A Clash of Media: Perspectives on Intrinsic Value

Dear readers, the blog will once again continue on the philosophical track; I got some good answers to my last post, so I'm hoping to hear some more on this note.

As my forewarning: as many of you probably know, I'm a pretty big reader. I always have been since I was young. I was that kid staying up late reading with a flashlight under covers, the one who took a book with him where ever he went, the one who belongs to the probably minority of our generation whose parents actually had to tell him to stop reading so much. I'm one of those people who rarely think a movie/tv adaptation is better than the source book, one of those who doesn't have "lol i h8 books" written on my "About me" section of Facebook. Thus I feel I have a pretty balanced perspective on the following discussion.

As all of you are sure I'm aware, The Hunger Games has been making a big splash as being the current hit book for children/young adults. This follows on the trail of the Twilight and Harry Potter series, the latter of which is often referred to as the series that "got a whole generation of children reading again."

I find this an interesting claim, because it highlights an underlying theme in modern American society. That is, specifically, that children aren't reading anymore, and this is a Bad Thing. Authors like Collins and Rowling are doing important work in getting children engaged in reading again.

This is a line of thought I sort of bought absentmindedly. Of course people should be reading, I thought, it's something I enjoy. It's always painted as a slightly more intellectual and satisfying past-time than, say, watching TV.

Balancing Game Design: A Case Analysis of Gears 3's Sawed-off Shotgun

Gears of War 3's multiplayer is fantastic. There, I said it. In fact, I sit here almost a month after the game's been out and I have yet to complete the main story campaign because the multiplayer is that good; perhaps a first in my entire gaming career. The modes are varied and well-balanced, flaws with the previous iterations have been fixed (ranged weapons are viable, less latency issues, etc), and it's obvious that they actually took the feedback from the beta and implemented intelligent changes. One of the most obvious examples is the Retro Lancer, which before seemed remarkably overpowered but now serves as a solid choice among 2 other solid choices in the ranged primary category. There is, however, one lingering issue that anybody who's been around me while playing is intimitely familiar with that has yet to be truly addressed, and I feel like I now have enough experience to truly comment on it.

Virtual Verve: A Review of VVVVVV

The Steam holiday sales are probably easier on my wallet than other people; to start with, I'm restricted to games that release on OSX, and furthermore set my price cap at around $5. So despite the multitude of offerings, it's rare that I see something that fits both my criteria.

However, one that did recently was VVVVVV, which was on sale for the incredibly low price of $2.50. The reviews were all positive, and although I wavered for a bit, there wasn't a downside to a game for that cheap, and after briefly playing the demo I semi-impulsively purchased the game.

Mind Games, Son, Mind Games: Viewing Traditional Vs. E-Sports

Anyone who has been hanging out with me in the last couple months has probably had me bring up the Starcraft 2 competitive scene, something I've been following rather closely for many weeks now. Indeed, I'm not alone in this; although places such have South Korea have commonly had video games streamed live to audiences of hundreds of thousands, it is only recently becoming more popular in the Western scene.  With that said, now that it's catching on, it's growing incredibly rapidly: for instance, MLG Columbus' 3 day tournament had a 16,000 member live audience and served over 1.3 petabytes of livestream data. Impressive numbers, and they only seem to be growing.

When I first started seriously watching the games and began getting really into it, I figured it was another kind of phase; I would get really into it for a few weeks, and then I would lose interest and move onto another hobby. However, here I find myself almost 6 months later still firmly entrenched in this world, and even watching a game while I'm typing this.

I had never really considered myself as someone into sports; I'll watch the Super Bowl, and the rare sports game when it's on TV and others are watching, but in general I couldn't name most sports team or major athletes, and I would never go out of my way to watch a game, especially alone. Despite this, I find myself staying up regularly till 4am to watch GSL and devoting many hours to watch VoDs and Youtube videos from major tournaments. Because of this sudden shift, I began wondering what makes the SC2 competitive scene different than any traditional sports scene that most of my other peers are fascinated with.

Return of Giant Backlog: Mini-review Rampage #2

So now that I'm home on break, I'm ripping through various media and finishing up and starting a lot of series. This naturally means I have consumed a large amount of games, music, books, and shows, and once again I've accumulated a large backlog of things that I want to get my thoughts down about, but don't necessarily feel I have enough to say to warrant a full post on its own (In retrospect, I could do one every other day and actually get in the habit of writing more often, but whatever). I promise more serious posts will eventually be coming around...eventually >_>.

Giant Backlogs: A Mini-Review Rampage

So over the break I consumed quite a large amount of media, and actually wanted to write individual reviews for all of them, but I never quite felt like writing them over the break, so instead I'm going to do a series of small mini-reviews just to get my thoughts down. Feel free to chime in!

Puzzles and a Spot of Tea: A Review of Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box

I ended up buying the first Professor Layton game about the time the first one came out, and staying true to form, ending up playing the second one, the Diabolical Box, just as the Unwound Future was released. This wasn't by any particular design, although it did make my wallet happy.

Armed with the experience of having finished every puzzle in the Curious Village, I was quite happy to return to the world of Layton and Luke. My only reservation was that, having had so many puzzles in the first game, there would be some inevitable overlap; after all, you can only come up with so many puzzles in a base sense, much like there are only so many plots for books. However, I was to be proven wrong, and the sequel to the premiere adventure-puzzle series lives up to the first.

A Surprising Lack of Unbaptized Babies: A Review of Limbo

I remember trying out the demo for Limbo back when it was getting rave reviews, and being fairly impressed with the demo itself, but all of the reviews were saying that while it was a great game, the price point was a bit steep for the limited amount of content you got. I therefore decided to wait until the hopeful day that the game dropped for a more reasonable price point. However, I was saved from this by the Spirit of Christmas!... or more particularly, Matt's gift of the game to me. I sat down in the lull before finals to play it, and roughly 5-6 hours later, came to pretty much the same conclusion as most of the other reviewers.

The Batreview: A Review of Batman Arkham Asylum

I've never been that into DC comics, and thus have never been that immersed in the lore of the Batman. The most contact I've had with the franchise are a few of the movies, particularly the most recent two, and occasionally watching the animated show as a child. I never read any of the comics, though, so when Arkham Asylum was released to high praise, I wasn't particularly interested and didn't pursue it past the demo (which while enjoyable was far from amazing).

Eventually though Matt ended up buying it for cheap, and as has been happening recently, I borrowed it and blasted through the game. While I ended up enjoying it far more than I would have thought given the demo, it still had a lot of flaws that prevented it from being a truly great game.

Once More Into the Breach: A Review of Call of Duty: Black Ops

I've had a good history with the Call of Duty franchise. It started, as it did for many, with 4, which blew me away with the campaign and hooked me with the multiplayer, which I ended up putting an excess of 100 hours into and Pristaging twice. Naturally I picked up World At War, and while it was solid all around, it was nowhere near as fantastic as 4. The biggest let-down was multiplayer--although I enjoyed being able to effectively wield a semi-auto rifle while everyone else struggled to shoot long-rang targets with short range SMGs, the multiplayer lacked the polish and enjoyment of 4. I had a lot of expectations for Modern Warfare 2, which was met with the campaign--again fantastic--but the multiplayer was a huge let-down, and while I held out for around 40 levels, I gave up in disgust at the sorry state of affairs.

With that in mind, I was hesitant about Black Ops--Infinity Ward had failed the last time, and Treyarch's last outing had been mediocre. I decided to not bother pre-ordering, and only pick it up if the day-of reviews were good. When they rolled in and were positive (even more so than I expected) I picked up my copy and sat down later that day to play it.

Splinters of War: A Review of Splinter Cell: Conviction

About a week ago Matt and I decided to pick up a copy of the newest Splinter Cell (we're still not quite sure which one of us paid for it, it was quite confusing) since we needed a new co-op game to run through.   I wouldn't say that SC is one of my favorite series, per se, but the two games I have played I enjoyed quite a bit, and for whatever reason it's one of the few stealth series I enjoy (in comparison to, say, Metal Gear Solid). This being the 5th game, I have now played every other SC game: 1, Chaos Theory, and Conviction. If I had heard much about the game, I didn't really remember anything about it, other than it was supposed to be better than the 4th iteration was, and that Matt told me they had "streamlined" things. What that meant I was about to find out.

We're Gonna Need A Lot of Wine Barrels: The Problem of Cheese

Ah, cheese. It can mean a great many things, depending on the context, ranging from a popular overpowered choice in a game, a risky early game choice, or just using something that's incredibly annoying. In any game that involves strategy & choices, whether's it's Warhammer 40k or SC2, accusations of cheese and cheese use are abound. It's always a question; if it works, why not use it? Does it cheapen the win to know you're using something "overpowered," or is it simply stupid not to use what the game gives you (although this idea treads dangerously to the Dark Side of glitch abuse).

It's an interesting question, and I'm afraid I can't give you any answers, but I can provide some (hopefully ) hilarious examples. You see, I've always been mostly against cheese, except in specific situations. For instance, 2 common "cheeses" of the Protoss army in SC2 are the cannon rush and Void Rays. The former is the kind of "risky early game strategy" kind of cheese, while the "Cheese Rays" are more the type of thing often considering overpowered (OP). I'd never been a fan of the cannon rush, the only time I've employed it was to annoy Aaron (and it only worked once out of the two times I've used it). On the other hand, I like Void Rays, but recently I've been trying to avoid them in order to a) not be so predictable and b) improve the number of options I can bring to the table in a game.

However, this was all to change.

Less Canon, More Cannon: A Review of Halo Reach

I had actually been planning to wait to write this review. The point being, I don't actually own Halo Reach; my friend bought it, and I played through the campaign co-op with him as well as borrowing it on a few occasions. I figured I should give it a more thorough playthrough, get to really know it, before I wrote a review.

This was before I've had it sitting in my room for the last 3 days, where when faced with free time I played Gears of War 2,  L4D2, and SC2 unless specifically asked by someone else to play Reach. So before I get into details on the game, a tl;dr would be that Halo Reach is merely ok. It works as a social game, but it'll never be something that's my go-to game, nor will I ever buy it unless it gets down to the $20 price point.

Sweet Victory and Sour Loss: The Nature of Competitive Games

First of all, credit where credit is due. Thanks twicefold to Rome, once for helping me brainstorm a new, more descriptive (Ed: Debatable) title for this Blog, and second for writing the post that inspired this one. If you click the linky link, you'll find some thoughts on his relationship with competitive gaming, so I thought I'd follow up with mine.

I've also had a gradual growth to competitive gaming. First of all, the majority of my gaming career has been spent offline-- the first real online game I played wasn't till something like Battlefield 2142, which was all of 4 years ago. Likewise it wasn't till I got my 360 that I had a dedicated online gaming platform that I played with consistency.

Blame & Stolen Praise: The Nature of Team-Based Games

My two current games of choice of late have been the online components of Starcraft 2 & Gears of War 2, both of which I enjoy very much. SC2 tends to be when I have friends on, while GoW2 tends to consume my private time. Interestingly enough, neither of these are single-player, and both are team-based multiplayer. The two are pretty different though.

I read an interesting post on the SC2 forums about why people tend to shy away from 1v1 in SC2. It basically boiled down to risk/reward. He hypothesizes that like in a team FPS, with 3v3 and 4v4 SC2 matches you can always take the credit for a win, and blame the others for a loss. 1v1 means you have to face the fact that you have no one to blame but yourself for the loss, which most people can't handle.

I actually think the poster's probably right for the majority of gamers; I've definitely seen a lot of "if my teammates hadn't sucked I would have totally owned you" type comments after my team winning a 3v3. However, I like to think I don't fall under this category. I usually acknowledge my strengths and weaknesses, or comment when I didn't really help in a match, etc. I think it's actually my awareness of my strengths and weaknesses that drives me towards SC2 multiplayer.

I know I'm not great at early game, especially scouting & early harass. I could devote more time to improving these, but since as I stated I tend to play SC2 with friends, it's easier to just play on a team with someone like Aaron who complements my weaknesses with his strengths and come out all the better for it. Naturally I'll want to improve eventually, but it's easier to focus on improvement when you have a reliable ally to fall back on.

Which leads me to my next point: SC2 is actually far, far harder to tell who's pulling the team, anyway. Numbers often will show overall who was "doing" the most, but let me present a game from today.
Rome, Aaron and I played a ranked 3v3, and decided before the match started to do a (late) early T1 rush. We were going along, and suddenly Aaron got attacked. We managed to fight it off, but Aaron lost the majority of his base. However, we counterattacked (since Aaron had taken down a good chunk of the forces) and Rome and my combined force managed to take out the 3 enemy bases, one by one*, while Aaron rebuilt his base and lent a bit of support towards the end.

Looking at the numbers and graphs afterwards, it would seem Rome and I carried the game and Aaron didn't help. What that ignores is the fact that if Aaron hadn't defended the rush well enough, had he just been steamrolled, Rome and I couldn't have gone on the offensive like we did. While the game gives us credit numbers-wise, without Aaron being the excellent player he is, we probably would have lost. And that's why SC2 is hard to boil down in terms of team gameplay; it's often a combination of, say, Aaron's expansion harassment, Rome's raiding, and my heavy support that will win a game, and even if I destroy the most buildings or whatnot, our success is very interlinked, and we are all pretty dependent on one another (assuming the other players aren't completely incompetent)

I want to contrast this with Gears. It's also a very team-driven game; for instance, whenever a player drops and it turns into 4v5 instead of 5v5, the team with 5 has always won in my experience. There are rare exceptions will I will see the last player on a team beat the other 3 players, but those are just that: rare exceptions. This is a game, however, where it's very obvious who's helping the team, and numbers are quite relevant. I often seen organized teams (i.e. people obviously talking to one another) annihilate the opposing team, as often if not more often than one player carrying everyone else.

This is why it bugs me when so often good players will split off and do their own thing, and then be faced 4v1 because the other team is working together, and then complain that the other players aren't helping out. Sure, they usually kill 1 or 2 of the other opponents, but they get upset that apparently they're the only "good player." The simple fact is if they stuck with other teammates and used their skills instead of essentially hiding, we'd probably BE winning. In fact, if my team is losing, I usually end up following someone else, and more often than not it means we end up winning the round. It's a team tactical game, yet some people still think it's Halo or MW2. Master Chiefing it may earn you the kills and the points associated with it, but it won't always win you the round. In fact, my most memorable win recently was me killing the entire 5 members of the opposing team in one round, and that was only possible because they weren't watching their back because the rest of my team was firing on them.

What's my point with all this? Good question. I guess I'm lucky to have such a good group of gamer friends, ones who I can play a game of SC2 with and not be blamed for being the sole reason our team loses, or never get credit for us winning. One aspect of gaming I absolutely hate is the amount of idiots on multiplayer games, and I suspect that if I had been playing SC2 online alone I would have ceased playing it weeks ago. While it's nice to be the top player in a winning team of Gears, it's far more satisfying to congratulate known teammates after a SC2 win, or even to analyze a loss to improve next time. I think this sense of camaraderie is the real reason I haven't played much 1v1 in SC2; I get that experience from Gears, and I get my "real" team based game with friends on SC2.

-HTMC

*Funny story from that, regarding stupid end game complaints. As we were killing the last base, the guy complained that "no one builds base defenses." Rome and I asked if he meant his teammates, since we had just blown up their bases, and they had defenses. Enemy guy responds "no you guys," meaning Aaron had no defenses. I respond "...but it didn't matter," since we had obviously just won. He keeps repeating that no one builds defenses, which would make sense if Aaron not building defenses had meant we had lost the game... but we hadn't. We're still not sure why he brought it up, but I guess it supports the point that most people will blame anyone else but themselves for winning or losing a team game... even if that other person is on the other team :-P

Video Games And Canon, or, The Lack Thereof

I'm supposed to be writing a short piece on Plato, but instead I'm going to talk about two subjects I enjoy far more, namely Stars Wars and videogames.

I actually have a couple SW related posts bouncing lazily around my skull, but this one is short and relevant to what I'm currently doing.

Anyway, Star Wars. I like Star Wars. I like the stories, I know the canon well, I have enjoyed and continued to enjoy the universe in its entirety, despite various ups and downs (and forcibly ignoring the travesty that is Karin Travess, may a Sarlacc consume her). I like videogames a lot too, as the number of posts on this site will attest. I don't think they work well together as a general rule, though, specifically when it involves story-telling.

For instance, KotOR. I'll admit I've never played through either game completely, but what I did play didn't impress me very much. For starts, the time period is kind of boring to me in terms of the SW continuity, and in addition they had to make things 2000 or whatever BANH (before A New Hope) but still maintain the Star Wars feel, which ends up being ANH with different names and none of the same characters. It would have been interesting if they had seriously messed with the look or feel of the universe... but they didn't, so I for one just was wondering where everything I know was. I understand why they did it, since it gives them far freer rein in what stories to tell and what to do with the characters, but I kind of ignore it for the same reason that I ignore the series set hundreds of years after the Yuuzhan Vong war.

Another example are the two Battlefront games. While being excellent games, they didn't make a strong attempt to be canon, and I think they gained from it. While I'll always be annoyed at things like using thermal detonators as grenades, it tried to be a good, solid shooter, and succeeded. Things like Battlefield 1942 didn't need much of a story, just a good background to set the war in, and this succeeded.

Another example is Super Bombad Racing. I'm not really gonna touch that.

Anyway, this brings me to the latest point, where I started today playing the Force Unleashed. This is where canonicity really rears its head. For starters, the first level is on Kashyyyk. On the ground.

Admittedly, a couple other games and the movie itself also featured ground on Kashyyyk. But in canon, you don't go to ground level. If you're there, you're dead and being eaten by giant predators. But to serve   a videogame setting, it's on the ground. Likewise you get Wookies dying in droves, despite how long lived and relatively rare offspring are. The game moves on to things like taking multiple lightsaber slashes to kill a single human, Force powers always having a physical appearance, and a Jedi Master sacrificing his entire battalion to draw out a Force user.

I get it, videogames need certain liberties in order to function. If you could always one-hit kill with a lightsaber, it would get somewhat old quickly. But then I hear things about the canon of these kind of games being contested, and I just want to say: No. They're no canon. They're games. In the same way that I view the Blood Angels as a fun fan Chapter that Relic made up, or even how a football team winning in Madden 200x doesn't represent real life, any videogame drawn from an outside canon is probably not actually going to follow the canon well, and I will likely not buy into it.

Videogames need certain parameters to work, and often this conflicts with the universe lore. While this isn't a problem in and of itself, when you try to force a videogame that simple conflicts into canon, then you have problems. I think the solution is to (again only for series not originating in videogames) simply leave the games as a fun side note, and leave the canon to books, movies, and other mediums.

-HTMC

10 Years Later and No Steps Forward: A Review of the SC2 Campaign

So while I wasn't (this has now changed) a bit fan of RTSs online, I was a big fan of RTSs. This means I've played a lot of RTS campaign, and so when I started reading online and hearing from Aaron that the campaign for SC2 was really good, I in turn got quite excited. The following is both a review of the campaign in gameplay terms and the story, the spoilers coming in the second section, so feel free to read up to the spoiler warning if you haven't completed the campaign.

In terms of overall mechanics, I was actually fairly disappointed with the SC2 campaign. I kept hearing about branching paths and upgradeable mechanics, but I feel that other games I've played have had much bigger impacts, namely the Dawn of War series. For instance, the Dark Crusade expansion technically had an entire world to conquer in what manner and whatever race you so chose, which made it a much more tactical experience in the "branching" idea. Some places you would never even end up fighting, due to the other races killing each other off in that location. While the SC2 campaign does "branch," it's usually just a question of doing one mission before another with the only real difference being maybe unlocking one unit before another. This approach also causes huge problems with the story side, but that's for below. In terms of upgrades, some of them were really useful and  I enjoyed, and they made a difference (the science vessel comes to mind) but on the other hand many of them were pretty boring. For instance, the first protoss tech unlock was insipid, many of the purchasable unlocks were I thought useless for my play-style, and a lot of them seemed to make no noticeable difference in-game. On the other hand, Dawn of War 2's upgrade and equipment system probably did have the same amount of effect as the SC2 ones, but because sometimes they had a much more dramatic effect (like replacing a heavy bolter with a missile launcher) the upgrades felt a lot different, and like I was having an effect.

The campaign did do a good job of mission variety, I suppose, but a lot of times it boiled down to a) turtle and survive or b) build up big force and kill things/capture points. I realize all RTS games do this, and SC2 tried to be different with things like lava and walls of fire, but oftentimes for me they ended up feeling more annoying than challenging. Tactics rarely seemed to matter, and for the last few missions I could just mass an air fleet of science vessels, vikings, banshees, and battlecruisers and run through without difficulty. On the other hand, Company of Heroes had less "mission variety" in that almost all of them were "kill the enemy," but the set pieces were far more interesting, and the missions far more memorable (like a Panzer tank hunt or the raid through night airdrop). Tactics seemed to actually matter there, since you couldn't just mass tanks and storm through the enemy (they'd be busy building anti-tank cannons).

The achievement system I have previously mentioned, and will not be spoken of again.

I did appreciate things like mercenaries and all the clickables in between missions, but overall as a campaign I feel it fell far short of what other moderns RTSs have accomplished since SC1.

And now, spoiler alert!

Spoiler alert!

Spoiler alert!

In terms of the campaign story, I was also very disappointed. As others have brought up, the first problem is that although the campaign was "branching," the story and characterizations also branched, being Jim would go from being overjoyed one mission at the progress versus the Dominion and a depressed drunkard the next. It made Jim in my eyes rather unrealistic and thus unsympathetic as a main protagonist. In fact, none of the characters were personally that engaging. Hansen was annoying and I was happy when Jim killed her, other science guy was basically not there, Mr. Techdwarf was boring, and while both Tychus and Tosh had interesting lines, I honestly think they were rather forgettable for secondary characters (people like Augustus Cole or Gaz being far more interesting, personally speaking). Tychus' betrayal was foreshadowed to the point of being foreshining, and the disappointment that is "mission choices" is, well, disappointing. I never felt invested nor was I all that interested, and I only really kept playing just because a) I had bought the game b) friends had said it was good so I was encouraged to finish it and c) I had already put time in so I wasn't going to quit. But I thought the Zerg "twist" was silly, the Protoss portrayal boring (oh right, we had colossal *ahem* fighting machine great at killing swarms of units hiding in Aiur, but no, getting invaded by the Zerg wasn't cause enough to activate it) and then of course patently stupid moments like our hero's Battlecruiser hooking up to an enemy warship and being stored by two, count, 2, marines.

Wait, did they just jump over something in the boarding action? Oh right, it was a shark.

I thought the whole bring Kerrigan back from the Zerg was a boring but necessary turn, the introduction of Prince Junior rather forced and uninspiring (what a textbook royal son) and General Warfield was so so boring considering he's listed in the achievements as a "main character." Perhaps this is partly a reaction to finishing reading all the published Gaunt's Ghosts novel, where all of the character (all in war, obviously) are about a 1,000 times more interesting than anyone in this game. Comparing a game to a book series is obviously unfair, but to bring up a previously mentioned character, I was sad and in disbelief when Gaz was shot in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Jim Raynor could have been hacked to death by Dark Templar and I probably would have yawned.

Lots of other things probably bothered me over the campaign, but they are all pretty minor, but the point is that in combination with the above made it so I found the campaign rather inadequate in terms of the story.



Overall, as you can tell, while I technically enjoyed the campaign, the problems were a bit too abundant for me to be comfortable recommending it. Were I still in the state where I only really played campaigns, I would be rather irate at the moment, but luckily the multiplayer component makes up for the $60 price point. I look forward to seeing whether they change or improve things in the expansions for their campaigns, since while my review is less than stellar, there's definitely still potential there, and after all I enjoyed the original SC and WC3 campaigns when I played them. I think the problem is that SC2 is SC1 in many ways, including the datedness of the campaign. The RTS world has progressed far from 1998, and while an old-style multiplayer is still fun, an old-styled RTS campaign is just boring.

-HTMC

Edit: Thought I'd share this because, well, I enjoyed writing it.

How to Really Annoy Your Customers

Notice the top two possible achievements. Note that the objectives for the mission were destroy the artifact housing and a secondary achievement of rescue the 4 sets of Dark Templar prisoners.

Notice that I did all of these things, and even destroyed all 8 of the Rift fields. And yet I Blizzard somehow thinks I didn't do any of these things, despite the stats directly to the right stating the contrary.

I would almost be ok with this if it was an isolated thing, but I did a run through of the last 5-6 missions today, and I figured that although things weren't showing up they'd pop up later. Right?

Wrong. Apparently Battlenet has to be "on" for achievements to actually work. So despite me having a solid internet connection the entire time I was playing, because Blizzard can't maintain a decent server (I only found out it was acting up for everyone after finishing the campaign and browsing the forums, discovering hundreds of angry threads) I not only have not completed the campaign, but I haven't even gotten basic achievements for things like "finish the mission." But if you look at any of the logs, it shows me as having finished the campaign, except achievements wise. So my profile states I have not finished the campaign, but if I load the campaign I go straight to the mission select screen. Even something like "buy all the mercenaries," which I've done, apparently "hasn't happened."

This is incredibly incredibly dumb design, and I don't know what the hell Blizzard was thinking. Requiring internet to log in I can /almost/ understand, but making achievements only active when Battlenet is running? So so stupid. At least Xbox Live allows you to earn achievements while COMPLETELY offline, and then updates it next time you connect.

tl;dr, I am so frustrated.

-HTMC

How to Stay Positive: Thoughts on Winning

To continue my undoubtably annoying trend of posting only on SC2 stuff (I'm sure it'll end sometimes...?) more thoughts on the game!

As I suspected, that bad night was simply that-- a bad night. I've played since then and although I can't say we've had a winning streak, we've been doing well (we is vague since it usually includes some combination of Rome, Aaron, and others). It's still definitely a learning process, but it's going well.

In particular I've been falling more and more in love with Dark Templars. I've pretty much nailed down an opening build that I've been using to great success for the last couple days, which basically gets me very quickly with full resources, an observer, 4 Gateways, 4 Zealots, a Warp Prism, and the ability to teleport 4 DTs instantly into the back of a base (after having the observer check it out). It's a great build because if they don't have any detectors (which happens often) it's devestating, and it also flows well into a mid-game/late-game strategy (since you have 4 Gateways and a Robo bay, and the ability to continue either with Robos or go Starport). For instance, one particularly good game happened tonight, which has my super amusing army value graph:

As you can see, for most of the game I had the 4 zealots and varying numbers of DTs. I successfully hit one base completely (with Rome's help) and proceeded to keep running around destroying things, with the Warp Prism following around to give reinforcements as needed. What causes the odd spike was because the DTs were working so well I didn't really need anything else, but I eventually realized just how many resources were piling up, and made 6 starports and began mass producing Void Rays and Carriers since I didn't need to counter anything in particular. Alas, although I had built up a fleet of about 100 supply, due to continued harassment from me, Rome and Aaron (including me destroying about 8 supply depots because everything else was guarded) they quit before the fleet was able to be used.

I am disappoint.

The Dark Templar strategy doesn't extend only to team games, too. I've been using it quite well in 1v1 matches. I keep setting up expecting an early rush to be countered with a DT hit, but the early rush keeps not coming, I keep getting the DTs in and winning the game, about 8-10 minutes in.

Surprisingly, this took a while. The first 1v1 game I played I got soundly beaten, and didn't play any for a long time. I finally got my nerve up and tried it, and since then I've won the last 4 1v1 games I've played (with the DT strat.) I suppose this is one of those lessons to not give up after an initial failure and blah blah blah. I'm am glad I've done it though, since I'm sure it's helping my skill set a lot (especially since I keep prepping for things that don't happen, like an early rush or the need to expand after the DT hit fails). It's also in a lot of ways easier than team games, since you can focus on a lot less (no coordination, no watching mulitiple bases early on, etc.). I'm almost looking forward to a game where I don't win handily so early on, although the wins are nice.

To keep up with my usual end of the post question, what builds do you all seem to be favoring/liking? I know I "see" most of them, but in general I don't know as well as I probably should. As I was half-joking with Rome earlier, despite playing so often with Aaron, I usually have no idea what he's up to, only that he's being inevitably effective.

To close, a non sequitar image. Basically while attacking my entire base got hit, and my entire base of production gets wiped, but I still had a lot of resources and income; but no buildings to produce units with. This is desperation.

-HTMC

I've Got a Good Feeling About This One: Thoughts on Losing

Although I am not the most competitive gamer you will ever meet (or competitive person in general, I guess) it would be very false to state I am not competitive at all. Especially if I'm playing against strangers, it's pretty much impossible for me to me to play for anything other than to win. This tends to manifest especially in video games, and as much as my battle reports recently might lead you to believe otherwise, I have on a few occasions lost.

Losing in itself is not usually a bad thing, since it encourages us to improve and play better next time. Especially in the games I tend to play, the turnaround time to the next game is quick, and even the ability to improve midgame is possible.

This, however, is not the case for RTSs, as I'm discovering. For instance, in an average game of an FPS you can be having a bad streak, and then make an excellent comeback. Likewise, one bad game might be followed by another great one. Finally, none of these games are likely to last long (especially something like Gears of War). With games such as SC2 though, games are likely to last at least 10 minutes (if not stretching to an hour, like one game Aaron and Rome had) and one mistake can mean the end of things.

These things can be made even worse in team games, which in my experience can last a lot longer on average. In addition, having one player drop can be devastating, as can likewise 1 really good player on an opposing team with two relatively ok or even bad players. For instance, in a game last night, here were the standings.

We actually lost this game, mostly because Rome dropped very early on (He had a barracks and a starport and that was about it due to Reaper raiding before he dropped). As you can see, I technically did best overall, but it still made no difference because we couldn't match their forces. I wiped out a base and a half towards the end of the game, but because I didn't have support it wasn't enough (likewise Aaron was still playing well, but taking the brunt of the attacks after Rome dropped, which is understandable). Unlike a game like an FPS where me playing like that might have won the game, in a team-based thing like SC2 the loss of Rome kind of killed most of our chances. I also think in 3v3 or 4v4 the drop is more problematic, since it becomes questionable who will take over. In 2v2 where I've lost Rome, I obviously knew I needed to take over both bases and did so, but because Rome dropped in this game and it was both Aaron and I (and we were unable to voice chat) we both, I think, figured the other would take care of Rome's stuff, so nothing ever happened there (it wasn't until the last few minutes where I realized Aaron could be making Vikings at Rome's Starport).

Anyway, that was one lost out of 5 for that night. Yes, we lost every game we played. It was rather demoralizing and painful (also reinforced how custom games kind of suck since you could be playing people of any skill level). Again, unlike other multiplayer games where many more game could have been played, those 5 games took a long time and oftentime it was just one single mistake that led to our downfalls, which can be very irritating. This obviously isn't going to stop me from playing SC2, but it's making me readjust my perspective on winning RTSs (especially since SC2 matchmaking is designed to give you a 50/50 win/loss ratio). In addition, I have to keep reminding myself that this is only my first week playing the game, I never even played SC1 online and I could be playing against people who have put many many more hours into both SC1 and SC2 than me (not to mention other online RTSs). But, last night was last night, and Aaron and I have a good feeling about this one.

In terms of other things I've noticed about SC2, here are some complaints that may or may not be echoed on the forums.

1. Surrender button. I was playing a game and the server lagged (?) right as I was hitting enter to type something to Rome, and it apparently it took the enter to mean I wanted to surrender (since the message goes something like "Server is lagging. Surrender?". A simple "are you sure" would have been incredibly appreciated.
2. The frickin' custom game set-up. As it stands, if you hit "Join game," it shows a bunch of maps listed by popularity. Note I didn't say "games," but rather maps. That's right, it'll show maps even though nobody's in a lobby for that. So you'll join an option and find yourself sitting in an empty lobby you just created, even though you clearly didn't want to create a game since yo hit join game. Incredibly frustrating, and it also means that nobody plans one or two maps (for instance, only Arkhan Asylum and the Bio Lab for 3v3). Very very very stupid.
3. The Zerg. They're pretty much universally acknowledged to have problems but haven't been fixed yet. This only bugs me because the player I almost always plays with (Aaron) plays Zerg. Sigh...
4. Terran detectors. Zerg have only 1 (maybe 2) and Protoss only have one, yet Terran have turrets, ravens, and the ability to scan an area whenever they want. That makes one of my favorite units, DTs, almost useless unless I get them early out AND the terran player has built neither a single missile turret or his advanced command center yet. Meanwhile Zerg are happy if they finally get detectors half way through the midgame... And while the Protoss Observer is awesome, it's also relatively late, and it's be nice if something else had the ability.
5. Similarly, either fix the Phoenixes or give us a unit that is actually made for anti-air. And give the Zerg one too. (now that I've been on the receiving end of Void Ray/Carrier spams...)
6. Finally, to end with, the whole cliff thing is weird. Protoss can't walk cliffs till T3 (or if you blink Stalkers which is still far from early game) and Zerg get it... never? Whereas Terrans have Reapers as T1 units. Which leads me to my next point...
7. "Practice" league games are interesting in theory, but the balancing of rocks means a) you can't scout, so you only choose a strategy and hope for the best until you get a flying unit up to scout, by which point it can be too late unless b) you're Terran, and you just make one reaper and you can suddenly do in the first few minutes what Zerg and Protoss can't, as well as harass very well while the other two races have to wait to have enough forces to break through two rock piles (one usually defended) or do mass air drops, which is impractical. Plus the lack of scouting makes things very unlike what normal games are like. If they had done anything, they should have just slowed down the game speed (not getting used to avoiding early-game rushes is also not a good habit to get into).

Again, I'm still having a lot of fun, but thought those things should be aired. Do you guys agree, disagree, or got something else that's bugging you?

-HTMC