Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Sometimes games brood, sitting in a corner and calculating their every internal component with a die that has unlimited sides. That can be agreeable, but it’s much more agreeable when a new game approaches wearing a jester’s hat and jigging merrily into view. Such is the case with Blizzard DOTA, the trailer for which has all the appearance of a wonderful parody. But this is reality and you will indeed be able to play a DOTA-styled game, pitching Blizzard characters against each other, with no regard for lore or legacy. It is to be an officially released Starcraft 2 mod, although you won’t even need to buy Starcraft 2 to play it.

Read the rest of this entry »

In the Great Battle Of The DOTAs, Eurogamer reports that Blizzard’s own version, made as a mod for Starcraft 2, won’t be with us until 2012 now. Because they scrapped the version now assumed to release near Heart of the Swarm, and started over. The version shown at last year’s BlizzCon is no more. The reboot will apparently aim to make the game more accessible to newcomers, which it’s hard to believe isn’t a reaction to Valve’s DOTA 2. There are lots more details in the EG story. So, two DOTAs due to arrive next year, from two of the most powerful developers in the world. Now, if only I liked DOTA games.

Reader and filmmaker Luke Pierson has made a short documentary feature about competitive Starcraft 2, and I’ve posted it below for you to take a look at. The film is a freshman year documentary project for the film school at Columbia College Chicago, and was shot at (presumably the Starcraft 2 club of) University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Pierson explains: “I really wanted to create something that would make it easier for competitive starcraft players to explain to their friends and family (gaming and otherwise) what it’s all about.” And he’s not done a bad job.

Any other gamer-filmmakers out there?
Read the rest of this entry »

Hello! Back in the 21st century actual video gaming is happening, and it’s taking a spin this weekend with the Major League Gaming circuit, which commences play in just over an hour. This is a big old pro-gaming tournament happening right now in Dallas, with Starcraft 2 being the big draw for PC types. More information and streams of the events are embedded below, for your viewing pleasure.
Read the rest of this entry »

Starcraft II’s competitive side is really beginning to catch fire, with the North American Star League announcing that their first season will have $100,000 of prize money available. Three seasons have reportedly secured funding, with the last one bringing in $200,000 in prizes. That first season is taking place from April 5th for thirteen weeks. It’ll be viewable five nights a week at 5pm PST, culminating in 16-man finals.

As a side note, I’ve been watching some of the competitive games taking place in SC2, and the top level beginning to seem supernatural. The game is RTS kung-fu. Anyway, it should be interesting to see how this latest bout of e-sports enthusiasm pans out.

The StarCraft MMO mod wrangle looks to have resolved itself overnight, with Blizzard finally offering a comment beyond a scary form DMCA notice. In a statement released to all sorts of places last night, they confirmed they’re not going to block the mod’s ongoing development. While the unwise ‘World of StarCraft’ name was, unsurprisingly, key to the issue, a comment from modder Ryan Winzen suggests that the other side made a bit of a boo-boo too…
Read the rest of this entry »

Game Informer have been chatting to Dustin Browder, lead bossman on StarCraft 2, and at the end of the interview, when asked about the other installments of the game, he said this: “We’ve got some mods we’ve developed internally that we’re going to put out to get some more art into the hands of the mod makers but also provide what we hope are some polished gameplay experiences for our fans to get more value out of Battle.net.”

A developer releasing its own mods? I’m not even sure what you call that. Creator generated content? Anyway, they had talked up how powerful and flexible the engine is before release, so I guess we will be able to see Blizzard put some of their own muscle behind that notion. Interesting.

It’s Friday, so time to quickly nose around and see if there are any key stories we’ve missed. And Blizzard releasing their first official custom map for Starcraft 2? That’s a key story. Not an enormous key, like the one Superman uses to keep his Fortress of Solitude locked, but certainly some manner of key. Perhaps one for a padlock for a bike or something. ANYWAY! The map’s called Burning Tide and is basically a 3v3 map riffing off the Devil’s Playground mission from the campaign, with all the fun rising and lowering lava flows and desperate rushing to get Ore. Or, as I prefer to call it “Space-Iron”. You’ll find it in your Custom Games folder in Starcraft II if you just play now.

UPDATE: Blizzard are a-fixin’ it, claiming the deactivation thing is an ‘issue’ rather than a decision, and will be sorted in an upcoming patch.

ORIGINAL: While we all knew Battle.net’s careful weaving into StarCraft 2′s fabric meant Blizzard’s latest wasn’t something to be played in an entirely offline vacuum, it allowed the less bewebbed players amongst us to have some singleplayer fun without being chastised. A quick nod to the Blizzardian mothership every 30 days was required, but other than that, carry on Zerging. That may have changed, with the game apparently now losing its activation every time you turn your PC off.
Read the rest of this entry »

You won’t find many people hailing Starcraft 2′s narrative. The characters are lumpen, the dialogue weak and the general plot simultaneously archetypal to the point of cliché while only really working if you assume players are invested in characters like Kerrigan. Which even for a game as successful as Starcraft, is a big assumption to make. There’s people playing it now who weren’t even alive back then.

However there’s one area where I think it’s quite clever and even genuinely ground-breaking, at least as far as mainstream games go. I talk about it below. There’s no direct spoilers, but there’s structural spoilers which may be even worse. I’m about to basically explain how a card-trick works…
Read the rest of this entry »

In what journalists are calling a “Dick Move”, Blizzard has announced that there will be no reviews of StarCraft 2 before lunch. Would-be reviewers are going to have to wait until after everybody in the office has had lunch before posting their review of the hotly anticipated RTS.

Wait, hang on. Sorry, I misread my RSS feed. Blizzard has announced there will be no StarCraft 2 reviews before launch. Before the game’s launch, on Tuesday, when the BattleNet servers go live. According to Eurogamer Blizzard was “unable to offer an official comment at the time of writing”, though they gather that it’s to do with Blizzard not wanting anybody to play the game without the full suite of BattleNet features. What did you have for lunch today, readers?