Sure, it’s guaranteed bug-free now, but the number of new features is pretty disappointing.

I only played the campaign. I usually get kicked big time in multiplayer so I’m not even bothering to try that.

Anyway, I have to say, the campaign is fun to play. The story isn’t particularly good or revolutionary (and pretty predictable), but it serves its purpose of sending you in a direction where you can blow stuff up. (Yay for blowing stuff up.) What I do like is how the campaign is done: usually in an RTS the campaign is linear: you have to do mission A, then mission B, then mission C, repeat until end. In Starcraft 2 you get to pick what you want to do when, and not everything is mandatory. Doing missions does however grant you more types of units, allows you to purchase permanent upgrades for your forces, and there is the research thing which makes things interesting as well.

Most missions are the same in the basic turn of events – ie you go somewhere, you build a base, train forces, attack (or defend) something, and ‘lo and behold, the mission succeeded. It does not however feel repetitive to do so, which is obviously a good thing. Several missions have interesting twists to them – one for instance (and don’t read this if you don’t want a spoiler) involves a wall of fire, caused by a sun about to go nova, that slowly moves accross the maps and forces you to push onwards and relocate your base several times over. This relies on the interesting (though realistically speaking, completely absurd) possibility of letting most of the building in your base take off, fly somewhere else, and land again. You’ll need to rebuild a few structures after each relocation but most can be moved that way.

The campaign plot is pretty generic. Rogue hero fights against evil empire to free the people (and of course the inevitable element of rescueing a long lost girlfriend), slowly gets to his goal, after gaining some sort of a foothold comes the ever-present inspiring speech after which the troops march into almost certain doom and succeed againt all odds. The girlfriend of course is saved, the old friend who betrayed the hero is killed, and they all happily watched the credits roll over the screen.

While the  campaign is fun to play, the core of the game is similar to pretty much every other RTS that’s out there. You’ve got the technologically mediocre humans who, of course, are the big good guys who rule over most of the galaxy, there’s the mysterious ancient alien race with expensive but strong units, and the guys that rely on hordes of weak units to flood their way to whatever their goal is. The game mechanics are fairly uninspiring but they work well and do provide a good couple of hours worth of time-spending.

One thing I do love big time is the mech unit called ‘Thor’. Like most mech units it is entirely unrealistic, but it’s voice sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger and it has some of the more awesome quotes I’ve heard from RTS-game-units in a while. It bothers me that it is not really THAT powerful and you need a bunch of them to really do anything, even though it is supposed to be based of Odin, a really giant mech that pretty much vaporizes anything (where did he go after the broadcast tower mission, anyway?), but the line ‘I am here, click me!’ easily makes up for that. Most of the other units’ speech is less interesting (and especially in case of the marines, starts to annoy really quickly), but who listens to that anyway.

Overall I’ve so far found Starcraft 2 to be enjoyable, but to say that it’s a big revolution that was really worth waiting so many years for… ?

No, not really.

So, right now I’m typing REALLY slowly… But I’ll get used to it. My speed (and average amount of time spent searching for each letter) has already decreased significantly while I wrote this post – I can already find some letters blind (especially the ‘A’) – or at least, without spending half an hour searching for it

No, my experience in typing with Dvorak does not extend very far beyond this post… But practice makes porfect, and I am already noticing that the letters are arranged in a more logical way

I’m quite excited about this. I really liked DO:A (and hence did two playthroughs, despite the amount of time it takes to get through the storyline). Even though in some cases I got the feeling that everything was deliberately made more difficult to lengthen the game rather than to add something to the overall storyline, it’s one of only a few games that managed to really grasp my attention in the last year or so. So that is pretty damn good.

DA:O Awakening (the expansion) was good too – rather short compared to the original campaign, but definately enjoyable!

And to all people who whine about how there is too much dialogue and interacting with NPCs and having to deal with the storyline:

That’s the whole f*cking point of an RPG.

If you don’t like dialogue, then go play a shooter or something. Or Pong. I don’t care.

We had the elections a few weeks ago. From the election came certain results about which party gets how many seats. Can we please just have those people sit down in their expensive blue chairs and let them talk about stuff and vote against eachother to make whatever decisions it is the government needs to make? As far as I recall that is the entire idea of our democratic system, so let that be what they do. Not this childish bullshit they’re wasting time on now.

We had elections, we have results – take those, accept them, live with it, and just do your freakin’ jobs.

“But mommy, I don’t want to play with that kid! He’s mean!”

Politicians, stop whining and grow up already.

Seriously.

I just sent someone 24 messages in a row, detailing my adventures in eating two slices of bread

I am now ranked 666th of the world on WhatPulse!

For those of you who are not familiar with it, WhatPulse counts mouseclicks, keystrokes, and tracks the distance you move your mouse. This data is then sent to a central server, where statistics and ranking lists are created. Is it useful? No, not really. But is it fun? Hell yes!

And you don’t even need to do anything extra for it (which is why I’ve been running it for a few years now). It is impressive that the Netherlands as a country is ranked second of the world, even though our country is tiny!

Anyway, if you aren’t using WhatPulse yet, get it now!

I wish you a very happy Towel Day!

May DNA never fade from our memories, and let us never forget the importance of towels, a greatly under-appreciated not-quite-household object.

The reason that the King had chosen to enlist even young boys into the army, was the raging war with a neighbouring country. The war had been going on for so long that nobody really remembered what the war was about, or even what the name of the country was – most of the time they were referred to simply as ‘the neighbours’ or ‘the enemy’. This has not in any way anything at all to do with the author of this story being too lazy to come up with any sort of decent-sounding name.

The King had a problem. His armies were vastly superior to the Neighbour’s army in many ways. They had a superior number of limbs that were capable of wielding weapons, superior training, superior numbers, pretty much everything about them was better. Except, their strategies.

Somewhere in the beginning of the war, an advisor to the King had invented Science. This granted him a lot of useful knowledge, a very well-paying job at the local college, a lot of respect from his friends and families, and generally a lot of other good things. The King naturally saw the potential advantage in using his knowledge in the war, so he asked his advisor to devise a new strategy to use against their hated enemy.

The good man went to work, and came up with a plan. The plan went something like this:

“As all of you know, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle says, in simple terms, that you can never be really sure where something is,” he explained.

“And since when you don’t know where something is in the first place, the best idea is to either go searching for it (which is futile, since you’ll never find out where it is anyway), or consider whatever it is you were looking for to be lost and hope to find it again at a later point in time.”

That wasn’t the brilliant part just yet.

“Everybody knows that, when you have lost something, it tends to come back to you at the time you least expect it.”

Now, let’s apply that knowledge to the neighbour’s army and defenses.

“Since it is impossible to know where their armies are and they can therefore be considered lost, and because in the middle of a direct assault on their territory is pretty much exactly when you would find some sort of resistance, it is, in accordance with my theory, perfectly safe to charge in at any moment. We don’t even need to bring weapons. We’ll just march in and there won’t be anyone there to defend against us. The only time when you would actually run into them is when you really wouldn’t expect it to happen, say, when you’re sitting against a tree thinking trying to figure out what the baby from a nineteen-legged squirrel and a shopping basket would look like.”

Amazed by the brilliance, the King dispatched his armies straight away.

Needless to say, the result of the battle was less than impressive. In a few hours, very little remained of the once mighty army, and shortly after that, a little bit less remained of the connection between the Scientist’s head and the rest of his body.

Centuries later, however, the war was still raging on. The only reason that the aggressors of the great slaughtering all those many years ago had not been defeated yet, was that the Enemy was a species that was generally very calm and peaceful and felt very bad about having to wipe out an army of such nice young lads.

At this point you have probably forgotten entirely about Vroomp. Though, admittedly, there is nothing really special about him, as has been said before. In an attack during one of the later years of the war (the new strategy involved bringing weapons to the battle), Vroomp and the rest of his squad charged into an enemy encampment. Being the young inexperienced boy he was, Vroomp drew his sword, grabbed an arrow, and spent a few seconds trying to figure out how to combine the two items into something useful, or at least, something edible. Then, in a rather painful fashion, he discovered that swords are meant to by themselves, by the simple fact that one was dividing his favorite vital organ into a few more pieces than what was generally accepted as being a good number of pieces to have your vital organs in.

A few years later, the King’s armies finally perished, and the King was forced to surrender what little he had left. He spent his remaining years hiding himself in places so distant and strange that even he himself started to believe that his entire kingdom and everything that had gone down was nothing more than a vague dream from a distant past.

The Neighbours (which is not really a proper term anymore since they were now the sole country that existed, but ‘Enemy’ is probably an even worse term since that obviously does not apply anymore) lived in peace and prosperity.

Until a lonely man somewhere in the Neighbour’s country had invented Science again.

The rest, as they say, is history. What has passed since then I will leave up to your own imagination (but feel free to share any very creative suggestions with me ).

Will Possibly Be Continued…

For those of you unfamiliar with it, Audiosurf is a music-based game. The idea is that you can select any song from your hard drive (or audio CD), and the level you play through is generated based on the music. You control a sort of flying-car-thingy that you can move left and right accross a thing that resembles a highway with 3 or 4 lanes, and the object of the game is to pick up colored blocks that appear on said highway. When you get clusters of at least 3 blocks of the same color, the blocks magically vanish, and your score magically goes up. There are of course a few things to worry about, but if you can think quickly and anticipate what’s coming, it’s not too difficult.

Again, the level is based on the music, so if you have really calm music it’ll be slow and mellow and there won’t be a whole lot of blocks to worry about, but pick some intense music and there will be tons of blocks, the track will quite possibly be twisting and turning, and you have to think REALLY fast to pick up what you want and avoid what you don’t want.

It sounds pretty simple, and yeah, it is pretty simple, but it’s also really addictive, and the just-one-more factor for this game is incredibly high.

Then came, The Idea.

This game bases the tracks on music, and since it keeps online high scores, there cannot be a random element as to how it generates the tracks (because that could create unfair advantages for some players). This means it just picks the audio file apart and works with that, basing its decisions on things like when beats occur, the tempo of the song, the presence (or absence) of certain frequency ranges, the shifts in frequencies throughout the song, and so on.

What if you can figure out exactly how the game’s algorithm works, and use the knowledge to create a sort of ‘level editor’ for the game, which in turn generates .mp3 files that, when played in Audiosurf, recreate exactly whatever level you had in mind? There are a few restrictions of course (for instance, the game never places two blocks directly adjacent, because then it’d be impossible to pick them both up, or it could create a ‘wall’ of blocks that you cannot pass through without picking up at least one of them). And sure, it’s going to sound horrible, with lots of bleeps and noises, possibly much like what happens when you listen to the signal from a 56k modem using a phone, but it’d be pretty neat.

No, this is not something I’m actually going to do (I’m not that bored, or at least, not at the moment), but it’s a fun thought experiment.