Some unexpected work came my way this week, and with £50 that I really didn’t expect to have I decided to spend £31 of it on a copy of StarCraft II. I’ve been playing the Starter Edition and finding it very intimidating: there’s a great deal to learn before I can even begin, it seems, to do some strategic thinking. So I searched up a video on how to get started:

Day{9} Daily #269 – Newbie Tuesday: How to get into SC2!

I was quite surprised by the attitude taken by this video because it felt like the host, Day9, was turning the whole into a chore while repeating that it’s all about having fun. He talked about making oneself play a certain number of times per week, and I said hang on a minute, surely if this if you are having fun with this fun game, you won’t have any reason to make yourself play—I mean, maybe a certain amount of discipline will be required to improve in certain areas where one tends to be lazy, sure, but surely the game as a whole doesn’t need to be made into a chore like this.

Despite my uneasiness with this attitude I was fired up a fair bit by the video. Assuming I actually like a game I haven’t really played yet, it seems that it’s something that can become really fun and in a very positive way that doesn’t have to be dropped because it’s termtime etc.etc. so I’m looking forward to receiving the full game, finishing the campaign and challenges and seeing if I can macro and micro it up.

Been thinking about race choice. Traditionally in RTS games I like to turtle, but I’m not sure what this actually means because I’ve never played an RTS as an RTS. By turtle I mean “build up a pretty base because I am a megalomaniac”, so I’m not sure that the obvious recommendation of playing Terran is so great. I think I’m being drawn into Protoss by cool things like not having to leave workers building things, by the way they lay down buildings—building within a certain distance from your existing buildings takes me back to my C&C days—and by things like forcefields which looks like a really interesting tool to use for winning battles. I mean, winning battles in an RTS through something other than having an overwhelming number of units? I’m such a newb.

Day9’s manifesto is an interesting read: look how much he feels he must defend himself. My immediate thought is, “surely Chess is harder than SC2 can ever be” but you know, maybe this is entirely prejudice. The other issue here, which only someone like me is going to notice, is that SC2 is dependent on Blizzard. Something like Warcraft III isn’t because it has LAN support that can easily be hacked upon, but SC2 is dependent on this massive corporation. One can only hope that it could be hacked round if necessary, but I’m not so sure.