Jeu de Semaine, no. 7

[algorithmancy]

StarCraft II
I was a little too busy getting married when this first came out, and finally had time to play just recently. What's striking about this game is the meticulous brand management going on. Making a sequel to Starcraft requires navigating the dire straits between the Scylla of hardcore eSports players and the Charybdis of casual gamers.

Comments

multiplayer

[treptoplax]

The striking thing about multiplayer, for me, is the extent to which there's an opening book. There are really only a handful of viable build orders for the first 3+ minutes, and even executing them sloppily is very dangerous against the default-level AI or mediocre human players. I find that if I make it past that point against people around my theoretical skill level I almost always win, as they try to do the same thing bigger and harder and I adapt to their strategy. That part is fun, but I probably need another dozen games just as terran to get the opening for that race polished...

The automatch works pretty well, but I would probably play more if I knew more people playing. Which I suppose is the point of the Facebook integration (!), but I haven't given in to that particular beast yet.

[countertorque]

I think they did a good job with the game. I enjoyed what I played so far. But I haven't been back in months. For some reason it's much more social to ignore my wife on the couch playing console games than it is to ignore her in the study playing PC games.

The campaign went better when I finally figured out to stop thinking and just spam the special unit for that map.