Starcraft and the New Year
Happy New Year!
Now that we have that out of the day, I have something far more interesting to write about: Starcraft 2
My friends know that I’m not that big of a gamer. League of Legends was pretty big back when I was in high school, but I never got into it, even though most of my friends played it. Whenever my friends talked about League, my eyes kinda just glazed over and my mind trailed off while they talked about how they “totally crushed this n00b” or something to that effect.
What most of my friends don’t know is that I actually played a bunch of Starcraft back when I was in middle school. Mind you, it wasn’t the fancy Starcraft 2 (which came out in 2010), but it was the 1998 classic Brood War. I remember the days when I would boot up our family’s ancient and massive PC tower and play a few games. Fast-forward to this past week and I was running Starcraft 2 on my laptop. This probably makes me feel old but I think that’s just insane. I’m equally surprised when I’m able to play games on my Switch (which I really should dust off more) that I played as a kid on my friend’s PlayStation consoles. CPU power has really come far.
I got into StarCraft 2 this past week because of my friend David. We were discussing the topic of gaming (and the insane sums of money that some professional esport players made), when he mentioned that Starcraft was now free-to-play. I probably wouldn’t have paid any amount of money to play Starcraft. That said, the fact that it was free and I still have a few more days of break meant that I was enticed enough to install it on my machine and play a 1v1 game with him.
I of course got utterly destroyed by my friend. It wasn’t even close. I was pretty overwhelmed coming back to a version of a game that I haven’t played in _literally _ a decade. After that we just played a few co-op games against the AI, in which David proceeded to just win again and again. I think I’m too old to really get back into Starcraft (and competitive gaming in general), but I have to say, I love that they kept some of the old soundclips the same. “You must construct additional pylons” was just as infuriating and meme-worthy this week than it had been a decade ago.
I’ve got just about a week left until term 2 of school starts. This term I’ll (probably) be taking a program verification course, parallel programming, and a directed studies course with my advisor. I’m currently signed up for probabilistic programming but I expect I won’t be for too long.
Have a great week!