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.
So you’re screwed, your command is under attack, all your miners are dead, and you only have one tank left, which is on its last leg to make life worse. Your life as a Starcraft player, at least in this game, is pretty much gone. It’s officially time for you to take a look at the UBC Starcraft club. Sure you’ve been to LAN parties in your city before, but LAN parties are nothing like this.
Last November, a group of about 20 gamers joined the ranks of the UBC Starcraft club in order to support the idea of e-sports, or video game playing in other words, on their campus. The Starcraft Club now has over 300 paid members, all mingling with like-minded gamers.
According to club president James Choi, “Most of the time, people play online games by themselves or with a couple of friends. But we want to get together and have fun as a whole.”
It may seem silly to play a game as a sport, but just think of the Wii and all of the sports minded games makers have developed. All things considered, there is also some controversy about if cheerleading, golf, and certain other so called “sports” should really count.
Supporters say that this kind of gaming requires work ethic and skill, practice and everything else that your average sport requires if you want to really be good. Intensity rises when you get two really skilled players, and many are trying to turn it into a business.
However, there is still a strong group of people who consider gaming to be an anti-social activity that is also wasteful and without question, not a sport. According to Choi, it is “just like any other sport or activity.” He is certainly supporting its growth. However, that remains under hot debate.
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.”
We’ve all asked the question at least once: how do Zerg fly in space? The simple answer: magic. There’s a certain point at which this is virtual reality, they can literally create anything they want and it turns into fact. There’s no faith involved, just the buttons and the understanding that game makers have created it this way.
There are many explanations that gamers have come up with to try to explain it on a more logical level. People want to understand even with sci-fi literature how and why things work. We want to justify the mutalisk’s ability in particular to flap its wings and get off the ground, flying through space.
In the vacuum, the general rule is that there is no resistance, meaning no matter how quickly you flap or try to flap, wearing out your arms, you will never get off the ground and be able to fly. However, the mutalisk’s wings are big enough that maybe it could carry air underneath its wings, acting like a parachute in a way, except without the sinking effect.
This would of course require it to also jump off of a high place, at least in theory, to get going. The idea is simple momentum, and basic high school physics show us that momentum is conserved.
To be fair, the game creators and gamers behind Starcraft probably didn’t get a degree in Physics. They are brilliant at programming, or at least they have someone who is at their disposal, and it’s a game we’ve all come to love. However, the simple answer to this particular question is that this is a game, based on ideas, not necessarily scientific facts.
If you hold it to a scientific standard, you will never be able to just play the game.
Just over 20 light years away sits a little red star called Gliese 581. It is about a third the mass of the sun and as such pulses off much less energy than our own. However it does have a planetary system of no fewer than four planets, though six have been thought to be detected.
Planet “G” is one of these two. Though astronomers debate as to whether this planet actually exists or was gust a glitch in data, Gliese 581 g opened the eyes of alot of astronomers, astrobiologists and sci-fi junkies.
Gliese 581 g sits perfectly in its star’s “goldilocks” zone, meaning it’s the right distance/temperature for liquid water to exist on its surface. It is also just bigger than Earth and could thus support an atmosphere.
The main downside is that because Gliese 581 is colder, Gliese 581 g would have to be close enough to it to be “tidal locked” with it’s mother star, meaning one of its hemispheres would always face its star. However, scientists still postulate that life could exist on the area between the two hemispheres.
While the odds are quite low that we actually find life on Gliese, its existence shows that over 10% of stars could have planets in their goldilocks zones. While the technology to reach them doesn’t exist, our imagination to explore them is only encouraged…
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.
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.
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.
Well, I’m hooked. For starters the game is BEAUTIFUL. The art isn’t just in the promotionals, it’s the whole game. That an MMO can have so much eye-candy and not lag up, is a mystery to me. And all on one server to boot!
And the “slow pace” isn’t boring in the least. When you’re not gawking at the scenery, admiring your ship, or role-playing that “long” journey through space, you’re in an epic battle. Sure, waiting to learn skills and mining for minutes can be taxing, but it all folds together to create a very realistic MMO-RPG.
Hope to see you there soon, just as you’re hoping you won’t see less of me on Starcraft.
We’ll see…
It’s a big world out there. It really is: they say “it’s a small world”, but it still takes 20 hours to get to China. I’m sorry Walt, I think that might be the one thing you got wrong…
I mean sure the Internet makes things smaller. My wife can talk to her folks in China as easily as I can mine in Frisco. A small business in “Nearest Location, MI” can make a living by selling to New Yorkers. And though all my exes may be in Texas, they can still bug me in Tennessee…
Then why do we take this attempt at making the world smaller, and create massive fantastical worlds in it? If learning the state capitols isn’t enough, why do we burden ourselves with the wars of the Zerg, the politics of the Amarr, or wow of WOW. If this Earth is so phenomenally amazing, why do we consistently blow it up in favor of other worlds?
Honestly, at first thought, I get a twinge of guilt when I try to reason my way through this one. Isn’t this world good enough? My immediate response is a resigned “ABSOLUTELY”. We do have an amazing Earth here at our fingertips. But we’re mortal and this world is hard on us. We game for relief. Unfortunately some of our fellow Earthlings have forgotten their heritage and squander their lives on the World Wide Web. Technology is amazing, and can offer relief and rejuvenation. My motto and cry to all gamers out there: “Enjoy Life: Don’t Waste it!”
Sentries have been one of the most important Protoss infantry units since the get go. Their ability to cast hallucinations and set up guardian shields make them great for scouting and for supporting your attacking units. Their best spell though is definitely the force field. This seems to be the bane of Zerg ground forces when trying to get the maximum amount of units onto the front line to surround your enemy. Against Terran, force fields are very useful for preventing marine and marauder pushes.
When a Protoss player opts not to go for four gate, there is usually a window of a few early minutes when they are vulnerable to infantry rushes. As a Terran player, there have been so many times where I could have one if the Protoss sentry didn’t cast force field on his ramp. To get over this hump, I have started using Ghosts earlier. By getting Ghost and cloak straight away, you can use your Ghost to lead your troops into battle, unimpeded. Just position your army away from the ramp and send your ghost in as the point man. Cloak him and send him up the ramp. Once at the top, EMP the sentry to drain it of all energy. Then its clear for the rest of boys to barrel in and start cleaning house.
Another good way around Force Fields is an early Thor. This often requires Terrans to only build two early barracks but if you can get a Thor out before they can get a colossus, you’ll be in good shape. When you do rush with the Thor, make sure he has infantry and SCV support. As the Thor is a massive unit, he can actually crush force fields as he walks over them. Use him to for the way up the ramp while the SCV’s follow from behind, repairing.
