Back in the heady early days of my multiplayer gaming addiction,
crowded into garages and lounge rooms, when my buddies got bored with
me schooling them at Quake we would play Warcraft 2 and later
Starcraft. I was never as obsessed with real time strategy games
anywhere near my love of Quake, but I have very fond memories of blood
rushed ogres and unleashing swarms of zerglings apon my friends. 12 long years after the original, Starcraft 2 has been released and
has reinvigorated my interest in RTS gaming. As is my usual approach
to gaming, I skipped over the single player campaign and dove directly
into the online multiplayer portion of Starcraft 2. I watched a couple
of tutorial videos on youtube and learned how to do the cheesiest and
easiest rushing strategies, using these to do pretty well in the
ranking matches. In hindsight, getting placed into the gold ladders
wasn't a smart move as the players I'm facing actually know more than
how to build up a rushing force in the 1st 5 minutes of a match. I
threw some of my ranking matches for the 1v1 and 4v4 ladders and got
ranked in silver for these, where I'm actually able to hold my own. I've been watching a lot of replays of the very very good players
downloaded from the amazingly slick sc2replayed.com and learning a lot.
I still suck but at least I have a bit of depth to my strategy if
someone is able to counter my early game attacks. The fact that the
game rewards aggressive play really resonates with me. I can't see
this developing into a true obsession, as I'm well aware that the time
investment required to compete at top levels in Starcraft 2 would be
insane especially because the top guys have been playing the original
game for the last 12 years. However I am really enjoying finding the
most annoying tactics and using these to piss off my enemies. I've
also found that a few quick games of Starcraft 2 puts me into a great
mindset for poker. "Who called in the fleet?"
