Starcraft FEVER
By finstern 5 Comments
I never played the original, it was just one of those games that slipped by while I played homeworld and star trek armada, its name faded completely from my and my gamer friends vocabulary. Since then we have played through pretty much every other RTS worth playing, with Supreme Commander being a notable entry (hundreds of hours). The only RTS we ever really played competitively was Command and Conquer 3 (I know, I know) but it was fun when it first came out, we watched replays, learned strats, nailed the Nod tank rush and finally settled nicely into the completely scum tactic of warping a Scrin mothership over an enemy base and wiping them out (see below)
We gave up on C&C because if any one strategy got used too much (regardless if it could be defended against by decent players) they would patch it out, although I will admit that the Scrin mothership was redonkulous, they even patched out the Nod tank rush, which was a tactic included on their bonus DVD, showing you how to do it! Since then though, we haven't really found an RTS we could commit much time to playing.
Even before its release SC2 never peaked my interest, I knew millions played it and S. Korea zerg rushed into stadiums to watch people playing etc but I never took it seriously at all. Then that awesome trailer came out, my reaction was literally :O the whole way through, I started watching a few vids on youtube and decided "Yeah, I think I'll pick this up." Monday night came, Brad was running circles in the office with his shiny limited edition copy and later the live stream went up and it instantly made me wanting to be playing it, I was honestly so excited I found it hard to sleep!
I woke up, went straight to unnamed evil game store, the guys behind the counter saw me coming and rung the game up before I even asked for it. Got home installed, browsed all the menus and decided to play against the medium AI... I got wiped out, numerous times. As a vet of the RTS genre I couldn't seem to pick this up so fast by myself, I remembered Brad talking about watching Youtube replays, so thats what I did. Just one replay had me beating the AI in under 7 minutes, I eventually ventured into the Practice League where I won my first few games (against people who I could tell were in the same boat as me a couple of hours ago). I was shocked to see even the noobs like myself would say "gg" and surrender when they knew I had their ticket. It was never like that in C&C the community would mostly make you pay time for every building you destroyed.
Again I remembered the wise words of Brad "Starcraft is a gentleman's game" and he's right. The players are mostly very nice if you start talking to them, which felt alien to me after years of Halo and Modern Warfare. Anyways, its getting to the point now where I'm going up against more experienced players and my heart starts racing when I think I've made a mistake or I see a chance and take a huge risk sending in all my units. Its a game I hope I don't get disillusioned with, I hope Blizzard wont patch up strategies unless they are really unfair and NEED it and even then I hope the patch is something that helps people counter it instead of removing it completely, I've yet to get into the real ladders yet but I hear good things and hopefully it works well enough that I will never be up against a million people totally out of my league so as to keep me coming back for more.
Oh, one other thing, TNT was AMAZING the third 1v1 match completely changed my mind about "never being able to watch SC2 being played by other people"
If you read all of this, I salute you, you are truly a person of great patience and I apologise for all my awful grammar and spelling. Anyone wanting to play add me Finstern - 761