Alright, so I deleted my old blog thread because I wasn’t too happy about it, it was a mess and I didn’t have any posts on the front page etc etc etc blah blah essentially I wanted to start again with a new blog that was more aimed at being a blog instead of a dump of shit or just HEY CHECK THIS SHIT OUT etc... Also I thought that having a layout blog was kinda pointless because adbro had his own system that was different and there was only two blogs anyway....
So now my blog will be more aimed towards gaming and make them more text based rather than just image based. I want something that if you care enough can copy to a reader app or something and have something to read away from the PC when you're bored or something. Text is the best way to do this so I’ll be using images, but they won’t be massive and I’ll try and keep them at a premium.
Metal Gear Blog
THUS, this blog will be almost my entire collected memories and thoughts on the MGS series as I played it. I’m going to intro each game with my memories (which are very vague and few because I have (actually medically) short term memory problems that kinda make it super hard for me turn short term memory ‘items’ into long term memory items... and once I’ve done that I’ll kinda dig into my own personal thoughts now and then (if I can remember) of each title. This will be a long post and no, I don’t care if you read it.
And so it begins...
Pre-Metal Gear Before MGS came out and before I even knew who Kojima was I wasn’t a console gamer really at all. I was brought up on PC’s thanks to my dad being a self taught programmer and gamer. He got me into Wolfenstien and then Doom. He even managed to trick the company he was then working for to install an IPX router and server so that all the people on his floor could play Doom 2 over the network. This is the kind of environment that I grew up in, gaming on the PC. Console’s where something my friends all had, at the time the console to have was the Sega Megadrive, but my parents not being the highest earners couldn’t afford it, so I was stuck with using my dads ‘work’ PC to play Doom, Hexen, Quake, C&C etc... until the Playstation came out and one of my best friends at the time got one. Over the course of that year everyone in my year at school also got one bar me. I would go round to my friends houses almost exclusively to play games with them, Tomb Raider and Tekken 2 being the standout games that I really wanted to play, but couldn’t. This wouldn’t last though and eventually my parents caved, though I do think that this was mostly due to my dad seeing Gran Turismo (he’s a big racing game fan) and wanting to play it. So it should come as little surprise, I did got the Dual Shock, Gran Turismo bundle.
Metal Gear Solid. Back in the day around the time MGS was being announced at things like e3 the internet did exist, but it’s existance for a young boy was essentially zero. If you needed information, you either looked in a book or loaded up encarta and spend half an hour playing in the maze before looking up what it is you needed to know about Dinosaurs. It didn’t really exist, it was just something that was there for other people to use, my dad used it but I didn’t. So when MGS was announced and shown at e3 I had no idea about it, or about e3. The only news I had was via Official Playstation Magazine, which was mostly just reviews.
So it took me by surprise on a cold February day in 1999 whilst on holiday the new OPM was almost all white and purple with METAL GEAR SOLID in big black letters and a purple ninja holding a sword on the cover and a white cover disc.
They talked about it in the magazine as if it was the greatest game ever made, but what was it, a stealth game? Playing the demo was a mind blowing experience. It was like nothing else I had ever played. It was like playing a movie and left me wanting more... I think I played the demo 3 or 4 times back to back before going back to the magazine to read everything about it to find out what it was all about, why was this guy randomly dying inside his cell? Who was the woman?
The magazine has kind of an amazing article about it and its amazing to look back through it. This was before there was any real internet presence and so in order to show cutscenes and moving images of any kind, they would cut it up frame by frame and post like 200 thumbnail images over a two page spread (they did a similar thing for the boot up sequence of the PS2 when it was first being shown off). They even have a spoiler section where they show parts of the story, ranks you can get and a character roster. As soon as I had read it I spent the rest of the holiday begging my parents to buy me the game. Honestly I have no idea when I did get the game, my guess would be probably for my birthday in May, but I’ve no idea I have literally no memory of playing the game for the first time or getting it.
So for me to try and explain how I felt playing through it for the first time would be me basically lying, so instead I’ll try and explain how the game left me feeling in the years following pre MGS2. To me MGS was the perfect game, I played it many many times unlocking all that there was to unlock, there were moments of the game I do remember playing and having my mind blown. Psycho Mantis was and probably still is one of my favorite ever boss battles, swapping out controler two, having him read my memory card and making the controler move across the floor shit was insane and so cool. But the game left me with kind of nothing, there was never a moments thought when I wanted the follow up, I had no idea Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2 existed or any of the backstory, the idea of another MGS game didn’t even cross my mind at the time as I was so contented with what I had.
Looking back now at MGS as a product, it was kind of amazing that Kojima was able to make it the way he did. I know now about how Kojima got into the position to make MGS and how he managed to make it so insane and mind blowing and very japanese while making it really pretty western in its general tones. It’s a game that as you grow older you can appreciate more and more, which is kinda true of all media when it’s at its best. I’m not sure really how I would rank MGS compared to the other titles now, I was pretty convinced it was better than MGS2/3 pre-HD collection coming out, but now, I’m not so sure. But for me, its one of the greatest games I’ve ever played and playing the demo from OPM Feb 99 was an eye opening experience and something I’ll never forget.
Metal Gear Solid 2. 2000-2001 was a pretty busy period of my life. 2000 really for me was the dawn of the internet, we had dial-up at the house for the first time that I could use and that wasn’t restricted for late hours or didn’t cost double that of a phone call (being charged per-min). It was an explosion of new experiences that would really make me the person I am today. Post MGS I had slowly moved back to the PC as my main place to game, with Age of Empires, Red Alert 2, Quake 3, Diablo 2 and Rollercoaster Tycoon and then Pokemon (ofc) taking up most of my gaming time, but the dawn of the internet brought something else with it other than new PC games, it brought with it MSN, Chat Rooms and Napster. It was kind of an insane period when I look back at it, it was all kinda going on at the same time, and with this is as a backdrop came the PS2.
Again I was late to the party, with parents having to pay school fees it meant that Christmas was a scrim and save sort of deal and it wasn’t until my mum got a job after coming out of a pretty nasty depression that I was able to get my own PS2 for Christmas. Thanks to the internet and a small but growing video game shop called Play.com I was able to buy games online (with my parents credit card) for cheaper than I could buy them in the shops and with a bigger selection. I bought as many games as I could afford making sure I’d never run out of new cool games to play, this turned out to be a bad move as most of the games were, bad. So it was with that that I decided to venture back into the world of OPM that I had left behind. A few months later and there it was, the Metal Gear Solid 2 issue, holy shit... what the fuck...
It’s February 2002 and I’m reading the MGS2 review, kinda amazed that it even exists. I had no knowledge that it was being made, but holy shit did it look amazing. I had to play this game, I had to see the new Metal Gear. Again, details about how and when I got MGS2 are as clear as mud, though this time I’d not played the demo and had no clue that Zone of the Enders existed, so I’ll do my best to convey my feelings from around the time. HOLY SHIT THIS IS THE BEST GAME EVER MADE IT EVEN HAS BITS FROM MGS IN IT OMG. I loved every single second of it, to me it was an open world MGS1 with a new character that was faster than snake and an even cooler looking Metal Gear. The graphics and art style really set it apart from every other game I’d played up to that point, bearing in mind that I had access to a high end gaming PC of the day. I played MGS2 to death, almost actually. To this day I struggle to play MGS2 because I’ve played it so much and so many times that I’ve kind of grown tired of it. But at the time it was amazing, so much more you could do, first person shooting. It felt and played so much better than MGS, and because the Shell was semi open world, it felt like an open world stealth game, where you could run around and do as you pleased without having to worry too much because after each loading screen (or some) the evasion meter would run out, not to mention the fact there were so many more ways and places to hide. I played the game to death (for me at least) and managed to get all the dog-tags on easy and normal mode, I think I completed MGS2 more times that I have any other game.
Looking back, MGS2 is probably my least favorite of the core cannon series, I think because I literally played it to death. The music was something I really loved in MGS2 but have kind of grown to hate and resent the re-done MGS style music. It’s hard to explain, but looking back MGS2 feels like a next gen MGS, which makes sense for the fiction, for marketing and sales and on a practical level. But the themes of MGS2 and its plot is kind of amazing and really forward thinking. Kojima had done an amazing job, I’d just overdone it.
Metal Gear Solid 3. This was kind of a big deal for me, but it would take a while to realise it. When I first heard about MGS3 and that it was going to be a PS2 game, I was pretty upset and annoyed about it. To me the series had finished and didn’t need to continue just (as I saw it at the time) to make money. When reading about it online and through OPM I felt the graphics looked pretty bad and dated and that it looked really difficult to play because of the viewing angles, the fact the draw distance didn’t seem long enough and the enemies seemed to blend into the background, it would be fair to say that I didn’t want or look forward to MGS3’s arrival, despite all the insane press and praise it was getting from people at college and in the press in general. I managed to fight back the urge to buy MGS3 on the day it came out, but that urge took over a week or so later and I decided to pick it up, having already decided that I hated it and that I needed to make sure it was going to be bad and simply Kojima trying to make as much money from it as possible before moving onto the next generation of systems.
Shock horror I hated it.
I played though the Virtuous Mission up to the point where you have to get inside the house to get Sokolov, I hit the wall, literally. I couldn’t progress any further without the gameplay crutches that I was crying and shouting out for, where is my radar?! WHY IS IT IN THE PAST, THE PAST ISN’T COOL! After this point, I decided that was enough and that MGS3 was a shitty game and I hated it. Two weeks past and I managed to come to the conclusion that it can’t be bad, Kojima already made two of my favorite games of all time, how can this be bad... maybe, just maybe I need to give it another go... so I did. Quickly I went from hating its systems, to loving it. Each area canceled out (for the most part) an alert state set in a pervious zone, so you could trial and error your way though, I learnt to play it slower and be more concerned with how I went about it, and not just run from tree to tree.
Kojima made me think about what being stealthy was, and I was loving him for it. Gone was the musical styles that plagued MGS2-tarted up MGS tracks-and in their place we got some amazing period style James Bond music, epic boss battles and the best and most rewarding sniper ‘mission’/boss ever! And it looked GLORIOUS, yes, it wasn’t the best looking game on the market, but holy fuck it looked pretty. The camo and stamina mechanics only added to it, making everything you do more and more important. Playing through MGS3 and giving it another chance is one of the most important things that happened to me playing videogames, it was an amazing experience that is really hard to qualify or explain, but I’m going to assume(hope) you know how I was feeling at the time.
Looking back and having recently played though the HD version of the game, it’s amazing how well made everything about MGS3 is. It really is a watershed game, it was the culmination of everything that Kojima had been building on, merging movies, music and gameplay into a single product you could experience in many ways whilst having a deeper meaning if you could seek it out.
Metal Gear Solid 4. The build up to MGS4 and it’s launch is probably the most vivid memories of any game I have. The build up for the game happened years before we would actually get to see anything of the game and for the first time (for me) I was able to watch it all unfold online via forums, video sites and blogs. The is it FPS? trailer was the first time we actually got any idea of what we were in for with MGS4 and I couldn’t have been more excited. A stealth game set in the middle east?! Fighting/stealthing your way through urban environments?! Fuck yes. It seemed so obvious after the fact, well of course... he’s done snow, water, jungle it only makes sense now to go to the desert!
What followed however was years of waiting and the impending problem of having to buy the Playstation 3. At this point I was a piss-poor networking student at uni spending all my spare cash on essentially getting as drunk as possible whilst trying not to fail my module’s, so the idea of having to buy a £300 console to play a single game, wasn’t such a great prospect.... luckily for me there was another reason to invest, Grand Theft Auto 4. MGS4 came out the month after my birthday and because of leaks I’d banished myself from anything MGS related on the internet until I had finished the game, it was horrible because all video gaming sites/forums where spreading news and spoilers so I couldn’t even jump in and talk about GTA4 or indeed anything without risking having something spoiled... But I managed it.
It was 6am June 12th 2008 and I was up dressed and waiting in the lounge watching the front door, waiting, praying. 8am and there is a knock at the door, I rush to open it in fear the postman might run off with my game, he didn’t and what followed was the most emotional, insane ride I’d ever experienced. When I opened the box that contained my Limited Edition copy of MGS4, I just had the package open on the kitchen counter, looking at it, barely believing it was here and I had it. I then sat down in the lounge alone and after installing, started playing MGS4 at about 9am, I didn’t stop that day until about 3am. At that time I was so tired and exhausted from playing and being blown away that I had to sleep, just for a bit... but I couldn’t, I literally couldn’t sleep... so after a few shitty hours of sleep I got up and carried on playing until I finished it at about 5pm the following day. I remember me and one of my house mates watching the end cutscenes very vividly (he had played most of the metal gears but wasn’t super invested), I remember it like it was yesterday, it was insane and it kinda blew my mind even though I’m not a story guy.... Playing MGS4 like that was basically the dumbest bestest thing I’ve ever done. My first completion time was a few minutes over the 24 hr mark.
For me, MGS4 will always be a very personal game, due to playing for almost 24 hr's in one sitting on almost no sleep made my brain a fucked up hazy insane mess that was only made better *** worse with tea and pro-plus. So It's hard for me to look back on MGS4 constructly. I loved it, I loved playing it, I loved the way it looked, I loved the silly TV adverts that play at the start of the game, I loved the Drebin system, I loved the ending, I loved the new Raiden. It’s easy to see why the general press wasn’t so amazed with MGS4 as it was with MGS3. MGS4 was and will always be fan service, but thats why its amazing. It was done for an audience that was wanting of nothing and yet got everything it had ever dreamed off and more. MGS4 also brought the clunky control schemes of the previous MGS titles up to date and it played amazingly well, allowing you real freedom in how you approached each mission objective. There is nothing I would change about MGS4, for me, it’s perfect and the experience it left me with was something I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to rekindle.
Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. Most of you guys, or nyx as you're the only one still reading at this point (if that) already kinda know how I feel about PW and how it was launched etc etc... so I won’t get bogged down on the details with this too much. PW for me showed me why the PSP and Vita are kind of terrible systems on a fundamental level and that PW was done a disservice by being made for such a device. PW is an amazing game with some really awesome and amazing new mechanics brought in from other genre’s to make it a pretty amazing portable game, but the hardware lets it down. Playing though PW on the PSP gave my thumb’s serious cramping, to the point where I couldn’t play Starcraft 2, and it takes a lot for that to happen.
When it was ported to the PS3 in the HD collection, you really got a sense of what could have been, while its by far the best version and PW adds a lot, it’s also hampered by problems MGS has never had before, poor Japanese design traits (read grinding). It’s a strange title taken at face value, it’s main mission narrative is pretty amazing and there are some awesome set pieces, but the way in which it’s laid out, to play better on a portable system kind of takes some of that away.
MGS:PW is still one of my favorite MGS titles, but playing it first on the PSP really was the worst kind of experience, it was frustrating and physically painful to do. It shouldn’t have been, it shouldn’t have ever been a PSP product, but what we are left with is some of the most refined gameplay ever created and a control scheme that works amazingly well considering the constraints and previous attempts at an MGS title on the PSP device.
Well I think that’s about it, I’ve managed to type a lot more than I thought I was going to manage. It’s actually been pretty nice to type it all out, going through memory lane. Cheers for reading any of it, would love feedback and comments.
I’m going to try and make my blog posts from now on more in this style if I can, because if nothing else, I kinda enjoy it.
My Starcraft Story
Copper League to Diamond League
I’ve kinda wanted to write this out and now seems like as good a time as any. This is going to be a long ass-blog detailing how I basically went from having never heard of StarCraft to playing it for hours every single day. This is my journey from Copper League to Diamond League.
I first heard about Starcraft 2’s announcement on a random video game blog, as growing up I wasn’t really at all a Blizzard guy and when it came to RTS’s, for me it was all about Command & Conquer. But I read this article about this new RTS game that was building on the best RTS game ever made (apparently) Starcraft: Brood War, so I watched the announcement trailer in Korean trying to figure out what all this was about.
Following the trailer I began reading up on this ‘esports’ thing and trying to work out why a room full of Koreans would care so much about a game announcement. I had literally no knowledge of the Brood War scene or that it was so popular in Korea. So I figured that the best way to try and get my head around it would be to buy and download the Brood War set from the online Blizzard Store and set up an account.
Initially I had a lot of problems even getting BW to run properly but I slowly managed to fix all the problems and was able to begin playing the single player StarCraft missions, starting (ofc) with Terran. This I found to be very very difficult and nothing like any C&C game I’d played before. There was a lot to do and the AI was brutally difficult. But I made it and finished the Terran single player and I have to say that while it was enjoyable it wasn’t as mind shattering as people had lead me to believe. From there I moved onto the Zerg campaign, this would prove to be even more difficult as the Zerg played like nothing else and it was extremely hard to even really understand how to build units and what I needed to do, but with the help of guides I managed to make my way almost to the end, until… the game finally broke and I was unable to patch it to make it work. The Brood War campaigns wouldn’t even run.
A few months later it was announced that people were getting into the beta for Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty, excitedly I checked my account every week or so to see if I got in. Lucky for me I got in after the first wave of beta invites, not only this my beta access gave me an extra key to gift to a friend, shit just got real.
When I first started playing in the beta there was only the option for 1v1 or custom games, so me and my friend (Rob) would play against each other playing it a lot like Age of Empires, building all the things and seeing what they did with huge bases (though only one mining base) to see what cool units to make. It became very clear that the Terran was the easiest to understand because its units and buildings essentially correlated to C&C, unlike the Zerg and Protoss. Back then you had 10 placement matches to decide which league you are put into, and during the Wings of Liberty Beta there were 6 leagues; Copper, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum and Diamond. Diamond was essentially reserved only for the pro’s and people who were very good at SC:BW and Copper was the place for people like me who had never played the MP of SC or SC:BW. Shock horror I was placed into Copper League.
I actually played quite a lot considering how bad I was, I had no idea of build orders and for a long time I wasn’t sure how to make any tech because I hadn’t see the ‘Advanced Buildings Icon’ and yes I was still playing with just the mouse. But I persevered with it discovered Day9 through TeamLiquid and began learning the core basics of the game, like using the keyboard. From almost that point on I decided that I didn’t really like the look of the redneck Terrans and wanted to play as the Protoss as they looked by far the coolest and had the best looking toys. The switch was pretty easy as I had no idea what I was doing but playing 2v2’s with Rob and working away in the 1v1 Copper league I was in helped me grasp the basic’s. I was watching more and more Sc2 beta though the video’s Blizzard put out and through people Day9 would mention.
The second season of the Sc2 beta however didn’t go so well, the number of promotion matches had been cut from 10 to 5 and I managed to win one of them, which put me in Silver league, way way out of position, I got raped… pretty much all the way back to copper league if I can remember correctly. At the same time the Sc2:WoL Collector’s Edition had been announced and you could pre-order it, but only if you lived in the USA, like a fool I pre-ordered a copy, which I couldn’t cancel and within weeks it was announced and available within the UK, discovering that the game would be region locked, I pre-ordered another CE… this did little to deter me and not long after (I can’t remember exactly) the beta was drawn to a close and everyone waited for the game to actually come out.
I missed the launch day do’s that people were doing all over the world, Day9 included because I simply didn’t know they were happening but I remember watching one of the GiantBomb video’s with Brad running around the office with the Collector’s Edition about his head screaming like a little girl, shit was getting really fucking real. When the game came out me and Rob (the only other person I actually knew with the game) played though the single player before venturing out into the world of the multi-player, but this is where Rob faded away, he wasn’t super interested in learning builds and trying to get really good at the game and so over time stopped playing, I was alone. I needed a friend.
At the time I was working with a guy called Jay who previous to all the Sc2 shenanigans was my Red Alert 3 buddie, we played the shit out of that game with him playing team games, he was far far better than me at it and would carry me the whole time, but it was epic non the less… so now all I had to do was convince him that Sc2 was better than RA3, seems insane to even say that now but he didn’t buy it initially… but eventually he decided it was worth checking out.
I at this point in time was healthy in Bronze league, but doing alright for myself. When Jay started playing he decided that he was going to do all the practice games (when you first make a new account you have the option to do 50 practice games, were the game has rocks you have to destroy in order to move out of your base and around the map etc to prevent rushing and it’s also run at a slower speed than the normal MP). So while I was still alone I worked my way through Bronze league and managed to make it to Silver league, like a boss.
Jay had done the same thing as me and started with Terran as they were easily decipherable, and coming out of Practice League he was convinced that he had an edge because of how much he had to play and was sure to make it into Silver League, he didn’t. And thus started our long standing 2v2 team, running from the very bottom of Bronze to ultimately rank 1 Masters (when that was added some time after). While playing 2v2’s we would often help each other with builds and theory craft, we would also play 1v1’s… though Jay ever the hyper competitive person he is played a lot more than I did. Soon he got into Silver league and we both moved into Gold league at about the same time. I stagnated though while Jay marched on straight into Platinum League, this meant that I for the first time was the worse of the two of us. This was actually a good thing for the game because as many people who know me, will know that I tend to get really angry at video games and go ape shit for no real reason, the same was true of Sc2 for almost the whole time I’ve played it. So back then I would complain about this map or this unit being broken and imbalanced etc and now Jay would be there on the Skype call to say, no, it’s fine, you just need to do X, Y, Z etc.
I managed to work my way into Platinum League after about a year or so of the game being out, this is the point when the game really did change the most. Protoss vs Protoss was 4 gate or be 4 gated, with little answer and Zerg’s had no way to deal with the Protoss death ball while Terran were still learning how to drop properly. During this time me and Jay mostly moved onto team games, well I did anyway. I stagnated in Platinum league for almost two years without really improving at all. In that time I’d moved away from watching Day9, Husky and alike to actual tournaments like the GSL and MLG’s. Watching pro’s play the game made me really understand and appreciate that this game is constantly changing and that it really is crazy how good they are. Jay had discovered a build on TeamLiquid that was advertised as getting you into 2v2 Masters with ease, so one night, we logged on and gave it ago. We started from Bronze League because that was where we had managed to tank our rating too (in order to basically mess around and have fun rather than try hard). The build was for a Protoss and Zerg, Jay at this point was trying to play Random and so it was actually pretty good for us (it was a 5 gate 10pool all in using overlords to give vision to allow you to warp in on the high ground) and it worked. We played 12 games and lost 0. We moved straight into Diamond League, and within 4-5 more games were rank 1 Masters. It was kind of amazing that a Gold/Platinum league and a diamond league player could make it so far with just one build, but we did and until finally getting promoted to Masters we never lost a single game. This amazing build had a knock of effect though, because in Masters League 2v2’s people knew how to deal with and therefor punish our dumb all in, so our winning stopped and we were both stuck. The only way to resolve this problem? Start playing 1v1’s again.
I started playing more 1v1’s a week than I had played almost entirely up to that point. Playing as much as I can simply trying to improve, not really worrying about my rank or league. After several seasons I was now easily rank 1 Platinum and crushing almost all I played against, including those in the League’s above me, for two seasons I would dominate my Platinum division.
Heart of the Swarm Beta.
During this run of domination, both I and Jay entered into the ESL weekly ladder. The reason was simple, the top 10 people would be given beta invites into the Heart of the Swarm (the next Sc2 expansion). The rules were simple, you got points for winning, and less points for loosing… so all you had to do (win or lose) was play as much as you can. We would play via a website and some strange plugin using chat channels but it worked, the people you would play varied in skill and style. This is where I would achieve something I never thought possible. I was put against a Terran, this Terran however was currently in Grand Master League, a league that is locked to only 200 people from each region, the very best players. Most of GM is made up of professionals and to even reach it, you need to essentially play 10+hrs a day for months on end. The game started and he decided that he was simply going to cheese (take a massive risk in order to end the game as soon as possible) every game he played in order to give him enough points, the cheese he was doing however was something very hard to stop and something I didn’t actually scout until it should have been too late. With some pretty amazing crisis management I managed to not die, while having an extra base. I had won. Even though he had cheesed I had managed to beat a GM player, something not everyone can boast about. This motivation pushed me though and me and Jay managed to both get into the HotS Beta.
The game was crazy, it had just come off a huge change were a new Terran unit had been totally removed, I got placed into Gold League and stay there for much of the duration of the beta. It was crazy, Swarm Hosts dominated games and widow mine drops seem impossible to stop. Protoss had the worst of it, the Oracle and Tempest would change seemingly on a daily basis making some of the new units from the other races very hard to deal with.
The beta went as fast as it came and soon I was back with WoL. I decided that my original goal of reaching Diamond in WoL was still possible and marched onwards. Protoss vs Terran was my favourite match-up and I was now facing Diamond players who knew how to multi-task, it was an amazing challenge and one that lead me to walk over Platinum Terrans. My best match up however was Protoss vs Protoss and in one of my last few games in Wings of Liberty I not only played a Masters Protoss’s player, but I destroyed him. The game wasn’t close for any part of it, even though he had picked an aggressive strategy he couldn’t match me for multi-tasking and fell apart, blaming lag and all kinds of other reasons as to why he was better than me.
A few games later;
Heart of the Swarm launched and with it I was back into Platinum League (as after placement matches you cannot start higher than Platinum). It was a refreshing place to be, and it was easy. I destroyed most players who opted for older builds, and struggled horribly against Widow Mines and Swarm Hosts. But soon enough I was back into to Diamond League.
This is where my story starts drawing in slowly. The start of the second season for ladder on Sc2 for HotS was where pretty much every player was demoted a league in order to better balance the spread across the leagues. I was put back into Platinum and Jay was in Diamond (previously in Wings of Liberty he was a masters Random player). After a month or two of constant playing and struggling, I managed to make it back into Diamond where I am now. Currently I have the best Win/Loss ratio in my division and can beat Masters players when I’m having a good day, the problem now is that I’ve lost the drive to play.
Being good at Starcraft isn’t something people are born with, it’s something you work had for. For the rest of the year I’m going to be spending a lot of it in a place where I cannot play Sc2 properly at all, and it’s left me wondering, should I bother and really put the work in to get into Masters League? I used to dream about being in Diamond League thinking that once I managed that I would be happy with my abilities playing the game, but now I’m here and I’m not. The game has lost a lot of its appeal, no longer can I ‘wing’ builds or try new things to win games, because I’m simply not good enough to do so, and if the other person plays the game ‘properly’ my shenanigans won’t work. For me Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm isn’t all I had hoped it to be, the new units have added really very little to the game, if you look at the core of how the races behave, HotS is just a slightly better balanced version of WoL with the same problems and no clear answers. Aside from balance and the core game design problems Sc2 faces in the future is the huge rise of Dota2 and LoL’s. Both have destroyed Sc2’s esport scene and dominated the headlines. On top of this Dota2’s business model and UI features simply make Sc2 look dated and amateurish.
Starcraft 2’s future isn’t very bright and I personally have gotten a bit tired of how the game actually plays out, in Brood War you can see that the insane skill required to move around 4-5 screens worth of units, in Starcaft 2 it’s (if your Protoss) can you secure a 3rd base and amass one huge clump of units to kill the other player. I will of course not stop playing all together and still look forward too and hope that they can change it all around with the last expansion Legacy of the Void, but I’m not very hopeful.
Well that's my long ass boring road to still being bad at Starcraft 2, enjoy.
Windows 8.5
Windows 8.5
This is my own opinion as a Windows 7 user since launch and is partly the reason why I never upgraded.
If you look at it on paper however Windows 8 is better than Windows 7 in nearly every single way, it’s faster (by a lot) it boots so much faster Win7 looks down right slow in comparison. It has better file management and allows you to handle data much easier, it’s also more efficient. It is better, however it’s also much, much worse because in the process of designing the UI the Windows Design team made a rather huge error in how the general population use computers and why it is they use them like that. In a recent Windows blog one of the lead designers for Windows 8 states that one of the major drives for the desktop UI to feel more like a touch screen was the concept that people didn’t really like, or know how to use the mouse and that it was a fairly alien device to most new consumers, I’m paraphrasing but that is the general gist of the argument for how Win8’s design was lead. They also have stated many times that the reason they could justify the removal of the traditional start menu was because most people simply pinned all the programs they wanted to use. To me this is a flawed and nonsensical notion.
If you’ve ever been to a public space with computers, be it a coffee shop, library, school campus what have you… you will see many people who are not familiar with computers using computers and there is one device from which there hand rarely moves away from, and that’s the mouse. This isn’t data I have spent millions of dollars researching this is simply information I have grasped when teaching people how to use computers or watched other people using them, be it Windows or OS-X people use mice pretty well and find them fairly easy to understand, you move the mouse on the desk, and the pointer on the screen moves as well, you get two clicks and a scroll that allows you to move up and down a page easily… fairly easy to grasp.
So, how many people do you know with a laptop of computer and out of those people, how many can touch type, or know keyboard shortcuts? If your anything like me, that’s a low number. In my mind the one device that most people who use a computer are intimated by or have no real idea how to use, it’s the keyboard. To me this is the key area were Microsoft has let users down in helping them both use and understand a computer. The Windows key is the most important update to the modern keyboard in memory, its huge… it makes using any version of Windows post XP much much faster and much much better. With a single key stroke you have access to searching for every single installed program and every single document… yet people have no idea that this exists and the proof for this is in the fact that (according to Microsoft) most users pin there programs to the task bar (again highlighting the able use of the mouse).
This I feel is were Microsoft needs to really re-focus Windows 8 to actually reflect not only the hardware (all Computers have keyboards, even tablets and phones) and usage of how and why people interact with them. This is what I am proposing…
Windows 8.5
I know the rumours that Windows 9 is due for a release next year, something I feel that would be a terrible decision and only further fragment a confused market with yet another version of Windows. Instead I suggest Microsoft do the Long Horn approach and take a few years to really go deep into R&D on the next version and instead working on making Win8 workable for everyone. That starts with a pretty big over-hall of the UI and teaching people how to use their machines.
I am going to go through these changes as you would see them upon first booting Windows 8.5.
When you first boot up Win8.5 it will show a map of a keyboard with the windows key labelled and heighted, it will then ask you to press it and type ‘login’ or another similar command, helping illustrate that you can type anything you like into the search bar to look for it. While this tutorial is running all other keys are disabled.
On the next screen you’ll be given some icons of either a desktop, laptop or tablet and you’re asked to pick which the device it is your running on. Picking either the laptop or desktop removes Metro and you never see it, picking the tablet option makes accessing the desktop harder and instead of simply having both at all times you’ll have to manually switch between the two. Further making the gap between tablets and laptops further and causing less confusion. If you pick the desktop or laptop version you have a desktop OS that looks a lot like the Windows 8.1/Windows 7 desktop, however the Start button is replaced with a search icon that fades from the new Windows icon intermittently. This is to remind users that this is how you should navigate your machine and run/open apps and look for things. Upon pressing the Winkey or Start button you’ll be presented with a search bar above the task bar, next to it will be a Settings WinPhone style icon, and next to that a similarly styled Shutdown button. Above the search box will be your most recently searched for items that you can either remove or ignore.
The charms are removed and any trace that this was once party designed for tablets gone.
I feel like these changes along with some others far more intelligent people than me think up would go a long way to making not only Windows 8 better, but helping people use and understand how to use their Windows machines. Better tools and information on how to use keyboard shortcuts and how to navigate there machines can only ever be of benefit, simply pandering to people who don’t understand how to use machines helps no one and only ever makes compromised less useful machines and this can be seen by Win8’s total lack of traction with ‘heavy’ PC users who still for the most part use Windows 7, or even still use XP.
Wow, that was a good read, especially the first MGS part. I was just a little kid when it was released and my first contact with it was that same OPM demo. The Docks/Heliport/Tank Hangar sequence will stay with me forever as the most incredible atmosphere I ever experienced in a game (Arsenal Gear coming close). Not to mention the badass lift ride while taking off the scuba gear with the logo appearing with that "tuum" sound. I was blown away.
That was an interesting read, knowing how you got into the series exactly. Pretty different from my situation, maybe I should make a similar blog sometime.
That was an interesting read, knowing how you got into the series exactly. Pretty different from my situation, maybe I should make a similar blog sometime.
Yeah you should, would make for an interesting read... and it's kinda fun going back down memory lane
Read it all, bro. Very good read. Especially about the bit about MGS1. I was only 7 when it came and had played it. I too was seriously mind blown. I hadn't seen anything like it or played anything like it. I was so hooked. I wish I could go back in time and experience that all over again. Anyways, awesome blog Gye.
great blog. inspired me to make write my experience with the series. i kinda agree with your views of mgs4 thinking back to it. mgs4 to me wasnt a bad or terrible game but out of the mgs games i found it the weakest. well excluding portable ops.