StarCraft 2

A little more Madden, and a lot more Starcraft… after a lot of matches against the AI today I decided to skip the remaining 43 practice league games, and jump right into my placement matches. It was a good thing to do… though my placement matches went sort of funny. I mentioned in my previous post that I had some reservations about taking my game online. I think I have a closet fear of losing, I know I don’t really care if I win or lose these things, I just want to be competitive, and have fun thats why the stress and anxiousness of playing these matches sort of surprised me, and made me really uncomfortable. Anyway, I’m really glad I played these games for a couple reasons that I’ll get to into in a bit.

First match I got roflstomped by a Protoss Cannon rush by a platinum player… nothing quite like a series of pylons and cannons creeping in from the fog of war outside your nexus. Game was over in 5 minutes, I felt shame. And was anxious, I was getting into it. Like really worked up. I’m generally a pretty tranquil guy, I don’t really like getting worked up like that. But, the lesson learned was pylon spread, and scouting, including my own starting area.

Second match was a win for me! I did everything I wanted to do in the match, I was working with a scout, something I had been struggling with, and neglecting, I stuck to my plan, and even worked in a little trickery of my own by planting a pylon inside my opponent’s wall-in that went undetected. I still got anxious and worked up, but this felt good.

My third match was literally 8 seconds long, I had just long enough to get my probes mining before my opponent quit. It appears from his profile that, this was his first and only 1v1 though, he has played a few 2v2′s.

The forth match was also sort of weird, because I thought I was going to lose, I was still sticking to my plan, but I was playing a zerg opponent, and the game I was playing was mostly neglecting using stalkers at all. It occurs to me now that this was a terrible idea to begin with because I clearly need ~something~ to shoot down overlords scouting my base, anyway… the player sent in a 6 zergling rush that I really didn’t have much defense for I managed to get a couple zealots out to start hitting them back and I sent my probes after him but the minute that first attack was defeated he quit. I was in bad shape too, I was down to 8 probes total at 5minute mark. I’m not sure why he quit but I lucked out thats for sure. The funny part though is that at this point, I was pretty calm, even in a very bad situation.

My final placement match was on a map I had never played, never liked the look of scrap station, against the first polite player I played in the lot. I lost, but it was pretty easy to identify why that was. I dropped my second pylon way early. My opponent didn’t, and instead got his second gateway well before I did. 6 zealot rush in my front door when I only had 2 out, probes couldn’t save me, and so it was game over. Checking the profile the opponent was a gold level player, with 24 matches under his belt, and I reckon they learned the same lesson I did in their early matches. Best part about this match, is my placement was done, and all that anxiety that I was experiencing was gone and I was able to focus on what was going on in the matches.

Feeling pretty good about myself with a 3-2 record (despite the fact that 2 of those wins were against people quitting inexplicably) I hopped into my first match in the Silver league (rated a lowly 82) (not at the bottom yay!), it was against a gold level zerg. Learning my lesson from the last match with the zerg that I needed something in the air, I decided to do a little something involving a star gate and some void rays, it was on a larger map, so I ended up doing my scouting like I’ve been trying to train myself to do even though it was effecting my macro some, including allowing myself to get supply blocked which meant I ended up having to do some probe defense on a couple zergling harass before I had any units out. I had setup my star gate at a proxy pylon closer to the opponent base with my original scout probe, something I had seen in some of the videos I had been watching while I was too nervous to be playing my own matches. this worked out really well for me, because it was never scouted. I fended off a subsequent push with a handful of zealots, and began my counter attack just in time for my void ray to be coming out. My opponent had no air defenses at all, so I was able to simply leave the ray in there after taking out the queen, and fall back to defend against the forthcoming base swap attempt. I WON! And again, I was pretty calm throughout the match.

I guess what I’m getting at here is that if you’re nervous about taking your Starcraft game online, the best advice I can give is get over it. It’s not worth all the thought you’re putting into it if you’re anything like me. Don’t get me wrong, be prepared, play some matches with the AI watch some videos online for some guidance. But seriously, you’ll be glad you did, I had a great day with StarCraft 2 today, and I’ll probably get some in again tomorrow.

Currently: 6-2 Silver League (rank: 46)

I eagerly made the trip out to the game store after work yesterday to pick up my copy of Madden 11. After I got home it was almost 30 minutes before I was able to actually play the game. It’s getting sort of ridiculous, I had to enter 2 different 12 character codes before I could even get started, the preorder bonus, and EA’s online pass. On top of that, there is the typical day 1 patch to install. Anyway, this isn’t really a gripe about Madden itself since this short of thing happens for almost every game at this point, but I seriously miss the days of the most time complicated part of playing a game the first time was getting into the packaging.

Anyway, when you get to the main menu, you are punched in the face with ads… Ads as menu items themselves, in fact the default menu items when the game finishes loading are ads. There is also an ad ticker at the bottom of the screen talking about EA DLC for other games (EA’s MMA in this case). I find it disheartening that a game that sells millions of copies annually, feels the need to bolster their revenue by this degree of advertising. I fully understand some product placement, particularly the in game stat stuff that does make things a little closer to the broadcasts, but there is just so much invasive advertising in this game it makes me a little angry.

Take it to the field! I played a few games with the GameFlow turned on, fully understanding that it’s more or less the Ask Madden system with a few out of game functions to give it some customization. This is not as big an innovation as people are making it out to be, in my limited experience thus far, it does seem like it would work well for the people who aren’t well versed in football strategy, or are playing as an unfamiliar playbook. However, when I say go for it on 4th and goal on the 2, I don’t want to see the wildcat formation, ever, worst part is in that scenario you can’t even audible out of the play because you don’t have the right personal on the field. And as an Eagles fan (a team that makes no qualms about being a very pass heavy team), I could tell that the default settings for my team were wrong. GameFlow had me running primarily, and 20 or so plays out of the wildcat, for the course of both games.

I think that leads well into my biggest complaint about the game, it lacks polish. Sure, there are lots of production values, and things going on in the course of the game that are good, when I think of polish, I’m talking about the extra effort that goes into the game to make each and every one of those things works flawlessly, that doesn’t exist here. There are obvious problems with the audio stitching in all areas of the game (ingame, pregame, postgame), which is understandable to a degree because of the volume dialog that exists but the frequency of it is nearly unacceptable. Also, hearing Cris Colinsworth goin on about the importance the first preseason game, and the experience of the 2 quarterbacks despite the fact that one of them is going into his first season as a starter and simply doesn’t have the experience he’s talking about. I don’t think this was nearly as bad in seasons past.

Also, the game crashed twice on me last night requiring a hard restart of the playstation. It happened once trying to load a Madden Moment (returning from last year, basically some game scenarios from last season that you try to recreate, or overturn, in the time remaining), they are decent if you don’t have time to play a whole game. And once while I was playing in the ‘be a superstar’ mode, which you basically play as a rookie and try run the plays that are called and win games. Because your player isn’t on the field at all times, you have the ability to simulate the game until the next time your player is on the field, that’s when the game crashed on me. It’s disappointing too because I was into my second game, and I forgot to save between them, so I may have to start over entirely, can I get an auto-save system please? Playing this mode was really fun though, I even liked running routes as a receiver, and even blocking on sweeps is fun.

I really think all of these could be resolved with the polish I mentioned above, I truly believe that this game is a victim of an annual, ridged release schedule, and will never ever be the perfect game it has had the potential to be as they continue to add features or outright change functionally. Because once you get into the games, most of those complaints are nullified by an excellent game of football. I’ve been loving the offense in this year’s offering. The line-aware receivers is incredible, I’ve yet to see a receiver take it out of bounds (I’m sure it will happen occasionally though), and the running game without the turbo button is great, i’m really liking the light tilts on the analog while the blocks set up, it really does feel like a burst when you push it down all the way to change direction, or hit the hole… this is easily the most fun I’ve had with the madden running game.  Defense feels the same as always, but they added a defense assist, while, holding ‘X’ your player will execute the play like he should until you let go, I find it handy when I’m playing off the line, so the player stays on him man when he makes cuts in man-to-man or gets to his zone in zone coverage, hopefully it’ll have me controlling something other than a lineman or a blitzer every play.

They changed the pre-snap controls, so it’s taking a while to adjust to the new system, but it appears to work, however it feels like there is less time to use it before the snap than in previous years.

It’s sort of annoying though when they say, we’re trying to make it a faster experience and have the games take less time, but there is all these “broadcast-like” things before during and after the game, that take more time than anything else. Anyway, its’ still fun, and I’ll be playing the hell out of it, and you shouldn’t let all these gripes effect your decision, since the football part of the football game really is excellent.

StarCraft 2

I’ve been playing StarCraft the last couple nights, mostly the single player campaign because I’m definitely not a competent player in the versus arena (I didn’t play the beta, and I didn’t play that much of the original SC, pretty much through the campaign and some vs with friends) so the amount of time I spend in there will definitely be limited, but I did try a couple 1v1 against the AI, learning that hard is too hard for me at the moment… my ‘newbness’ aside…

The Campaign has been excellent so far, and I was pleasantly surprised by the depth. I don’t think I’ve played a mission yet that was a simple beat the opponent yet. There is some of that, but they always seem to add a bit of flare with things like lava overflows of low altitude areas of that map, so you have to make sure that you have your units on high ground, it’s never overwhelming because they give you a timer telling you when it’s coming, as well as notification as the cycle approaches. They also used a day/night cycle in which you switched from offense to defense, but they always included optional objectives that encouraged you to explore past those simple boundaries, and they are always tied to some sort of reward, be it points to go towards your research trees, credits to upgrade your units, or collection of mercs available, and always some kind of ‘achievement’. All of this really encourages you to go the extra mile, and explore the maps, and gives a strong sense of variety that I honestly wasn’t expecting. There is also hero based missions that start you out against the odds, and you have to use the abilities of the hero to strategically get through the enemies lines.

You get some choice in which missions you do, and each has unlocked a new unit so far, each mission catering to that unit’s strengths, it makes it sort of obvious what you have to do to win, but to be fair I’ve been playing on ‘normal’ difficulty, so I expect that it wouldn’t be so simple if you had the cahones to play like a man… I think there has been a cut scene after each mission so far, and they have definitely been up to Blizzard’s standards.

I’ve spent some time with the challenges and they’re pretty fun, more or less have been like rock paper scissors in the ones that I’ve tried but that will likely change too.

Megalodon

They need more profile pictures unlocked at the start though… pretty limited customization up front and everyone looks the same on the forums which falls into blizzard’s model, it sort of sucks now though.

I’ve also had some issues with my megalodon headset however, it took some tinkering to get output working at all which is annoying because the beauty of the USB headset is that it’s just plug’em in and go. It’s also annoying that I had to set it to be prologic output instead of 7.1 which is supported by the headset, and works outside of StarCraft, and then I couldn’t get the mic to work… it’s all working now but it was troublesome, and annoying, and when I switch from desktop speakers to headset I have to go back into the settings to re-optimize, or continue to play with “lesser” settings.

[Update: 2010-07-31]

Just got back from a mini road trip, overnighter, and was getting ready to fire up starcraft. Looks like a patch went out while I was gone… notably!

Fixed an issue with sound not playing on some 7.1 systems.

If Blizz fixed my only complaint about the game already I am going to be thoroughly impressed. haven’t got to try it yet, but I’m pretty excited