Your choices, “sir”.
So we’re co-opting the old “reduce, reuse, recycle” adage, and re-purposing “reuse” as “re-pews”.
Is now really the moment to give us a hard time about this? Don’t you know us well enough by now? Seriously. Cut us a break.
Oh yeah, the title – with less than a week until the official launch of Starcraft II, we’ve taken the time to look forward and then look back a little bit to get some perspective on the game. Also, our neck kinda hurts, and we figure looking around really quickly should totally fix that.
Looking ahead, we see the release looming. Blizzard has already announced “Zerg Invasion” plans at stores in California and the UK before the midnight launch on the 27th (re: dudes in costume RP’ing before midnight), which will give some nerdy spice to an already technologically tasty event. We’re sure that these release festivities will be well-populated, but realistically they will be attended in force only by contractually-bound employees and those of our brethren who want to the feel the rush of actual human contact for a brief period before their re-confinement to their own personal hell. Nothing smells like “weird” more than a group of gamers waiting for a new game release.
Sure, we’re interesting – especially in the body odour department – but we’re not exactly “normal”.
In many cases, nerds nationally will be going the “digital download” route that Blizz is offering. Gamers can download the SCII client right now and as soon as the release date hits can pay for and activate their client. This should hopefully cut down on the legions of fans overwhelming the download servers by spacing the purchasing out a little bit, but be warned – the digital copies will not be ready for activation until 10:00 AM PDT. This means if you brave the nerd-legions for a hardcopy, you can be playing 9 or so hours earlier. As well, it will still take the purchasing of a code on the day of release to activate the game, and while the server stress should be less than full-on game client downloads, it will still be present.
Be calm and maybe drink some more mountain dew. Deep breaths. Deep breaths.
But the release also has us looking back. Blizzard has recycled a great many of the mechanics that made the original game great, and based on our experiences in the Beta, to great success. When you’ve got the best-selling RTS franchise in gaming history behind you, there’s really no need to rewrite history. It looks better, plays better, and smells a little more earthy, but Starcraft II is the successor, not totally-new-version of Starcraft, and it shows. Is that a little lazy on Blizzard’s part? Sure. But it’s also smart. Millions of dollars, incoming!
So savour this week(ish) long break gamers, say goodbye to your “friends” and families, and make sure you’ve got your Starcraft II survival kit all stocked up. The time to bust out that new Razer gaming mouse is almost here, so get those fingers limbered up and your mind right to pwn some n00bs.
Time to pewpew.
Then wash (metaphorically – we are gamers, after all), rinse (off the Zerg blood), and re-pewt.
Oh yeah. Nailed it.
