plays just like it did back then.  I was happy to find that the hotkeys I remembered from SC1 still worked in SC2, and I was happy to see how naturally I fell back into my SC gaming groove.  The first SC2 game is Terran only in the single player, but there are a handful of bonus missions you get to play as Protoss.  The full Protoss and Zerg campaigns come out as separate expansions, which may be as far as 18 months out between releases!  CRAP!

What’s really got me hooked is the story!  In SC1, and even Warcraft, the story was told mid-mission, through scripted events, and between missions, through the occasional cut scene or scripted event.  All you ever got to see of a character was their unit in the game, and a small portrait image in the UI.  You were either looking at a loading screen, or loaded into a map for the duration of the game.  In SC2, they’ve taken that to a whole new level by borrowing the setup of the Normandy from Mass Effect.  Now, between missions, you retire to your own personal battle cruiser, the Hyperion.  There, you can talk to your crew, look after research projects, check the armory for new permanent unit upgrades, or hire new merc units in the bar.  I find myself spending as much time in the ship between missions as I do in each mission!

I’m only 2 days into the game, and I’ve knocked out the first 10-12 missions so far... those being the easy ones that teach you the basics of play.  I’ve also stumbled across the bonus Protoss missions, which I’m rocking my way through right now.  In terms of levels, I’m about 1/3-1/2 of the way through the game, but in terms of time, it’s more likely 1/4 of the way through, at most.  I’m sure the later levels will get much harder much faster.  As long as the story keeps pace, I don’t mind.  I’ll play the game on easy mode if I have too, just to get to more of those juicy story bits!

So anyway, if you can’t tell by now, I am totally in love with Starcraft 2.  If you’re any kind of blizzard fan boy (guilty!), you should totally pick it up.  Even if RTS’s aren’t your thing, the story is worth the game play, and you can play through on easy (or even cheat!) to get past the missions.  I know I’ll get more enjoyment out of this than the next 3 bluray movies I buy (which cost as much as this game did).  Seriously, I can’t endorse this game enough, just for the single player campaign alone.  Of course, I haven’t touched multiplayer yet, but I’ll get to that in my own sweet time ;)

--Crash

And your little dog, too…

So, I’ve known for some time now that my mother was planning a visit down to my place for the first week of August.  That’s no surprise.  She hasn’t been down here since this time last year, honestly I’m surprised she lasted this long.  She’s bringing her computer for me to fix too, which again, isn’t any big surprise.  I’ve long since resigned myself to being the family tech support monkey.  Whatever, it’s easier to just fix this crap and get it over with than try to teach them how to do this stuff themselves.  The only sense of impending dread I’ve had up until now is my mother’s propensity to extend a ‘few days’ into a ‘few weeks’, when she comes down to the coast.  Fortunately, I’ve got a major deadline right in the middle of her visit, so I’ll have an excuse to hide at my office for 10-12 hours a day while she’s here.  All in all, I thought I was fairly well prepared for her visit.  Until, of course, I found out that…

She wants to bring her dog with her.  And by want, I mean she’s already made plans on doing so, without ever having asked if that was ok with me or if I had any objections to it.  My mother’s dog, I might add, is less than a year old, and hasn’t quite mastered that whole ‘house broken’ thing down yet.  It’s a hyper active, yippy little meat sack of a dog, the kind of dog you could kick 20 yards.  It’s a miniature schnauzer, and I can already see it causing a world of headaches for me.  Why?  Well…

I don’t ‘hate’ dogs, per say, but I don’t think anyone would mistake me for a dog-person.  That’s why I have cats.  2 of them, in fact.  Nora and Kiera.  They are both typical cats, in that they know that they own everything in my apartment, including me.  If it’s head scratching time, it doesn’t matter that I’m arms deep in a computer trying to replace a burned out power supply, it’s head scratching time, damnit!  They are both very spoiled cats, and they know it.  So, putting a strange smelling, hyperactive dog that is larger than either of my cats in their space, and expecting them to live with it for at least a week… yeah, that’s not going to be fun.

Have I mentioned that my cats will not hesitate to show their displeasure at things that annoy them, with extreme prejudice?  I’m serious!  I’ve already been hospitalized once because of my cats…  I tried to break up a fight between the two of them a few months ago, and they both turned on me and clawed the fuck out of hands.  My left hand got infected and was at risk of needing surgery to undo the damage.  I spent a weekend hospitalized, with an IV in either arm pumping antibiotics in to fight off the infection.  Real fun, I assure you.

So, my mother is bringing her dog into my 2 bedroom apartment with my 2 homicidal cats, while asking me to fix her computer and put up with her in my space for no less than a solid week, maybe two...  What could possibly go wrong?

--Crash

Trying out Windows Live Writer

I’m always on the lookout for new and interesting tools to play around with on the web.  Today, at a lunch training session at work, we were introduced to Windows Live Writer, a Blogging platform tool that Microsoft put out.  We’re going to be using it at work to collaborate on a group SharePoint blog for our office.  However, when James installed it on the conference room computer, I noticed that this tool had support for blogger accounts (like this one, and my developer journal).  So, since I had to install this anyway for the office blog, I thought I would try it out and see how I liked it for my Blogger account as well.

So far, I’m ok with it.  It’s got a nice WYSIWYG interface, it lets me publish directly to the blog or save as draft (I have as many unpublished ‘draft’ blog posts as I do published ones), and it supports multiple accounts.  I like that.  It’s also supposed to support picture uploads, tagging, videos, and other such things.  I’ll play around with those later.  Well, maybe I’ll play around with the picture thing now, as I never pass up an opportunity to put up a Deadpool demotivational poster!

I’m not sure if having a new utility to write blog posts will make my writing any more prolific, but since I’m not writing this blog for other people to read, I don’t know that it matters.  I blog when I blog, when I think I have a post coherent enough to publish next to my name (because, you never know who *might* find it by accident).

Posting to a draft seemed to work just fine, but doing so also wiped out my white space in between my paragraphs.  The preview of this post in Live Writer doesn’t show that problem.  I need to see if publishing a full on post will have the safe effect.  I wouldn’t be surprised to find that this post only renders properly in IE, if I publish it from this tool.  If that’s the case, I’ll stick to my web interface for making new posts to my accounts.

*EDIT:  Publishing the post seems to have resolved any white space issues, and the page renders properly in Firefox.  I think I may end up liking this tool after all…

Crash