Chatter Of The Squirrel

Game: Starcraft 2 Beta

WoooHooo~~~!!

I got an invite to participate in the beta testing of the best thing to happen in PC gaming this millennium.

Took a while to download. Then, I had some problems playing on Battle Net.

But no worries. With a little help from ‘friends’, I can toss in a simple AI and play single player games just to try out the game.

It’s still gonna be Zerg, Terrans and Protoss. Some familiar units and abilities are still there. A lot of things have changed.

Terran

Supply Depots can lower themselves underground or pop up at will. Thus becoming essential defensive structures. Able to block off a choke point completely, yet lower themselves out of the way for your own army to walk through. Evil.

Air transport is now a Medivac too. Nukes are built in Ghost Academies. Upgrades allowing buildings to pump out 2 units at a go. Command Centre upgrades include a gun turret. Robotech Valkyries transforming to provide both air and ground support. A new giant mecha, the Thor, stomping around like a Warjack. Battlecruisers shoot much faster now. Then a unit that can throw out mini gun turrets…

Protoss

Gateways can turn into Warpgates, which warps in new units almost instantaneously to any spot covered by a pylon or a warp prism. There’s a 15sec cooldown, but that’s still much faster than building the unit via the Gateway. Zealot rushes are still scary. But no more Reaver drops. The Mothership isn’t anywhere as scary as the alpha preview video Blizzard shared with us in the early days of SC2’s development.

Zergs

Zergs is a whole new creature! Creep Tumors to spread the creep all over the map. Hydralisks now an advanced build; more expensive to maintain, but powerful. Brood Lords shoot funky ammo. Infestors can burrow and move, and shoots out Neural Parasites that controls an enemy unit for 10seconds. How fun is it to parasite a Protoss probe and quickly get it to build you your own Nexus, so that you can start building both Zerg and Protoss forces? Think cloaked Hydras…

Not sure how Zerg will deal with air superiority… The few games played, Zerg’s anti-air seems lacking. But ruling the ground with swarms of Zerglings is terrifying. Extremely fast buggers, annoying hit and run attacks.

It’s unlikely that I’ll ever play much on Battle Net. Will definitely work through the single player campaign when the game launches. Although, should put some effort into the beta to demonstrate enthusiasm, so that they’ll keep me in the list for future betas >.>

Game: World Of Warcraft is 5 years old

Dang~! How time flies…

When I started playing WoW, gold was still less than US$400/oz.

Game: Torchlight with cheat

Torchlight is a pretty fine game to play, while waiting for Diablo 3.

It integrates some of the best elements from Diablo 2, and World Of Warcraft. Lots of monsters to hack and slash. Lots of loot. And plenty of ways to bash in your foes.

Forget challenge. Forget the story. Forget FMV. It’s just mindless clicking fun. And it works fine in a windowed screen, so I can have Star Trek:TNG playing on one monitor while I disintegrate goblins with a laser beam. All the while, I can still tab out and carry out some semblance of a conversation on MSN.

It’s a nice game that just works and gives you no grief even if you don’t have the latest graphics card that comes in a box-so-big-you-can-use-it-as-a-casket.

But there is a bug. A nice one.

Talk to the vendor that sells you Identify Scrolls.

Left click on the Identify Scroll, bring it over to your inventory box, and left-click on your item. And behold, the item is duplicated!

Use this to duplicate your gems till you’ve got all you need.

So. Much. Fun.

Book: Retribution of Scyrah

I’ve been promoting WARMACHINE in Malaysia for quite a while.

I earn points for my efforts. And managed to accumulate quite a bit of it. I can redeem these points for free products. Perks of being a PressGanger for Privateer Press.

Although I’ve been taking it very slow lately, I still have a quantity of points accumulated. The past year or two, every time I’ve tried to redeem them for products, the items had either been stolen, or been bounced back to the US. That had sapped my enthusiasm a fair bit, thus leading to my reduced efforts.

As they say, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” I’ve made a few repeated inquiries, and I finally managed to get my predicament heard. About a hundred points had been lost for good, but I managed to get some points charged back and I was able to place a new order 2 months ago. This time, I had it delivered to a good friend’s house, cos seemingly the postmen on that route aren’t the lowly, scum-of-the-earth thieves that had been taking stuff meant for me.

And finally, I have THIS:

Which contained THESE:

These are mostly blisters I needed to complete my collection of the Pirates of the Broken Coast Mercenary faction, as well as the currently available selection of the new, 5th faction of WARMACHINE: The Retribution of Scyrah. These are elves that KICK BUTT!

Here’s a closer look:

I even splurged on the hardcover copy of the Forcebook. WARMACHINE is entering its second age, Mark II, with a revamp of many of its rules. The prior 4 factions will also be republished in their own individual Forcebooks. The Retribution book I have in my hands now is a glimpse of how those books will be formatted later.

There is lots of fluff. ie. the stuff that drew me into WARMACHINE in the first place. There’s a lot of it.

There are many pages pertaining to the history and military structure of Ios.

There are Theme armies for each Warcaster. For each theme, there are 4 tiers of requirements you can follow to get added advantages to your army.

Retribution gives us 5 new Iosian Warcasters. 3 Light Warjacks. 3 Heavy Warjacks. 7 infantry units. 5 unit attachments. 1 weapon attachment. 1 cavalry unit. 1 cavalry unit attachment. 5 solos. 4 character solos. 1 cavalry character dragoon.

And finally ending with painting guides for the most distinctive features of the army.

It is a thing of beauty…

Must make the time to build and paint up my army as soon as possible.

Games: Space Hulk

GW re-releases their best game ever… after 20 yrs, with the …erm… 20th Anniversary Edition Space Hulk.

It’s an amazing package, and it sold out really quickly. Some local stores are selling it 25% over recommended retail.

It’s also the first time I’ve looked at a plastic sprue, and felt desire. It’s some amazing…

Wolf only brought in 8 boxes, and they went out really quick. Of course, a bunch of people gave him shit for not bringing in more, cos he was supposed to TELEPATHICALLY pick up on their desires, and thus brought in more stock for them. Even though Wolf had asked everyone to pre-order and no one did…

Well, I only saw the contents of the new Space Hulk. Everyone just pick up the goodies and bring them back to their lairs.

But we opened up Wolf’s own old copy of the game, and I learnt to play it for the first time ever. Even though that game has always been sitting somewhere around for years and years.

Imagine the scene in Aliens when the marines hunt for vicious aliens besetting them from behind every door and dark corner. That’s what this game is like.

A squad of Terminators, genetically enhanced super-soldiers in thick, cumbersome armor and armed with the best weaponry of the 41st millenium, enters derelict spaceships to purge it of deadly infestations of Genestealers. The armour is so heavy that in the time it takes a Terminator to pirouette a 360, a Genestealer can rush inside half the maximum range of some of these 41st millenium guns. The armour is so big, that it becomes impossible for the Terminator behind his squadmate to provide covering fire. Yet the armour is so delicate that it’ll yield to the claws of a Genestealer in one hit. They might as well be fighting in their jammies and at least be more comfortable!! Oh, and those 41st millenium guns still jam all too frequently.

Well, asides from the inconsistencies in logic and imagination, the rules of the game is pretty good. It’s extremely challenging for the Terminators to achieve their objective. And obviously everyone loves to play Genestealers. The game comes with a whole bunch of missions of varying challenge. It’s a true classic.