StarCraft II

The time has come, the release of StarCraft 2 is today and I was there at midnight to get my copy.  As an aside, I was the first one to get out of GameStop with my spiffy new copy of StarCraft, kind of a fun feeling! 

To say the build-up to this game has been huge is a gross understatement.  Blizzard even had TV commercials for the game…TV Commercials…how many video games do you know have TV commercials announcing the release of a game?  I guess it’s well deserved though, this game has been 11 years in the making so the hype for the game has been there for years.  Anyway, enough about the build-up, on to my thoughts about the game.  I will try my best to not have any spoiler content in here, but no promises!

The game, to say the least, is AWESOME!  I’m about half way through the single player campaign at this point and it has been totally amazing!  Most of the classic characters are there, Raynor, Kerrigan, Mengsk, the list goes on.  The characters have moved on in their lives, but they are still all very recognizable and the voice acting at least very similar, if not the same, as the original.  Once you get past the initial reintroduction of some of the main characters, this is mostly done with various cinematic cuts (that are beautiful), you move onto game play!  For the sake of cutting out spoilers I won’t go into any specifics of the story, but suffice to say, I’m half-way through and can’t wait to get back to it!

So the game is awesome, it has a very familiar sense, as well as a sense of something different.  I think a lot of the different feeling has a  lot to do with the new units that have been introduced in the game.  We got to see all the new units in action during the Beta, but to get the fully integrated sense that comes with a single player game is a great thing.  It also has awesome graphics.  The cinematic cut scenes, which they use in between almost every level, are very well done.  All the scenes are animated so there’s no live action in the game, but like I said, they look very real! 

Overall, at this point, I have give the game a 5 out of 5.  I haven’t really messed with the multi-player yet (even though I played it a ton during Beta) so I really don’t expect much different there.  If it is the same, the overall score of the game will not affected at all since I had a great time with the Beta.

Ok, that’s gonna be about it from me for now.  As I get deeper into the game I’ll post some more thoughts and I’ll see if I can get some multi-player games posted for you all to watch!

~C

Another Day another power outage

Here it is again, a weekend about to being and my phone explodes with alerts…

      ”Warning” it says

      “APC02 has switched to battery backup”

     “OK”, I say, “this must just be a quick power blink, no big deal”

     Another text message “Warning” it reads

     “APC01 has switched to battery backup”

     “AH HELL” I say.  “Maybe my boss is testing something?”

     After a quick call to the boss it becomes very clear that in fact the power has gone out at our building once again.  As an aside, the power went out last week too due to a massive storm that ripped through central Virginia and only left pain and destruction in it’s path.  So I turn my car around and head back to the office, knowing full-well that when I get back there all of servers will have been hard powered down due to no one being there to turn them off and the UPS’ only last for a couple of minutes at best.  I get back to the office and I hear the tell tale sign of power being out that I learned last week, a generator working at full capacity for another company in our building.  At this point I get the sinking feeling in my stomach and realize that my nice 3-day holiday weekend that I was so looking forward too, may not come to pass. 

I head into the building and see only the emergency lights are turned on and when I get to our office I see all our lights out and the all-too familiar chirps of our users UPS’ telling me that the power to the office is out and people need to turn their computers off (mind you, most everyone has already gone home for the long weekend.) *sigh*

A couple of phone calls to the boss and to the power company and I discover that someone has hit an underground power line and the estimated return time for the power is 11pm (as I look at my clock now it’s 7:16 and I’ve already been here a while.)  OK, so what do I do now.  I now know an approximate time when the power will be back, so I’m mostly free, but I still need to be around just in case it comes back a bit earlier, so what to do?  Hey, how about dinner in town!  Great idea!  So I’m sitting here, waiting for Amy to finish with all the pets and then head into town so we can go grab some dinner and then I’ll head back here in hopes of the power being back on so I can get all the servers reset.  While resetting the servers, I’m also hopeful that due to the hard turning off of the SQL database, that it did not get corrupted.  If this is the case, then we will have to rebuild the entire SQL database from backups, and there goes the holiday weekend straight down the crapper, and everyone always thought IT was a glorious job…

In the end I guess I really can’t complain too much.  I’m just sitting here at my desk and while it is a bit warm, it’s not too bad and I get time to do things…like blog!  Now only if I had a way to publish this……

~C