Cheeky Monkey!

My left hand is sore. How is that possible one may ask, well the answer is simple it begins with an S and ends with a –tarcraft 2. I’ve been gaming since morning till lunch then decided to stop and study, eat, take a shower and all that good stuff. So right now, I want to play the game and my left hand is sore. To be exact my palm muscle is sore and the only strenuous thing I can remember this hand doing was mashing on hotkeys.

Does Starcraft 2 live up to the hype? By now there are dozens of reviews out there that have the same general opinion as mine Starcraft 2 is a splendid game. I have some gripes with somethings like certain parts of dialogue and storyline but that’s a personal preference I can’t write a review but there is one of professional opinion that managed to express my gripes and loves quite perfectly: http://www.giantbomb.com/starcraft-ii-wings-of-liberty/61-20674/reviews/

I’ve always regarded gaming as this addiction that I should try to grow out of. Ever since high school it has been a love hate relationship, I hate it for what it takes away what I could have been doing (opportunity cost) but I love it at the same time maybe due to its addictive nature or because of my long history as a gamer since the first command and conquer, your to blame Dad. I know some most people are either ignorant about it and listen to all that stereotypical media garbage or they make ass-umptions like the douchebags they are. I detest how society places people with ‘proper’ hobbies on a bloody pedestal to be glorified. How being good at a sport is seen to be more beneficial than being proficient in a game.

Which is true. I can’t deny that no matter what reasoning I try to use to justify the benefits of gaming vs. sports, sports always comes out on top. My opinion sort of changed once I heard someone saying something along the lines of, “Anything that requires you to work hard to be good at isn’t a waste of time.”

When you apply that sort of thinking into hobbies it actually makes sense, not all I’m sure I mean if your hobby is mopping the floor does that mean you can work hard and become a professional in the sport Curling? I think not. But it does bring up the point that just because it’s a game do we put off that hard work it requires to be good at it, because it’s a video game?

Personally I like sports that are game oriented like football, basketball, badminton, anything with rules. But most of these sports are team oriented which is not to my liking. The competition in any casual sport game is bogged down by its friendly nature to play nice. The thing about starcraft is that it is very competitive, something I cannot find in any real sport unless I acquire the skills to compete at a state level .

Adrenaline running in the veins, heart pumping, palm sweating, a held breath, a trembling hand, all these happening while your mind if caught in a battle of wits and choice. Do I expand? Do I tech? Do I build workers or units? Where is his main army? What is his composition? I should be scouting. Do I have the right mix of units? Has he expanded?

Needless to say, starcraft 2 is chess with a syringe of adrenaline stabbed into your thigh. And what really bothers me is that people with no knowledge of this game will dismiss it like any other game and lump it together with the likes of massively popular games such as Halo or Modern Warfare because it’s a video game and thus mind numbing. I’m not saying those two games are bad games or stupid by nature no, no ,no ,no, no – what I’m implying is that ignorant people would make those cliché assumptions of what a game is – violent and simple.

Meeting new people you understand how non-widespread gaming is but what grinds my gear is not their ignorance or their stupid assumptions, it’s that look of pity. Like when someone says he collects anime figurines or plays warhammer 40k the tabletop game or magic thegathering. I know not everyone makes that stupid face but those that do, can go fuck themselves for all I care.

At this point I have forgotten what was my intention of writing this. So I will conclude this entry with a youtube video. Oh, and about the title - well lets just say I've been using that a bit excessively right now.

iTunes Ver.2

Its been roughly half a year since the first iTunes post. Because I cant lug around my beloved desktop I've been happy to use a Vaio laptop. Its surprisingly awesome. Apple however is Fucking stupid (not to mention iTunes is a shitty program that eats up CPU resources), conveniently my iTunes playlist with all my songs and its respectives play count and skip count had a reset. Tried and could not fix the problem.

So here is my top 5 and yes, the top two is from an anime. Enjoy, or not.......jerk.

Jaydiohead
Lucifers Jigsaw (39) and Optimistic Movement (39)
the rest of the album + encore is awesome too

Jaydiohead - Jay-Z x Radiohead by Max Tannone

Right Now ~ Fort Minor
(play count: 41)



My Song ~ Girls Dead Monster
(play count: 45)

Crow Song ~ Girls Dead Monster
(play count: 68)

Evangelion 2.0

Its been a cool two years since I saw the first of the Rebirth of Evangelion tetralogy. I couldn't even remember how it ended, all I remembered was that it was awesome. Evangelion 1.0 was a mirror to the anime series, a remake (part of it, the best part imho) that had no plot changes the difference was in the animation, visuals, music, the technical stuff and it was superb; as expected from a movie remake.

Although my memory of Evangelion the original series is frazzled by time and space one thing is certain, the plot changes in Evangelion 2.0 gives the series a breath of new life. And to a certain extent an easier understanding of the story in general. The problem with the anime series (from my memory) was that it ended on a strange end of Gods, fractured realities of what could have been and an assortment of visual stimuli that would cause photosensitive epilepsy. The ending ruined the original series for me only because of its confusing nature and its sudden divorce from reality that made me go, "Wait....whaaaaaa?"

The past is the past, Evangelion 2.0 is an awesome anime movie. Not as good as Summer Wars but this isn't a competition of which movie can please you best. I think what made Eva 2.0 better than its original material is the better fleshed out characters. His father seems less of the asshole and Shinji, well I find myself hating him much more less than I did before as for the others, there is much more to them than I am willing or able to write about at this moment.

Another aspect that I love about this movie is its portrayal of daily life in Tokyo-3 their short clips one minute or two at best but its gives so much character and life to the city their trying to protect.

All in all, Rebuild of Evangelion is an awesome tetralogy (50% complete for now) and I implore anyone who is interested in any good story to watch it and enjoy.

Now I just have to wait for the sequel, another two years most likely......*sigh*

Starcraft, you Pwn me.

(I know the picture is from sc2, it was just too hilarious to ignore)

I recently bought starcraft, was too lazy to go to the game shop so instead I paid a vist to blizzard store and surprise, surprise a digital copy! Hell yea, so I bought that online. First thing I did was to play against the PC just to get my hotkeys a bit grounded. I've played starcraft multiplayer a little bit back home, wanted to get into it again because of starcraft 2. SO i new the hotkeys, and units etc, basic basic stuff.

Now, haha! Now I was feeling confident! Of to battle.net I went but alas it was... weird. There were no games in english. So snooping around my favourite starcraft site (TL.net) I discovered Iccup. AN international server for starcraft players who are 'serious'. I thought that last part was a joke, boy, was I wrong.

Rank D. You'd think people in rank D would have problems getting the hotkeys right, you'd think they wouldnt use the keyboard, you'd think that they were just a bunch of easy kills, I knew a few builds vaguely but these people on Iccup they knew more than I did. Digg this, I've won only one single game. ONLY ONE out of maybe 8 1 v 1 matches, I've won 2 out of 3 Big game hunter matches. My first game was rather fun I had 3 rax but did not rush him, wish i should have he was zerg. I was slow, my macro was really weak and he got mutalisk. Mutalisk stacking my marines one by one but I survived for a fair bit before I gg'd.

The other games were just me fucking up, I manage to push em back far but always my macro is really bad. Or sometimes I just get jacked because of I had no anti air, or pushed too much and lost all my units, or did not push enough and he secured his natural. The worst game was this protoss player, I was playing Terran and he came into my base built a pylon. I thought well fuck it whats a pylon gonna do. I somehow managed to kill that probe with my scv. A minute later here comes another probe and he puts a FUCKING CANNON on the pylon which was on my base. I panicked sent my SCV's on him, sent I had one marine, but the single probe continued to make a second cannon and assimilator on my gas. My macro and micro was so terribly bad, I was trying to control this dumb ass situation while my minerals had stacked to 300. The rest is history I was badly, badly owned. His rank? D.

I know I'm a noob. But, damn. Noobs in starcraft are no fucking joke. I dont know how any new player would get into this game multiplayer wise. If he had a practice partner it wouldn't be so bad. I'm okay with it, because the amazing thing about starcraft is that you can analyse you game and pin point your mistake. Like not microing well enough, or not scouting the second time, or getting that armory up fast enought for goliaths, or not upgrading that overlord speed, it goes on forever.

I think the best thing about starcraft is that, sure 50% to 60% (maybe? I dont know) is your skill on the mouse on keyboard at macro and micro. The other percentage is knowledge, information, build order, its so damn important. I lost mostly cause I did not know. Some games I was ahead but loss because of bad micro macro. Its not infuriating but frustrating in a good way, because I want to get better.

I started playing at 7oclock and wanted to stop at 10pm, I looked at the clock the first time since 7 and it was 12. Losing sucks, but starcraft is fun regardless of win or lose espcially for a noob like me.

So anyone want to play starcraft with this noob? I'd be happy to play, win - lose it dont matter. Just watch out for my 4 pool!

Heroes of Newerth.

I recently have been obsessively playing a game called: Heroes of Newerth. Here's a short description from wikipedia they sum it up rather nicely;

"Heroes of Newerth is a Real-time Strategy game made by S2 Games based on the Warcraft III scenario Defense of the Ancients otherwise known as (DotA)."

The game plays exactly like Dota but in a more refined, clean and unrestricted way. The coding is not restricted to the Warcraft 3 engine, so many spells/ powers/ abilities have incredibly unique and cool animations, and the creativity is quite refreshing. Although much of the core characters are still there are new ones and the cores get tweaked in one way or another. Its the same game on the same board but with different chess pieces.

I've played roughly ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY matches in the last few days. From 2nd of April to today 11th of April. Its a fun game, but again the community reeks. Its just as bad as dota, maybe worst with all the elitist garbage. Playing this game has given me practice to cuss many phrases and insults have been made with my time playing it and its not because I was trolling, no no no no. As much as I love trolling, I was the one being unreasonably crucified with noob stakes and feeder spears. Just so you know, I was rather far from noob my KDR is 1.0 over all my games and I have a rating of 1600, a bad player would normally have a psr <1500>

After a week of playing this game, almost incessantly and obsessively, I've recently (yesterday) have toned the playing hours down significantly. To be frank, I played it because I needed something to fill the void that is starcraft. Nothing can, I bought Bad Company 2, KOTOR, redownloaded Counter strike source and Modern Warfare 2. Nothing, lasted. HON lasted the longest if we're counting hours played which I have easily managed to get over 100 hours in HON, BC2 was around sixty i think. My recent obsession with HON is because of my previous history with DOTA or maybe its because of how awesome the rating system is, its quite addictive to rack up those points and improve one's KDR (kill death ratio). Although the community really kills this game, the fact is that HON like dota is a very team oriented game. Something that may be fun once in a while for example: playing starcraft with friends is ludicrously entertaining. But, playing with a bunch of strangers takes a toll especially when most of them are unforgiving douchebags that can only help one by calling others noob, feeder, or [insert cuss word here]. The key word is friends. But still, I would not recommend this to any of my friends, word of advice; stay away. I will, glad I could try it out and now call bull fuck on it.

Also thanks to HON I have a new inclination to hate people from the Philippines, not to be racist but; their such DICKS IN HON.

Now, tomorrow I think I'll check out the closest game store to look for Starcraft Brood war.