Starcraft at Campus

We had a discussion at work today. One of my Russian co-workers told how everyone at his university played Starcraft exclusively for a period of two years. I basically did the same except me not being in college at the time. The third in our conversation had never heard of Starcraft and wanted to talk about World in Conflict! I'm stunned.

I have never played World in Conflict and I guess it is an okay game, but it is symptomatic of the difference between gamers who play games to get a set experience and gamers who play games because they offer an opportunity to dive into a game to learn to master it. It is the difference between role-playing that you command armies to the graphics and setting of the game just being a metaphor to help the player learn the underlying game mechanics.

And some people do not play to win. They want a game that gives them progress and a sense of accomplishment regardless of the level of their skill at the game. I want to be owned by the game or my opponent if I do not go out of my way to win!

Now, there is nothing wrong with playing games casually and to do a bit of role-playing too. I do that from time to time. I just bought Spore for example (and that is a shitty game, but that was not my point) to get exactly that kind of experience. But I really like the hard core game experience too and it has given me so many moments of joy over the last 10 to 12 years. I appreciate it a lot.

Warcraft III Dream Team

So I have been playing some Warcraft III lately and winning to my big surprise. Amazing, but somewhat more understandable when I have been playing team games with AiurAdun and JENS_VIKING (really stupid name, but that is another story). Yesterday we managed to win six 3v3 games in a row and no losses at all. It wasn't even hard.

Our suckage is complete. I may be the suckiest player on the team, but the competition as to who sucks the most, is tough. We don't scout and only change builds a long time after we discover what our opponents are trying. And yet we are winning. I suspect I hack, but don't know how I do that?! ... and wouldn't I know?

In one of the closest games we had, we completely annihilated the Orc opponent very early on and then spent 10 minutes fighting huge number of towers and chimeras.

We went all the way to level 13 in one evening and I hope that we will go even further. Level 20 does not seem out of reach despite our utter lack of skill.

Danish Starcraft Tournaments

Back in the days I used to run a website called www.teamladder.dk, a Danish gaming site centered about RTS games in general and Starcraft: Brood War in particular. Part of the site was to run regular tournaments for Danes and set up matches against our archenemies the Swedes ;-).

Later my site merged with www.quake3.dk to become www.dailyrush.dk. To this day DailyRush has a solid core of Danish former Starcraft players among its readers. Lately we have been discussing a new tournament among ourselves and yesterday the first attempt happened.

Around 8 players had shown interest but only 4 showed up. About what you could expect and one of them (KakaoPlante) lagged so bad he had to quit. That left three of us. Not enough to really call a tournament, but still loads of fun. Especially getting to observe and comment on games as they were being played.

The highlight of the experience was my game as Protoss on Othello against my friend AiurAdun as Zerg (replay). Yet another victory! Yay, glory!

In the forum the results and comments have shown enough interest that we will try again in 2 weeks time. This time hopefully with a lot more players.