I’ve been meaning to pimp GiantBomb’s excellent videos covering the South Korean StarCraft II scene. These two videos were real eye openers. Even if you’re not a fan of StarCraft II, take a look how serious others have made it.
Giant Bomb in Korea: The GSL StarCraft II Finals
Giant Bomb in Korea: oGs/Team Liquid House Tour
Intense. I’d love to see more of this kind of journalism from the gaming media.
I won my first CivIV game via Space Victory yesterday. It’s my second CivIV victory and it was by far the most gratifying. And yet, I still can’t say I mastered anything. I’m flabbergasted by the amount of stuff I still don’t know or overlook.
For example, in my last game, I thought I had the game sealed, but I neglected to keep tabs on the Khmer civilization and its move towards a cultural victory. By the time I realized it, it had the three legendary cities required for the win. Oh well, live and learn.
In somewhat related news, I canceled my pre-order for StarCraft II. I’ve played the beta for a grand total of one time and that wasn’t a very long session either. I’ll either wait for a better deal (not $55) or I’ll just wait for all three games to be released and get the eventual battle chest. I just don’t have any interest in playing it any time soon. I’m content playing Civilization IV for the summer. That or Demon’s Souls.
I’ve chosen From Software’s sleeper hit as my summer game. Ironically, it’s another Atlus publish game — they’ve become my summer game publisher for the past couple of years with the Persona games and now Demon’s Souls. I’ll also have my hands full with Alan Wake and Bayonetta. And those are just games in my possession. I have at least two more that I want to get.
StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty has a release date and it’s July 27, 2010. That means I need to get a new PC sooner rather than later. Or maybe not? Who knows? I may just tough it out and play it on my existing rigs. (As you can see, there’s virtually no desire for me to get a new PC at the moment).
I am pondering the notion of a new Wii though; a black Wii to be precise.
Starting May 9, 2010, folks can pick up Wii’s in either superior black or plain white. Both will come bundled with Wii Sports, Wii Sports Resort and a Wii Motion Plus. The price will remain the same at $209.99.
And what do both of these news articles have in common? They’re both going to make a lot of money this year.
After trying out the StarCraft II beta briefly last night, I have some thoughts and info I’d like to share.
Blizzard games have always been pretty scalable and I was wondering how my five year old Shuttle PC will fare. Here are the important specs:
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (2.0 GHz)
Memory: 2 GB of DDR-400
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT
OS: Windows 7 x64 Home Premium
And here’s the configuration I ended up running the game with:
The auto configuration actually pinned my resolution at 1280 x 720 resolution, but I bumped it up since I try to play my PC games at the monitor’s native resolution.
To my surprise, the game ran at a somewhat playable framerate. There were hitches when sudden shifts in on screen unit counts occurred, but other than that I did play a single successful 2 v 2 match.
As I alluded to, I’m was not big on the StarCraft multiplayer so don’t expect any major insights into the game itself aside from “it’s more StarCraft” — at least for now anyway. What I was most impressed with were the first “five practice” matches I was greeted with when I first launched the multiplayer. It’s supposed to help Battle.net gauge my skill level and throw me into the appropriate league. I can’t say how well it works thus far since I’ve just completed a single match, but it seems like a great idea.
The map I played on had rock barriers to discourage rushing and plenty of resource locations to expand to. It was a noob map and I welcomed it. They also fixed the game speed to “normal” which was nice. All in all, I think these kinds of touches will open up StarCraft II to a wider audience than the original ever did.
I hope to play more of StarCraft II, but I don’t when. Although it runs on my current machine, it is nowhere near optimal visual or performance benchmark. I’ve always said I’ll build a new PC for StarCraft II, so I guess I’ll have to look into that before proceeding any further.