Starcraft II Beta, part 1

About half an hour ago I finally laid my hands on the SC II [I insist on calling it 'II' rather than '2'] Beta for the first time (as I was sick, I couldn't go on the good computer due to it being dad's work machine as well).

I fired it up, went through the bizarre character creation process, and was set loose into the Mass Effect 2 style Welcome screen.
The first thing I noticed was the 'Single Player' button was unclickable. Bugger, I thought, I have to actually play with other people.

They don't make this obvious, but to play against an AI you need to create a multiplayer game and simply add an AI enemy. No problem.

10.
9.
8. Why the hell do I need a countdown against an AI enemy?
7.
6. There's no good bloody reason for it.
5.
4. I guess it builds drama.
3. I suppose.
2.
1.
Loading map...


Thrust into the game world, the first thing I noticed were the amazing graphics. Blizzard put a lot of effort and money into their new graphics engine. It still has a cartoon-y feel to it, but I don't think they wanted super realistic graphics. It looks damn good as it is.

The second thing I noticed was the soundtrack. There's a browncoat in Blizzard somewhere because one of the Terran tracks is very reminiscent of Firefly and Serenity. For me, it gave them a bit of a space cowboy feel.

After sending my SCVs out to mine crystals and bring back what look like enormous beer steins of vespene gas from my recently built refinery, I got one of them to make me a Supply Depot.

The problem with the Supply Depots in the original Starcraft is they were a waste of space. You needed them, but you didn't want them. Starcraft II gave them a well needed improvement.
Say you wanted to send your units around to the back of your base, but you stupidly blocked it off with Supply Depots. Never fear, because now they can be shoved into the ground with a click of a button, giving you a smooth surface to move over.
These can also be used to make traps for particularly thick zerglings or a wall with inbuilt gates.

Another cool thing that I noticed was right after I finished researching an upgrade for my marines.
The upgrade was essentially a riot shield. Once finished, a riot shield appeared on the marine's shoulder.
In retrospect, I probably should have seen it coming, but at the time it was a pleasant surprise. The only other game I remember ever doing something like that was the spectacularly disappointing C&C3.

The units in Starcraft II seem to have a bit more personality than other games I've played. Marines are a little rougher this time round, but Marauders are huge black guys that kinda sound like Chef from South Park.

Although, the game isn't a flawless diamond with the power to cure all the world's diseases.

They claim the Reapers, the Terran jump pack armed troops, are from the nastiest prisons for psychotic murderers. You know, at their worst they're the kind of people who run around shooting kittens for fun and laughing with child-like glee.
So you can forgive me for being a bit surprised when they came out sounding very much sane. After clicking them a few times, they still sounded un-psychotic.

And I'm a little pissed off that there isn't even a tutorial and first mission or so of the campaign. At least that'll give everyone something to amuse themselves if they aren't interested in multiplayer.

Well, I need to get back to it and play some more. So far I've only clocked about half an hour, and I haven't even won my first match yet.

St-t-t-tarcraft II

Sometime this month [having lost all sense of time I cannot remember when exactly] I preordered the special edition of Starcraft II.

SC II: Special Edition comes with many fun features.
- Developer commentary : always get these wherever I can.
- Soundtrack : always good when I get one of these.
- Art book : The artists at Blizzard do a damn good job.
- Flash Drive : complete with SC and Brood War, not that any self respecting Starcraft fan would need but hey, you know. Good to have a second copy.
- Exclusive DLC : DLC? Or just maps? Either way, I'm all for it.
- WoW vanity pet [pic] : "So, my engineer had this brain wave last night..."

Unfortunatly, even though the game is on the 'coming soon' shelves at my prefered game store, the clerk suggested that it would be released november. Frankly, I wouldn't take that with any shred of truth, primarily due to "Spore syndrome", where a game is overhyped and overhyped and then not released for, what, six years, and then everyone gets angry.

But since it won't be in my loving embrace for a while now, they've decided to give me a key for the SC II Beta, which I'm sure will tide me over.

Sick

I bid everyone greeting from 6:20 in the morning.

I've been sick - rather, generally out of it - ever since the 48 Hour Film Festival in which I helped Team Nitro [Nitro Media?] make their film.
Well, I took part in the process of helping. Really, the only thing I operated was the clapper board.
But still, you know. That's... a somewhat important roll.

Anyway.

Now I've moved into the 'cough' stage of the illness, which feels like someones taken a rusty angle grinder and unceremoniously shoved it down my throat.
And most of the time I sound like an angry seal.

Webstock, day one

Funny story that goes along this post.

So, I'm walking back from Webstock 2009 to the train station when a rip in time and space opened up before me. It swallowed me up and I was sent to a surreal nightmarish world where I had to answer questions in order to get home. The more questions I got right, the more likely the reality I would return to when this was all over would be the reality I was most used to.

The man said I got 99% of it right. That's pretty good, I told myself, stepping through the portal. And there I was, back in the real world.
Only now, nobody I know speaks mandarin. Not even the mandarinese.

The point I'm trying to get across is that, to me, today is the day after the conference, even though it's two months later according to the calender.
Unfortunatly, some of the finer details have escaped me. I still have an abundence of notes though, and I remember most of it.

So. Here we go.


DAY ONE

Day one started out a little slow for me. I wasn't paying attention to the speakers, more taking everything in about webstock - the venue, the people, the free food... everything.
I didn't get much out of the first two speakers, who were Scott Thomas and Brian Fling.
Then we broke for free food. Not brilliant, but not bad either.

Lisa Herrod seemed a tad on the emotional to me. Her part was supposed to be about 'Designing for diversity', or designing for the crippled/blind/deaf/etc. And I don't think she limited it to web design, either.
I wasn't paying that much attention to her either, mainly because she came across as an angry woman with a chip on her shoulder the size of texas.

Oh, but then we got to the one by Ben Curveny - Off the Grid, it was called.
Wasn't that fun.
There was more gardening metaphors than a green thumb conference. It's like he honestly didn't know quite what to say, because he kept talking about soil and plants and greenhouses and plants and... ugh.
I can't say it was all bad, though. He did give me one idea, and that's for a game that's completely ruled by what the player does, even if the player doesn't quite realize it. 'Adaption through user response' was the words he used to inspire this concept.

Then we got to Shelly Bernstien - Fostering Personal Connection to Place, and she was great.
It felt like she was actually talking to the audience rather then telling us something, her topic - the Brooklyn Museum and the way they interacted with their community was really interesting.

Jeff Atwood (StackOverflow) I didn't get much out of.
I took his Work vs work speech to heart, though. Work = something you have to do, because your boss tells you, and you usually get paid for it.
work = something you want to do, and it's usually unpaid.

I completely missed Regine Debatty's speech (Please don't let it be interactive). Not because it was uninteresting, just...
Alright. I personally didn't find it interesting.
I'm pretty sure she was the speaker with the french accent.

Then we get to the end of the day, and Rives appears.
I never really saw him coming. He was like a cake at the end of a day of mains at a restaurant, some great, others not. But somehow, the cake made up for all the ones that wern't so good.
If he was a class in an RPG, I'd give his a fancy name like Wordcrafter. He read us this poem - and I'm pretty sure it was 'Kite' - and it was just awesome. The lyrics, delivery, everything - just awesome.
I should also mention that this peom went on for half an hour. Yeah, you heard me. This guy kept a poem going for a solid half hour.


The day for me was a bit of a bust. To be brutally honest, I had no idea what I was going into, and didn't come properly prepared or equiped. There were only two or three speakers I really got something out of.

I was a bit worried that the next day was going to be the same - only a few people that caught my interest.

I've hit the wall

Seriously.
I got to sleep at about midnight and woke up at 3:30 in the morning today, which I didn't even know existed.

I tried to do work (maths, english, anything) but just couldn't bring myself to do so. Not today.


So. That being the case, let's talk about the lesbian scene in Mass Effect between female Shepard and Liara T'soni.

I remember reading somewhere that there was a massive media outcry about the sex scenes in Mass Effect. I didn't care at the time though, because ME was only availible for the Xbox back then.

But I did eventually get my hands on ME on Steam. My second time playthrough I decided to do a female Shepard, soldier, paragon, and get it on with Liara.

It was an arguous journey. You only get the sex scene when you enter the point of no return with the storyline, which means it's pretty much mission quests from there on out.

That meant I spent about, in total, 6 hours or so getting to the sex scene point. That's quite a long time just to get to that point, considering I could have just Youtube'd it.
But I didn't want to. No, I wanted to actually experiance it in game.

For all you people who have always wondered byt never actually seen it, the brief description of the actual 'sexual content' in this clip is about 8 seconds of bare ass.
Over the course of the entire scene, which was roughly 30 seconds.
Including both characters.

It was about as child corrupting as a wristwatch.

Oh sure, both were clearly naked. But there was a blur on the whole screen and you never got the see the front of anything, save for the faces.

And due to the Mass Effect graphics, it was about as sexy to me as a painting of a USB port.

I guess what I'm trying to say is if you are an adolescent male and really want to see the so called "super explicit sex scene", then watch it on youtube and save yourself a good 5 hours faffing around, and that isn't counting any side quests you might want to do, which you most likely will.