First post!

I recently started playing the SC 2 beta.  Some friends of mine let me know that Gamestop was giving away beta keys with preorders, and I couldn't wait.  Back in College Days, I had my first real exposure to PC gaming.  You see, I'd never actually had a PC that could play modern, online computer games until then.  However, my console gaming portfolio was rather striking.

I still remember the first LAN game I played in the BSB 2 dorm room floor my freshman year.  Someone had the disc for the exciting new Starcraft game and we were setting up 4v4 games with spawned copies.  While the "cool" kids were off hazing themselves to get in good with the frats, I was preparing to disembark on my PC nerd journey.  I was thinking of my academic life, of course.  Statistically speaking, gaming nerds were more likely to graduate than hazing thrillseekers.  I was off to a good start.  That day, I forged relationships that would last me the rest of my life.

I spent most of college either playing Starcraft, passing courses, or keeping myself fit.  Well, maybe fit isn't quite the right word.  Keeping myself from physically merging with the furniture was more like it.  Mostly, these activities were independent.  It's hard to read while playing basketball, and most profs didn't appreciate Starcraft as a classroom attention concentrator.

So here we are, 10+ years later.  I started playing the SC2 beta a few days ago, it's multiplayer only.  That's good, I'll have something to look forward to still on release day.  Since I hadn't played any RTS games in awhile, I checked the box that said I was new, hoping for some kind of tutorial or something.  Instead, I was placed in a "practice league" for 5 multiplayer games.  One of the things SC2 does really well is provide pretty much everything you need to know to play in mouseover tooltips.

The practice league games were silly roflstomps, clearly I had clicked a button meant for less able RTS players.  However, I did get a chance to explore the tech trees and see what kinds of units the game had.  The very first thing that I noticed was that SC2's look and feel is very similar to SC1's.  I had half expected that since SC1 seemed like a really good game to me, and I was worried SC2 would change it in all sorts of half cocked ways that made it a more or less inferior game, sort of like Halo 2 did.  However, they didn't do that.  If it ain't broke don't fix they says, and so they didn't fix unbroken things.  The next thing that I noticed was that while the look and feel was the same, the units and tech trees were really different.  It was like learning a new vocabulary.  Many of the classic units are gone, replaced my one or several new units and sometimes combined with other units or even buildings.  Make no mistake, it's a very different game than the original.  It just looks and feels the same.

Even now after a dozen or so games I don't quite know what all the units are by heart.  Generally speaking, the tech trees are just as deep as they were in SC 1, but the higher-end units are more practical in multiplayer games.  They're cheaper and correspondingly powerful.  I had a player shoved into a shoebox and was mining every single mineral location on the map to his one (10:1 or so income) when a small fleet of battlecruisers caught me offguard.  It was nearly enough to turn the tide for him before I caught my breath and managed to get enough of the right units to end them.  The tech tree is also much broader.  There's more variety of units to pick from and they each have special advantages.  Marines, zealots, and hydralisks are still there, and they still make good staple infantry when you need 'em.  Buildings have a much more prominent role to play as they now have special powers of their own and can be transmogrified in a couple of ways, especially Terran.  Optimus Prime would be proud.

Speaking of things Optimus Prime would be proud of, the Terrans get a new infantry-of-the-air unit called a Viking.  These things are cheap, fast, and awesome.  If they get tired of shooting things in the air, you can push a button that turns them from jet planes into ground based mech warriors!  They're not so bad on the ground either, sort of like Goliaths that can't shoot up.

What do you get if you mix 5 Goliaths with lightning and 80's hair band riffs?  In SC 2, you get the THOR, a mecha-Goliath that is the size of your screen.  Thors are produced by the Factory building to protect players during the seizure-inducing cutscene with flashing lights and interlocking lions.  I can't really tell what fights it can win because it's over too fast.  I can say that equal number Thors versus battlecruisers seems to favor the Thors.  I'm expecting the Starcraft 2: Transformers expansion to let Battlecruisers morph into Thors and vice versa.

Well, I think that I have gotten my blog off to a running start and can dump some other late night post SC2 games into it another time.  For now, be content with the comprehensive list of great SC 2 Beta Strategy sites that I have come across:



Yes, it's empty.  Need more sites with exciting stuff to read.  The public SC2 beta forums on Blizzard's website are pretty much filled with new Beta players QQ'ing about how overpowered unit/strat XYZ is.