<3 Gaming

Barnes and Noble recently had a nice little clearance sale going on so I thought I would pick up a book or two… one thing led to another, and I wound up spending about $40. Weee!

Mmmmmmmm, SciFi/Fantasy

The list (for those who can’t decipher the photo) follows from top to bottom:

• Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card (actually this book was given to me by my father in law who picked it up in a thrift store, which just so happens to be a great place to find really cheap books!)
• Uninvited by Justin Musk
• Lord of Bones by Justine Musk
• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clark
• Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi (This series of books is amazing!)
• Dreamsongs Volume II by George R. R. Martin
• The Complete Sherlock Holmes (leatherbound) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• NEXT by Micheal Crichton

Almost all of these books were under $5 with the exception of the Sherlock Holmes collection. I am really excited to start reading Justin Musk’s books since I have been reading her blog for quite a while now. She has great advice on there for anyone who is interested at all in writing or learning the process.  The rest should be fairly well known to an avid Scifi/Fantasy reader, or at least to me, with the exception of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell which apparently won a Hugo a few years  back.  So it must be rather enjoyable!

Now to find some time to read them between games of Starcraft 2…

Like many I have been consuming hours and hours of YouTube Starcraft 2 beta videos. Specifically HDStarcraft & Husky Starcraft, who are probably the best two commentators on YouTube for SC2B. Each of them have tons of videos that are not only informative, but also genuinely fun to watch. Anywho, after a few weeks of dedicated refreshing of my inbox/battle net account, and these hours on YouTube someone up there saw fit for me to get a beta key! Actually it was my former college roommate, but he is kind of tall! I had held back from making a post about any of the SC2 beta before this solely because I had only the viewing pleasure of these commentators but now I feel like I can really give a good and brief “Saritor” spin to the way the beta has been for me.

A few things happen when you log on to battle.net for the first time aside from the obligatory pants wetting from excitement. You are asked to pick what you think your skill level is going to be (Total noob? Check!) and wind up playing ten preliminary games to get yourself placed in to some league. I have to admit, that I even surprised myself by getting placed in the silver league, when I expected to end up in copper or bronze. Let us hope I can hold my own while sticking to it.

Solo games are very interesting, and extremely competitive already. The biggest challenge for me so far has been learning how to maintain macro on as large of a scale as is required by SC simply because I am used to the more micro intense Warcraft 3.  Multi-player games seem quite the opposite (2v2s are all that is available at the moment). Most of the time they just feel like gimmick games with suiciding partners and poor matchmaking/one-sidedness. Its probably because I haven’t finished my preliminaries and due to the low number of players in beta, but RT feels way too much like the plague of WC3′s RT.  Many players just join games to sabotage themselves or try to do something very stupid, and it all is very unsuitable for my tastes. I approach the game with a “want to learn” attitude most of the time, and it is damn near impossible to know what you could have done to improve your game when your teammate tells his SCVs to kill his command center and then go rush your base. This is why I have mostly stuck to 1v1s. I really can’t say much about the 2v2 arranged team games, since most of the people I play with also like to 1v1, so we just 1v1 each other.

As far as the rest of battle net goes, many people seem to be disappointed in the lack of features it has (ie, chat channels), but at this point I don’t think this is the concern of Blizzard and so I have just put my opinions on the matter on the back burner. The system that is currently in place, though lonely at times is not really terrible and its plain to see that it is also not the final product. Probably one of the things I am most excited about, custom map making, hasn’t even been the focus of the beta yet, and who knows if it even will be. Though from the persistent internet fan base who have been keeping us up to date with Galaxy (the new “language” for SC2 map making) it seems like it will be better than ever. The distribution method seems to be minimally in place and I can’t wait to see that once it goes live too.

So if you feel like stomping a noob into the ground and you are in the SC2 beta please feel free to message me I am saritor.subc on battle net. I am usually around in the evenings and am always accepting 1v1 challenges!

So in an effort to consolidate all my various web presences back under one host you will notice I have redirected my old blogger site to this one. I rather like the very small theme. It keeps things nice and tidy! Also a list of my projects will end up on the projects page eventually as they are completed.

Just some food for thought…

According to this WoW.com article. Blizzard is in the works of potentially mandating authenticators on all World of Warcraft accounts. To be honest, I really like the authenticator idea. I even have the app on my iPhone and use it.  I find it to be a great extra measure of security for protecting my account info regardless of my amazing ability to not navigate to every fishing website messaged to me in game.  The only issue I see with a mandatory authenticator is that they do not soley bind to a WoW account, but it is something that your battle.net account uses as well.  What about all those people who are going to buy Starcraft 2/Diablo 3 that don’t play World of Warcraft?

Perhaps they will give a free authenticator away with the purchase of each game, and pray that it doesn’t get lost.  Hopefully Blizzard will make a strong attempt to get the authenticator application on more mobile platforms before they make a move to do this since in my humble opinion it seems to be the most reliable method of not having it stolen by the dresser goblins who also steal my socks.  After all, my iPhone never leaves my sight!