Heart of the Swarm is coming....

As an openly huge fan of e-sports and specifically Starcraft 2 it may come as a shock to anyone who cares that I am actually not that excited for the upcoming expansion Heart of the Swarm. Of course it is too soon to tell how good it will be, but in hindsight it is my not-so-humble opinion that more doesn't necessarily always equal better. Heart of the Swarm's success in my eyes will really focus on what it brings to the table and what it really improves. In case you haven't seen the teaser/gameplay video:



Maybe I started off a little harsh, as the single player campaign of Starcraft 2 is really only rivaled by earlier entries into Blizzard's RTS's in terms of polish, variety, arc, and quality. The mechanics were amazing and the design was so meticulous that it may as well have had a mirror shine. My only issue was that the story, characters, and setting weren't really that good.

*Spoiler warning* the plot of Wings of Liberty was pretty much a drunken rebel faffing about, crying about his evil bug girlfriend for most of the game until he attacks the "swarm" and leads a small band of soldiers to defeat the greatest threat the Korpulu sector has ever known. By his side was his old friend who has always been his old friend who evidently only wants to kill his bug girlfriend (and is probably right to do so).

Dude, how did a few marines fight an entire planet swarming with the most evolved killer sentient bug race in history? What really happened for the first 80% of the game? I know I always say story doesn't make a great game, but it certainly can make a good game amazing and can take a great game down to good. Stracraft 2's single player mechanics and mission variety are rivaled by no other modern RTS's, but the plot is certainly garbage. Can they turn that plot around and make it actually as epic as it should and thought itself to be?

The best thing about Wings of Liberty's story was the launch trailer. Epic:


The multiplayer, ie the reason Starcraft 2 was really created, is what keeps millions of players worldwide glued to their PC's. Starcraft 2 is pretty damn close to perfectly balanced, and I know my friends all make fun of my love of watching the pro's play (btw did you see the AMAZING game QXC played? Mass micro'd Reapers FTW its a new thing) and around the world there is a reasonably lively scene. The question here would be would it be too much to alter the delicate balance? Does more mean better or would it throw off the delicate flow of the match? Would chess be better if it got 2 expansion packs?

Ultimately Blizzard has yet to deliver a product not worth full price and then some. They have made the 2 best RTS franchises in the world, the best click fest ever, and the best legal drug to ever ruin nerd culture. They are the best of the best and it will be nice to see them bring the story forward and improve the already amazing multiplayer. I am just going in to it with the attitude that it will be messing with a good thing and will leave the burden of proof with Blizzard to show me otherwise.

E

Age of Empires Online First Impressions

Thanks to GamePro I was fortunate enough to acquire a beta key to AOEO (heh). I spent about an hour with the game so far since and I have to say color me optomistic.

The game is a MMO RTS. To be honest I'm not to sure how it works yet either. I do have to say the tutorial is kind of mediocre so far, but that's okay because there are a lot of exciting ways this game could go. You start off with a capital city and get quests which are like missions in any other RTS. So far the only real interaction I've notice that would let you know there are other people playing is a chat window. Aside from that I haven't yet been introduced to the MMO part.

I'll hold off talking about the game play until I spend a little more time and really get the chance to wrap my head around it, but so far I really like the direction Gas Powered Games has taken it. I will say I absolutely love the cartoon like graphic style. Not only is it fun and unique, but it will help the game scale to many budget PC's and laptops, which will be very good for the game's appeal.

I will always have a spot in my heart for GPG. They are most memorable to me for their cult classic RTS Supreme Commander, which is hands down the best non-Blizzard RTS in my not so humble opinion. The game was very macro oriented and focused on amassing huge robot armies and smashing them against each other. It was really about who could get their resource generation going faster and who could keep their supply lines going rather then micro/expansion. They did release a sequel, Supreme Commander 2, a couple years ago but it definitely fell flat and lost a lot of what made the original so incredible. As big of a Starcraft 2 fan as I am I can say it's a shame that the original Supreme Commander couldn't "command" (heh see what I did there) as much of an e-sports following as Brood War and now SC2 control. Still great game if you ever feel like going back into it.

Anyways back to the OT I am super excited for this game because it is already doing something different with the MMO genre. Unlike the WoW clone Rift (IT IS GET OVER IT) this game tries some actual new game play mechanics! It is clearly not trying to be a WoW killer because, despite what Trion seems to think the only person who can kill WoW is Blizzard.

So far the only glaring fault with this game is that you need Games for Windows Live to run it, which I have avoided like the plague so far because I have Steam which works about as good as anything right now. Plus I fear this dystopian future....

Portal 2 Lab Rat is brilliant art, Valve is amazing at marketing and Here's Why

Spoiler warning! Another games are art rant incoming! Well that's not entirely true; in this case it's marketing is art. Hear me out on this one!

For me it is easy to gauge what I perceive to be good art because I have a very easy litmus test; did it place me in an uncomfortable emotional state? Whether it is the one rom com I can actually tolerate (Love Actually), a stupid movie like Dumb and Dumber or Jackass, or something truly brilliant like Gataca the common theme throughout all of the movies is that they push your emotions around like a pinball. When I play or watch a Starcraft 2 match I always feel my heart rate rise, I feel warmer, and I can feel the adrenaline start to pump. All signs of brilliant art.

I adore the contrast in tone between the Aperture Science investment ad's and the recently released Lab Rat comic. Both marketing vehicles are incredibly entertaining separately, but when taken together as a mass of propaganda for Valve's imminently released opus it could be the most effective communication of tone and theme I have ever been witness too. They are also damn well made. It is the tonal shift between comical and dark as hell; but still a little of each emotion in the other (much like a yin yang) that is really amazing. You have the uncomfortable humor of the investment videos and the dark experience of the comic.

It really seems to me that Valve is not afraid to market a new idea to the masses. It is really exciting they are not only putting out an FPS that isn't about soldiers shooting soldiers, and really isn't about shooting anyone at all, but that they are marketing it to the Madden and CODBLOPS masses (whom many of us PC Master Race look down upon and rightly so =P).

How is it that Valve, a company without a marketing department or firm, can come up with arguably the greatest campaign video game kind has ever seen and the best EA and Visceral can do is this?

A nonsensical rant about pro Starcraft 2 and eSports

I absolutely love watching pro Starcraft 2 matches online. I'm starting to become a more hardcore fan and working up to live casts of international tournaments, but right now I watch a lot of my favorite Sc2 casters on youtube. Watching a well cast, well played Sc2 match is a ton of fun and reminds me a lot of why I am a huge sports fan.

Outside of gaming I love to watch Baseball, Basketball, and Football in that order. I live in New England, so fortunately for me all of my teams generally are in their selective playoffs and I always get to catch a few live games every year. Working in downtown Boston no matter where you look there are always RedSox, Bruins, Celtics, and Patriots (our sports teams for my international viewers) clothes adorning every other pedestrian. Will eSports ever be a part of our national pastimes? Will we ever see pro gaming team jerseys? What would eSports need to do to really rise to prominence?

First off let's look at what makes sports fun to watch and what keeps people from getting bored. First off sports are fun for the same reason that Call of Duty or Left 4 Dead is fun; competition. Since the Greeks started the Olympics many years ago history has acknowledged it is really engaging to watch people who are the best at what they do being the best at what the do. When you watch a pitcher in a baseball match throw so many precision pitches, so many different pitches, all from 90 feet away and most landing with in a 2 squarish meter window with other athletes just getting confused at how to hit the pitches it is really exciting. It is also exciting to see one of those hitters get a good read on an amazing pitches and smash that ball so hard with a bat it flies out of the park. Superb and skilled athletic displays are brilliant to watch and translate into fun.

Watching a pro Sc2 match can have that same effect. When you watch someone who is so good at balancing micro and macro and adapting their play to get the right unit combination with the right positioning, or you watch a brilliant Protoss player hold off a zergling rush, or a Terran do a double drop at two different expansions and cut their opponents economy in half in about 20 seconds it can also get really exciting because it takes skill.


There is a great sense in hometown pride rooting for your favorite sports teams. We have over 100 years of history in Boston with the RedSoxand the team here is larger than life. Games are sold out months ahead of time. On TV games get some of the highest ratings. We love our hometown team and it is always more emotional and connecting when you have a hometown team to root for.

This is a big gap that eSports would really need to step it up. It is very difficult to rally people together and build awareness enough to establish a profesional, local club. There would also have to be enough talent and money to be able to band together the necessary clubs to be able to organize a national or semi-national league. The logistics would be really tough and take a decently funded organization to put together. There won't be a lot of funding until there is awareness. There won't be awareness until there is a league or organization to be aware of. There won't be a league until there is funding. There won't be funding until.....

It is so magical to see a live sporting event. I always try and catch 5 or so RedSox games a year because, despite it being significantly more expensive than watching the game on tv, there is such an incredible energy when you enter a stadium with 40,000 fans cheering together, laughing together, drinking together, booing together, and generally sharing an emotional connection to what is happening on the field.

This is the magic I think eSports can really capture slowly but surely. If you could go to a bar on a night with 100ish other people and watch 2 or 3 great Sc2 matches with people cheering or oo-ing at baneling busts, or calling out mistakes, or cheering big skirmishes, that would be really exciting. If we could find live events that would really capture the shared emotional experience of a common interest and you could have talented players that could really put on a great show
with a charismatic caster calling the games, it could really be special.

I plan on starting to try and put together an Eastern Massachusetts Starcraft 2 league. I could definitely get nights in some bars in Boston, Worcester, and places in between, so really it would be about securing a couple sponsers, creating awareness and getting an interested crowd, and finding enough local talent to make it happen. I really love eSports and Starcraft 2 in paticular and I hope that we can start seeing it rise to fame in North America in the next 10 to 15 years.

MLG is a great start, but I really think local effort are where we will really see pro gaming and eSports grow here in North America. We all need to be able to go see a match or event after work on a Wednesday. It will take the nerdy guy dragging his girlfriend to a match, it will take fans inviting non fans, it will take patience and lots of explanations of builds and units (just like me trying to pick up rugby), but we can and will get there (I hope).

Why the Dragon Rage???

Dragon Age 2, the anticipated sequel to BioWare's 2009 surprise hit Dragon Age Origins, released a couple weeks ago to a firestorm of mixed reviews and fan rage. The major complaints seem kind of silly to me because they all boil down to one real complaint:

It's different.

I love(ed) DA:O. I played it through soup to nuts 3 times. I am 100+ hours in to the game through all my experiences with the game. I am certainly an old school RPG guy, hence my nerd-affair with a high quality AAA western RPG that is difficult, unforgiving, and decidedly unwelcoming to newbs. I liked the fact that the world, although kind of generic high fantasy, still had more than enough personality to keep me engaged and interested and that the voice acting was above average (not that it is difficult). The writing of course was top notch cause' it's BioWare. That's what they do. Of course the game had a lot of shortcomings, but us hardcore RPG nerds tend to see those as necessary as we are crumudeonly stuck in our hater-like ways.

Dragon Age 2 is a very different game from Dragon Age Origins. The combat is much faster paced, the interface looks a lot more minimalist, the art styhas chaged (although both games look like ass), and the story structure is a lot less "epic hero makes epic, heroic journey with his friends to save the world from an ancient evil because he is the one and ONLY one who can" and more struggle to survive. The game breaks a lot more old school tropes in favor of a more Grand Theft Fereldan (or Kirkwall) type feel which I for one also really like. There is still a lot of depth, resource management, tactical options, and fantastic writing, but is very decidedly different. On normal dificulty it also is not so punishingly arduous a task to get through basic encounters.

I really like that BioWare didn't push out another overpriced expansion pack. I like the differences in gameplay, the new art style, the minimal interface, and the REALLY intesne and fast-paced combat. It's a welcome change for the IP. If I wanted to play more DA:O I would play through it again. Now for full disclosure I haven't finished DA2 yet, but I am over 10 hours in, playing through my first playthrough on hard, and am having a lot of fun with the game.

We live in an industry now where the status quo is beaten in to us. People pay $60 like clockwork every year for a roster update in Madden, or a couple new maps in Call of Duty. Rift, despite being EXACTLY like WoW but not as good, is off to a strong start. Homefront sold incredibly well despite mediocre reviews and cloned game play. Hell, even my darling Starcraft 2 is very identical to it's 11 year old predecessor. It's not just that publishers and developers fear risk and change, but us as consumers are starting to fear it as well. The only place we are really seeing any innovation is in the indie and mobile gaming scenes and even there I feel like we are drowning in cartooney 2D platformers.

Fact is BioWare has done a lot to draw nerd-ire and flame recently, but releasing a poor followup to Dragon Age Origins is not one of them.


Fact: 4 out of 5 people get crushed by giant diamonds every day.

PAX East 2011 Day 1

Well day one was quite amazing as to be expected. I did skip the keynote speech for reasons I already went over (and will prolly do a follow up to that soon anyways). Let's start with a few highlights for me.

[Quick side note, the pictures look like ass because they were taken with my phone camera. Taking a real camera today to get some MUCH better pics]

First off, I am happy to report that I am starting to think I was wrong about 38 Studios and Kingdoms of Amalur. Now full disclosure; I did get the shake Curt Schilling's hand, and as a huge RedSox fan, that is kind of awe inspiring. I didn't get any pictures though much to my chagrin. Anyways, the game looked reasonably solid, considering the gameplay demo we got was a pre-alpha build. One thing that really impressed me about Curt's attitude is that he is fully aware that KoA is not breaking any new ground as a fantasy RPG, but he wants it to be the absolute best. He is going for the Die-Hard effect (topic of a future post). The game right now looks an awful lot like Fable to me with more of a focus on fast paced, combo driven combat. To be honest the demo looked like a hell of a lot of fun, with really fast paced and visceral combat, beautiful visuals, and an interface that seemed very streamlined and functional, yet potentially as deep as many hardcore RPG nerds demand. Of course he is going to have some stiff competition in 2011.

I did spend some time in the expo hall as well checking out all the booths and what some AAA and indie developers had to offer and I am sorry to say there is really nothing new to report. Gears of War 3 looks an awful lot like GOW2, Battlefield 3 looks an awful like like BF2BC, COD, and all the rest of the military shooters to the point I couldn't discern (and I am sure it will sell accordingly), BioWare had a short playable version of TOR that looked exactly like it does in all the videos, and Bethesda had a multiplayer build of Brink for people to play that, once again, looks an awful lot like other online shooters on the market. Lots of fun to check everything out, but no new revelations.

On the floor I really enjoyed the Kingston booth, where they had EGiNcontroL playing Starcraft 2 against challengers from the crowd while being cast live by professional shoutcaster Day[9]. I have to say it is really exciting to be there, surrounded by an enthusiastic crowd, watching high(er) level live matches. There was one game when the challenger got almost all of his army blown up by blings and just hearing the crowd holler and jeer was almost reminiscent of any professional sporting event I have been to. It really makes me want to pursue my thought of getting a small, local tournament up and running (more to come on that).

Regardless there was a lot of gaming, a lot of Magic the Gathering, a lot of great booths and great sights, and I got to meet a lot of amazing people already. Day 2, here we come!!

The Crysis 2 Demo Kicked my Ass (but not my Compy's)

I noticed on Steam last night that the Crysis 2 demo was available so I made the rookie mistake of taking that out for a spin. Before I get in to had badly I got pwned I have to say the game ran really well. Despite my compy being middle of the road at best the game had no graphical hiccups running at full 1920 by 1080 with medium settings. The graphics did look spectacular.

The mp itself plays very much like COD to me. You run around shooting people, raising your sights with the right mouse, getting knifed every 2 seconds. I suppose I can't blame my lack of skill on the developers, but I can say the game (and mp FPS's in general) are very forgiving to new players. I don't think I have, or will have the mental and testicular fortitude to really become average at the genre in general. It really makes me pine for the good ol' days of 1995 playing Quake on the WPI computer labs in my hometown of Worcester. I was actually competitive back then!

Also I am a reasonably strong L4D and TF2 player. I always tend to hold my own and be at least average (spy FTW), but those skills just seem lost in Crysis or COD.

Anyways the game did add the spin of both stealth and armor mode (pretty self explanatory). I can envision a leveled up player jumping around, raining death Crackdown style which would pretty pretty awesome actually. I just don't think I can develop the skills to get there. I'm sick enough as it is consistantly getting rocked in Starcraft 2 these days as it is.

On another note I was staring at my crappy, old XBOX 360, wondering why I could not get any adapter for HDMI for it when a thought came to me; why doesn't Microsoft and Sony sell XBOX and PS emulators? It seems like it would be easy money and a much higher profit margin for us PC master race. You can already use a 360 controller with a PC, why not take control of the market and let people play XBOX or PS discs too? I would definitely prefer that and it seems like it would be easy money.

PAX East will be 28 Days Later

Today is Friday February 11^th and PAX East is officially 4 weeks away. I have been trying to ignore the time between purchasing my 3 day pass and the actual convention in March, but it is hard not to focus on something that is really as incredible as PAX.

I remember quite fondly sitting in the main hall in the Hynes last year listening to Wil Wheaton’s keynote speech. By the time he was through I knew exactly how amazing PAX would be; seriously watch the youtube playlist if you have time. It’s pretty epic. Some highlights for me last year: Being stomped out by a Brotherhood of the Steel dude, getting eaten by Enforcer Zombies, and having an amazing time with some of my best friends.

This year my goals are really to be more social and get a little more involved with the community of fellow geeks, participate in a MTG tournament, play against someone other than my friends in the PC free play room, meet HuskyStarcraft and HDStarcraft who are kind enough to make my commuting into Boston everyday not only bearable, but enjoyable, and mostly I am excited to just be in that atmosphere of common interest.

I do plan on making up business cards with my contact info to not only promote this blog, but also maybe meet some people to play on Steam and Impulse with, and maybe another person or two to get involved in my TTRPG circle. I don’t know if I have time in my life or room in my heart, but I probably would be open to joining someone else’s as well or finding more people to play MTG with.

If there is a Starcraft 2 tournament I will definitely have to play a lot of games to train so I don’t get knocked out the first round. I don’t actually play much anymore but I am a high platinum Terran! (That's me front right BTW)