Moving to a different state is hard - its expensive, you have to find a whole new social circle, to say nothing of finding a new job. I don't regret it for one second, however, as this move is part of what I'm hoping will be the start of "Life 2.0" where I figure out how to do what I love and make a living instead of just settling for something that makes me enough to pay the bills but slowly saps my will to live. So, goodbye bartending/serving and walking home with tips every night and hello poverty. Also, to quote a horribly beaten horse, you can take the girl out of California... etc.
The result of all this is having to be careful about what games I buy. Titles I could get real mileage out of would be key, and while I'm looking forward to being able to buy Guild Wars 2 soon, I was getting the itch for a new game well before it had been released. I'm still enjoying gaming online, but I was ready to move on from ME3. I still enjoy playing it, but I had already gotten the hang of all the classes I'd unlocked and the only challenge beyond that was getting better at the shooter aspect, something I've established is not my cup of tea really. There's a reason I love playing Vanguards - melee is fun. Also I was getting a little frustrated seeing people popping into games with their shiny new N7 class characters after I'd spent the whole afternoon getting enough credits to buy a Premium Spectre pack only to unlock the human Soldier. AGAIN. Seriously, that CCG thing Bioware put in there kind of makes me grind my teeth.
Anyway. All this led me to pick up Starcraft 2. You play with other people, and you don't have to have awesome hand-eye coordination. Also I had a vague memory from way back when the first game came out of completely failing to get it and rage-quitting after maybe the fourth mission. I've never let a genre beat me before, I thought, this is just shameful. So that's what I've been doing the past few weeks, and when I get into a game as complicated as Starcraft I really get into it. I've been reading strategy articles, watching pros play to get ideas, drilling myself on hotkeys, the whole nine yards. Reminds me of back when I was playing Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne. I had the demon fusion tree pretty much memorized because I was reading the strategy guide at work, and I could school you for a goddamn hour about using the phases of the moon to your advantage. Which is something I love in a game - surface simplicity (collecting demons, or building a strong base) that covers layers upon layers of complexity.
So I finished the campaign and just started playing with real humans online. It took me a while, at first I was nervous so all I was doing was playing the computer in vs. AI mode. But a couple things happened that shoved me into the quick match scene with a vengeance. First, I watched a bunch of Day9's Newbie Tuesday videos, which not only gave me some great fundamental tips but also enlightened me to the fact that people on the ladder are just people and most of them are pretty nice. And, at least in the practice league, probably just as scared about playing against other people. Which has been true almost across the board. The second thing was a couple weeks ago at my DnD Next game. There's a breed of tabletop gamer that can get really annoying to me, the person who's been gaming for so long they view themselves as some kind of gaming oracle who's opinions have ceased to be such and have instead morphed into golden morsels of wisdom. And we, the lowly peons who did not roll our first d20 before we could walk, sit at their feet waiting to hear the honeyed words of nerd truth fall from their lips. To be fair, this particular person in my group is really an awesome dude, but he does tend to slip into the nerd superiority from time to time. This time it was after I mentioned I'd been playing Starcraft; he asked me if I'd been playing online and I said not yet, I was still getting the hang of playing against the computer since this was really the first RTS I'd gotten into. "Don't even bother," he said, "There's no way you'll be able to catch up. Those people have been playing that game for years." I don't react well to being told I can't or shouldn't do something. Nuts to you, sir!, I thought. I will throw myself at this game until one of us breaks.
So far it hasn't been too bad. I'm still in the practice league, so everyone else is pretty much just as much of a noob as me. And even once you get on the ladder you aren't going to be matched with someone completely out of your league from what I've heard. My win/loss ratio is about even right now, which think is pretty good for someone completely new to the RTS thing. I even won my very first online match. I've been saving almost all of my replays and I actually like watching my losses to figure out what I did wrong. But I've had a couple awesome wins so far. Fair warning, if you don't play Starcraft the following will probably be far less exciting for you than it is for me.
Awesome Win #1: First time a Zerg player had pulled out a Nydus Network on me and at first I was convinced I was going to lose. He popped a bunch of roaches and zerglings into my base pretty early and did some major damage to my economy before I realized what was going on. What saved me was that I managed to hide my expansion so I don't think he knew I had built a Stargate until it was too late, and the fact that he spent all his resources on harassing me with the Nydus worms meant he'd spent almost nothing on anti-air units. I ended up sacrificing my main and just throwing what I had left at his base to try and cripple his economy before he could wise up and start countering air units. It worked - I managed to pump out a bunch of Zealots and a couple more Void Rays before he found my expansion. After that, it was cake, and the moment where I switched from "Oh god, I'm going to die, might as well go out in a blaze of glory" to "holy crap I might actually win this" was an amazing feeling. The end count was absolutely no structures left standing on either side, and me with a handful of Zealots and Void Rays.
Awesome Win #2: This was an example of how one can make a horrible and stupid mistake but still adapt and pull a win out of it. Watching the replay, I made a lot of mistakes at the beginning. I missed my first pylon and wasted a Chronoboost because of that, and I built my first Gateway really late. But the kicker was when I decided to try a wall-off for the first time and building-blocked ALL my probes inside my base. Yes, that is correct, I locked myself into my own base. So, unless I destroyed an expensive building I would have no expansion, no proxy pylon, no nothing. Well, I decided to run with it, try some early aggression and possibly die horribly. Luckily I had a pylon outside my base, so I started warping in Stalkers a fast as I could and sent them to hang out under the cliff of my opponent's base while I got Blink. And I added a Stargate for good measure - for some people its "When behind, Dark Shrine" but for me apparently its "When you're losing the fray, go Void Ray." By the time Blink was done I had a decent number of Stalkers outside his base; so I blinked them all up the cliff and started tearing into his units. I held back the Void Ray at first until I saw a couple siege tanks and managed to warp in a few more Stalkers to clean up his Marines and ended up winning. So I didn't feel so stupid, but I did feel like sending him a chat that said something like "Hey dude, sorry I came at you so early, but I walled all my probes into my own base. Like a boss." Watching the replay was pretty enlightening - the only reason that had worked was pure luck. He'd built missile turrets on the opposite side of his base. If he'd spread out his turrets or if I'd picked the other side of his base to camp out at I would have been dead.
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