Starcraft 2: IEM and slow internet

This will be a short one! My PC arrived yesterday! Oh my days! The tower is huge! Much bigger than my old one, that right there tells you that it's better.. cause bigger is better right?! While I'm writing this, it's downloading stuff on my nice and slow interwebs.. joy, it just did 10,001 windows updates. Ok, that may be an overestimation but still.. it was a lot! I love getting a new computer, but then I also hate it very much.

I've downloaded steam and D3.. oh! With the graphics cards I got, they gave me a key to Tomb Raider, so that is also downloaded - going to give that a bit of a play later. They also told me I'd get keys to Bioshock: Infinite and Crysis 3 but they have yet to arrive. I'm excited to see what Crysis looks like! Currently downloading SC2.. C'mon! It takes so long! Now, I know I complain a lot about my internet.. so.. take a look at this! Note: This is without any downloads running.

Apart from that, I watched some of the first day of the Intel Extreme Master's Starcraft 2 tournament. Instead of deciding to use the Wings of Liberty, they decided to go ahead and use Heart of the Swarm(which is released in 7 days!!!). At first, I was quite sad as from the games that I saw played - two Protoss Vs Zerg, the Zerg buddy lost :(

However, there was one hero waiting in the wings of liberty to take up the mantle of ultimate Zerg buddy... LiquidRet. He is part of Team Liquid and has been for a long time! The guy has put a lot of effort into playing HotS and it showed. I won't spoil any results for anyone, but safe to say it was really enjoyable to watch! If you are interested, you should check out the VOD's from today's games!

Time for me to try out some of them games!

Ciao for now!

p.s. I was about to post this and then saw this new blog post by Travis Day about Diablo 3's itemization - very cool read and some promising thoughts in there. Find it here.

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Starcraft 2: HotS and stuff

I figured it was about time I did a bit of a natter about Starcraft.. and I guess it's the perfect time to do it, with Heart of the Swarm being released in 9 days and the beta was closed on the first of March(I think), which was two days ago! Since I've been spending a bit more time checking out twitter, I have seen a lot of pro-gamers tweeting that they don't quite know what to do to fill their time now that they can't play HotS.. I don't have that issue, mainly because I haven't played it for quite a while!

Apart from that though, for those who have been living on another planet, the new HotS trailer was released the other night and here it is!

I am mainly looking forwards to the campaign being playable and to see what has changed in the overall SC2 experience. Heck, I guess part of my time till HotS is released will be spent checking out the features that were implemented into WoL, that I never actually knew about! I'm sooo out of the loop!

The changes I'm talking about are patch 2.0.4, the full patch notes can be found here. The main ones that piqued my interest were the following:

Anyone can now create or join a Clan and participate in private clan chat, post news on Clan affairs, and more. Clan tags are pre-pended to character names of all players who join a Clan.

The very idea of clans is pretty cool and the fact that clan tags automatically pre-pend onto your name just rings out as awesome to me.

Players will soon have the freedom to select any game region to connect to and play.

Global play, wayhay, now I get to test my mettle against those pesky non-foreigners.. who will no doubt destroy me at any and every turn!

The overall AI play experienced has been greatly enhanced.In a custom game, players can now elect for an AI player to follow a specific build order, such as Full Rush, Timing Attack, Straight to Air, and more.AI players will now report key information back to their player allies, such as when they are scouting, attacking, expanding, and retreating.Additional AI improvements, including the ability to issue specific commands to AI partners, will be coming in Heart of the Swarm.

Any updates to the AI is pretty sweet, it got pretty tiresome playing against the AI when all it did were the same tactics and all that happened when you ramped up the difficulty was that it ramped up the speed at which it did the same tactics, really.

In other news, my pc still hasn't arrived yet :(:(:( though it should be delivered sometime tomorrow! Hopefully just before I get home from work.. though it will probably be delivered right before I have to go to work... then I will have to go to work and actively have to not think about my new pc and what I could be doing with it.

I've been playing a bit more Diablo 3 in the past week, I started doing something new.. leveling hardcore characters.. after doing a bit of research I found out that the best way to do this is to level 3-5 at the same time.. so I'm leveling a Witch Doctor, a Barbarian and a Demon Hunter on hardcore.. oh, did I forget to mention that I will be limiting myself by not using the auction house for the duration of leveling.... ohhh and did I also forget to mention that I will be attempting to do this while set to Monster Power 10.

Daunting task! At the moment, it's going pretty easily.. though they are only between levels 7 and 12.. the plan so far is that I will level one of them up 5 levels, then swap to the next and so on. I am allowing myself to trade between the characters however.. which is why I picked the three classes I did, as the Barbarian's main attribute is Strength, the Demon Hunter's is Dexterity and the Witch Doctor's is Intelligence.. so any drops I get, I will be able to use on at least one of my characters!

I'm looking forwards to it, exciting times!

Though, with my new pc I am getting free copies of the new Tomb Raider, Bio-shock: Infinite and Crysis 3.. so I'm not sure whether or not I will be playing those, or trying out some new things on the beast! I can't quite do what I really want to do just yet as my internet connection is still a big pile of tripe.

That's all from me!

Ciao for now!

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