Starcraft Strats, Builds, Reviews

When I saw this, I simply hard to share it. Go figure, it had to be the Koreans to do it, but somebody came up with a pretty amazing Starcraft comedy sketch. If you’ve played Starcraft 2, chances are you probably get it, even without the subtitles. The audience sure seems to get it.

The other day, playing SCII, I realized the need to mention acid and its role in new attacks associated with some characters. The Baneling and the Roach, both new zerg units, have acid based attacks. The baneling acts as a suicide bomber that basically explodes, spreading corrosive acid all over anything near it while the roach is actually an armored insect that spews acid onto anyone it views as a threat. It can work from a further distance.

Of course, as you might expect, the acid is absolutely bright green, just as media suggests that it should be and has for a while. I’m not sure where this originated from, but it has been around for years, perhaps ever since Ghost Busters with the idea of some toxic glowing substance being in it that mutates things….. I can believe that acid should be green, but glowing is something else.

Whatever its origination, real slime or acid would not be this color. Acids are colorless in their pure form. From sulfuric acid to hydrochloric acid to hydrofluronic acid, these acids are all completely colorless!

I’m not a chemist by any means, but there’s a reason why this is only in a game and it’s not supposed to be realistic. It’s an imaginary world with bugs that obviously don’t exist in real life and therefore slime that doesn’t fit in with real life.

The way I figure it, they use this kind of coloring for effect. After all, if you have the choice between green slime and glowing green slime, I’m personally going to look to the glowing green slime almost immediately if not immediately. It makes it seem somehow more toxic and more effective as a weapon. However, that’s just this blogger’s opinion on things and one of the reasons why I don’t see them changing their tactics any time soon.

Gamers have had multiple complaints and multiple praises for the emerging Starcraft II, which presents a largely different way to play the same old game. Some stick to the old version while some are ready to go forward. However, while it remains one of the most anticipated games to be released in years, Starcraft II may literally burn up your graphics card.

It doesn’t set it on fire per say, but it makes it so hot that it will melt away some of your information and render your card useless. It makes it show the menus over and over again until it overheats for some reason.

It has a strange bug that they are trying to fix, and there are probably plenty of techies out there who have already done something for their own Starcraft II and graphics cards. The main issue is that the menu’s frame rate is not locked, which means your graphics board can go a little crazy and has to keep reading the menu.

However, for now, there is a simple fix even for those who are not that technologically savvy. Look in your files after Documents/Starcraft II for something called variables.txt. Add in:

frameratecapglue=30
Frameratecap=60

Until Blizzard actually finds a permanent solution that is already set into the game, that should fix the problem. For now, the game makers are fully aware of the problem and have released the following statement:

“Screens that are light on detail may make your system overheat if cooling is overall insufficient. This is because the game has nothing to do so it is primarily working on drawing the screen very quickly.”

Blizzard sure has a thing for the “spread”. However, the Zurg’s ability to spread and infect was nothing compared to a glitch Bizzard set loose on World of Warcraft.
Back in 2005, programmers released a patch with a quest called “Zul’Gurub”. Meant to be difficult and achievable only by high level characters, it culminated with a showdown with the quest’s final boss: Hakkar the Soulflayer.

During the battle, Hakkar would debuff the attacking characters with a curse called “Corrupted Blood”. It quickly sapped the characters health, and while annoying at best, could kill a lower lever character in seconds.

However, this curse spread to nearby allies. Soon your entire party would be infected and your healer would have his hands full. However, something happened that Bizzard didn’t intend.

Supposed to be contained, characters were able to teleport out ofthe Zul’Gurub area. The infection followed and soon characters that hadn’t even gone to Zul’Gurub were being infected.

To perpetuate the spread, NPC’s could catch Corrupted Blood, but couldn’t die from it, spreading it to other PC’s. Pets could spread the disease in places the player couldn’t go.

Soon, bodies lined the streets of major cities and towns. Healers volunteered their abilities, other characters helped enforce quarantines, and many players fled populated areas or quit playing altogether.

Unfortunately, some players intentionally spread the disease. Quarantines became unenforcable. The entire epidemic infected three servers and forced Blizzard to reset WoW from the inside.

Implications

Because people in WoW are usually quite passionate about their characters, they reacted in a way that was typical of a real pandemic. However, because people were really reacting it made the real world wonder something: What if this happened in the real world?

The Center for Disease Control and the Department for Homeland Security teamed up with an epidemiologist named Nina Fefferman to study the effects of this virtual plague. With people reacting to this scenario in a real-world way, we hope they can garner clues against the chance that this hits us in a not-so-virtual way.

Lets just say, you can’t reset the world.