We have been braving the toils of battle.net against real people with both success and failure, but mostly success! The actual outcome of our gaming evenings have been based off of a series of d20 rolls: 1 through 9 for real people and 10 through 20 for custom AI games. Our first few wins were overwhelming victories against people who were obviously new. Game #4 was the first “real” opponent who made an effort to attack. I don’t know how the practice league works, but it seems like were are being paired with more skilled people the more we play. Just for the heck of it I have been jotting down short notes about some of the matches that we have played throughout the week. Here are a couple of highlights:

3rd game: We got complacent after the first two wins and having little to no defense, pretty much got rolled over very early in the game. We also got rolled over during our 5th game  but I am pretty sure that was just due to the other person being better :P. I like how you can kind of sort of gauge your opponents skill level based off of their SC2 portrait on the game load screen. If they have one of the portraits that is not unlocked by a normal campaign play-through odds are that the game is going to be fairly short lol.

4th game: This match was a lot of fun because our opponents were decent. They got a good mid-game stalker/viking rush off. Mothership and banshee spam still prevailed though I feel as if we should be exploring other build options at this point. First decent win \o/

8 through 10: We went double Terran and “experimented” with viking rushing. Basically, just going 111 build with a reactor on the starport to shit out vikings as much as possible. It worked well twice; The first game being an 11 minute win, the second game being an 18 minute win. The third game was a massive failure because something uuuuh bad happened lol. 

11th game: Even match, they had half of the map and we had half of the map. They surrendered almost exactly at the one hour mark, ending a huge no resources left on the map standoff. That was a very fun match. I spent a not so insignificant portion of my time faffing about turtling my base because I wasn’t sure what else to do. I should have realized that the southern zerg base was a lost cause and sent units up to help my partner overtake and hold the top part of the map earlier on. And yay, I also learned a couple of nuking and siege tricks over voice chat courtesy of my lovely 2v2 partner <3.

I really like the replays, we have been examining and commenting on each interesting vs match. I have gotten reasonably okay at turtling and eliminating expansions, ultimately leading to wins by resource attrition. Still not good at keeping constant, early pressure on other players. You see this micromanagement thing is uuuh tricky. This is what I have learned so far in my two+ weeks of playing. I still intend on learning to play a race that is not Terran at some point.

1. Terrans should wall off their ramp as early as possible to prevent scouting and to help defend against early rushes. Apparently more cleaver people are able to craft ramp funnels around units and bunkers, redirecting an invading force around armed units.
2. Supply depot walls make reasonable fodder. They will also retract into the ground with you select them and press “r”. In practical terms, it means that they make great gates.
3. Ultimately, StarCraft is a resource strategy game. No minerals = no units.
4. Expand early and try to prevent your opponent from expanding.
5. The general strategy, afaik, seems to be: Attack and retreat attack and retreat. Harass early and as often as possible. Pull out to avoid excessive unit loss; The goal of an early rush is to do more economic damage to your opponent. Reapers can kite all level 1 units but can be countered by like, placing a bunker or a marauder at your mineral line.
6. You can queue unit actions by holding shift and right clicking. Awesome for siege tanks: Hold shift, right click, siege mode, go do something else. Also awesome for scouting: Right click all over the map, let the unit scout, do something else. I NEVER KNEW THIS.
7. You can mix and match Terran building addons. Need a tech lab on your factory right away? Lift off and swap it out with something else that has a tech lab...as long as your base isn’t retardedly layed out like mine usually is. Also good for pre-building expansions so that say, you will be able to start pushing out Banshees immediately without having to wait for a tech lab to build. An idle building is a useless building.

A couple of replays are included below for posterity. I still need to hop on and do some 1v1 matches. In fact, I was planning on doing that earlier today but I uuh had to be productive this weekend and step away from my computer for a good portion of the day.

I admit, I have known about the Scott Pilgrim series for some time, heard that it was good, but just put off reading it because I figured that it would either be overly goofy or some lame action manga rip off. Well, it's not. In fact, it's probably one of the better comics that I have read. I know that both the movie and the game will have already been released by the time I bother posting this entry but, go pick up the graphic novels if you have a chance. It's not that long of a series at 6 volumes but it's well worth reading.

If you are put off by the art style for some reason, don't be. Bryan Lee O'Malley follows his own style: Relatively simple character designs against detailed background. The overall plot is a simple and somewhat ludicrous story that is at heart, an honest story about a young man's post college struggles with life, love and himself. So, if you are in that age category, go read this series because it should resonate with you on some level.

The fight scenes are good, but not really the focus of the story. Most of the plot is driven by character interactions and dialogue. In fact, I would say that the characters themselves are defined by their voice and interactions and not by their character design. Without spoiling the last volume, I really liked the closure and the character growth the last volume offered. The series has a good message; It's a fun read without being too heavy.

Somewhat related to my previous post, this comic seemed to resonate with me. We were adventurous this weekend and played a 2v2 co-op game against hard AI opponents. We got curb stomped pretty badly during an early AI rush the first time. Subsequent tries on Saturday and Sunday evening versus the hard AI were successful (though my lovely co-op partner had to come to my rescue several times <3). He shits out cannons and what not and I shit out marines and what not. Together we shit things out.

We also managed to beat a 2v1 co-op game against one AI opponent on insane. Though I am not sure that really counted. We may have uuuh cheesed the AI a bit as shown in the screenshot above. For some reason, the AI doesn't like attacking Protoss Motherships. I mean, I stashed an entire army of banshees underneath it and the computer just let it float around killing everything?

I can consistently beat the AI on medium solo if I defend against the first wave and don't flub my opening game; Still don't get how people build so fast, but I officially consider myself graduated from remedial StarCraft school! I guess I should play games against actual Battle.net people now that I officially don't suck too much. So I guess the secret to getting better at something is to just do it a whole lot. If anyone is interested, a couple of replays are attached below for the hell of it.

So anyway, guess what I have been playing in lieu of WoW for most of the week :P. The yearly summer wave of attendance attrition in addition to pre-Cataclysm apathy is sort of killing the 25-man raids as of late (doesn't help that it's a busy social period for most folk)s. 25-man ICC didn't pan out on Friday so we made it a guild 10-man run. Oh, and my stupid loot sponge hunter was invited along and boy did he sponge loot. His gear score went up from 3k to 3.6k! At this rate, all of his green and blue items may be replaced before the expansion. Maybe I can sneak him for Lady Deathwhisper next week. I kind of want that bow >_<.

I have been experimenting with Mumble this weekend. It's an open source voice chat alternative to Team Speak and Ventrilo. There is a video floating around on YouTube comparing the latency between game chat clients: Mumble's voice quality is fantastic with almost no latency (I have a bad habit of talking over people because of the chat lag). It doesn't seem to resource intensive either; But then again, I only have and will probably only have two people on the chat server at any time ever. The client is slightly more finicky to setup though and voices still sounds little roboty every once in a while. I am not sure if it is a server side thing or some setting in the client.

Also: Are RP servers really that bad? Do horny players really sit in Goldshire and fondle each other's digital crotches out in public all day long? Out of curiosity in response to this wow.com post, I rolled a human character Saturday morning on Moon Guard. I don't know, maybe everyone went moved over to another server already? Or maybe Blizzard already started cracking down on people. You know, you know that your realm is pretty damn bad when an employee is assigned to patrol your specific server.

This (screenshot on the right) was the only interesting thing that happened.

Absolutely nothing productive was accomplished this past weekend. I didn't do any chores, I didn't run, I didn't work on any projects. Hell, I only left the house twice: once to quickly pick up something and another time to eat. A good chunk of my time, obviously, was spent fawning various games ending in the word "craft."

I am not a huge real-time strategy player and I never latched on to the original StarCraft. I mean, I enjoy playing RTSs but unless the campaign is compelling most games of this genre are forgotten in a week. In fact, I was going to hold off on purchasing StarCraft II but caved in because everyone was...talking about it. The single player campaign has a surprising amount of variety in terms of mechanics and design for a strategy game. I am surprised at how much fun I am having playing this game.

I've really only played solo matches and co-op matches against the AI. One day I will reach the stage where I feel the urge to compete against actual human beings. But first I need to master playing against he AI on medium! (I am sad. I know). If anyone uuh can point me in the direction of a good newbie guide I would be most appreciative.

I lament, often on an almost daily basis about the lack of co-op support in our modern gaming society. So lo and behold what do the Valve Gods gift us with? An up to 4-player co-op game for free! Alien Swarm was originally an Unreal Tournament mod released in 2004. This release was actually developed by the original team after they had been scooped up by Valve (according to Wikipedia). It’s a top down 3rd person shooter with a sci-fi flavor. There’s not a whole lot in terms of plot, but that is not important. The only facts that need be known are that there are waves of aliens to kill on a space ship with your real life buddies.