Part 1

(click to watch wegame video)

Part 2

This is the 2nd half, looks like a lot of the previous new Terran footage came from this same game. Lot of Thor & BC action...

Judging form these videos the Terran Heavy Metal strategy vs Protoss seems to be much improved. Since before Protoss would counter with diversion tactics and send in Zealots to engage the tanks, with Jackals doing inline splash damage now that hurts the Protoss counter with Zeals.

However this is of course of the moment analysis since Jackal damage like most other units is subject to change. Without Goliaths the Terrans will have to resort to Vikings or Thors for their anti-air Heavy Metal.

Related Posts:

Brand spanking new Zerg vs Terran StarCraft II Video

Extended Zerg gameplay video

Watch the new Zerg Ultra in action!

Thanks to our friends at Starcraft-esp.com for the vid.

Transcript here:

http://eu.blizzard.com/blizzcast/archive/episode3.xml

Download the mp3 here:

http://us.media.blizzard.com/blizzcast/blizzcast_episode3.mp3

I did a google search for Pineapple Entertainment, but nothing relevant came up, I have emailed the original uploader about where he got the video. If he responds or I find out another way I will let you guys know

KloMeister created and recently launched a new tool that any competitive SC player would love to use. It is a combination Starcraft hack detectors as well as providing nifty features any player could use. Such as the constant map download display and automatic unique replay saving(saves every match by a new name so you don't have to rename the last_replay.rep file)

So far I haven't detected any hacks, course I don't play on Bnet these days anyways(no thanks to fucks like BWhacks)... but the other features a real nice

Download Ultimate Starcraft Toolz Now

^ Oblivion Hack detection

^ Download status

^ Automatically save and name replays

Matt our talented designer for Starfeeder got offered a job with Wegame.com a while back and here are the fruits of his recent labor

http://www.wegame.com

Don't forget to check out the Starfeeder WeGame channel here:
http://www.wegame.com/user/starfeeder/

also we will be porting current users over to the new community

stay tuned....

In the meantime check out some great posts from our archives:
http://www.starfeeder.com/blog/full_archive/

I have tons of magical Starcraft memories I'll never forget :') like being able to get away with Scout Rushes lol, perfecting the Zileas reaver drop, beating Maynard, Kali & Cases ladder etc...

Starcraft was the first game ever where I hated to lose more then I loved to win. It brought out the competitive gaming blood in me.

Moral of the story is, SC wasn't perfectly balanced right out the door, but Blizzard's hardwork and patience molded it into the greatest RTS game on the planet.

Now we can all look forward to creating new memories in the future with StarCraft II.

This video was uploaded a while back it seems, but has gone under the radar for a while...

Even with the low quality video it is apparent Blizzard is adding a lot of subtle details, in the effects, doodads and unit animations.

StarCraft: Frontline Volume 1

MSRP: $10.99
PAGES: 192
AVAILABLE: August 1st 2008
http://tokyopop.com/shop/2329/StarCraftFrontline/1.html

Thundergod
In a story by Richard Knaak, a Thor driver's ego leads him and two partners to try to pull off a heist in the middle of a war zone.

Heavy Armor
A Viking pilot must battle his mentor--for the lives of an entire colony. Dogfight/mecha combat w/ a psychological/strategic edge.

Weapon of War
A psionic six-year-old boy is at the center of a conflict between a Terran mining colony and the Zerg--and the Marines and miners must decide whether to shelter the boy, kill him, or use him against their attackers.

Why We Fight
In this profoundly moving introduction to the StarCraft universe, the three species in StarCraft are examined--and what drives their war for survival will shock and awe.

Warcraft: Legends Volume 1

MSRP: $10.99
PAGES: 192
AVAILABLE: August 1st 2008
http://www.tokyopop.com/shop/2330/WarcraftLegends/1.html

Hot on the heels of the bestselling Warcraft: The Sunwell Trilogy comes a stunning and truly awesome collection of original adventures set in the Warcraft universe.

Fallen
From Richard Knaak and Jae-Hwan Kim comes an intriguing follow-up to Warcraft: The Sunwell Trilogy. Trag Highmountain, the courageous Tauren who first made an appearance in Warcraft: Shadows of Ice, finds himself reborn...as one of the Undead.

The Journey
The arrival of a group of adventurers with promises of gold and excitement will disrupt a simple farmer's life in ways unimaginable as he takes a nightmarish ride into Scourge-ridden Andorhal.

How to Win Friends and Influence People
Lazlo Grindwidget is a Gnome engineer with a house full of seemingly useless inventions and a knack for saying the wrong things at the right time. But when a Troll goes on a rampage in town, Lazlo may be the only one who can sooth the savage beast.

An Honest Trade
Nori Blackfinger is known from Thorium Point to Booty Bay as a master weaponsmith who will sell his fine blades to anyone with enough coin. But when he sells a sword to Havoc, the infamous bandit and murderer, the result is an adventure that begins in tragedy and ends in blood...

Tournament Sponsored by http://starfeeder.com & http://rtsprofessional.com

Part 1 of game 1

Part 2 of game 1

Game 2

Game 3

Related Posts:
The Blizzard sponsored Starfeeder fansite tournament

What a tournament winner looks like

Shoutouts:
Diggity of http://sc2gg.com
Joneagle of http://starcraft2forums.org

There will be a random drawing to determine which site sponsors which team during the tournament. Each site will conduct interviews with their drawn team to give their viewers and the community as a whole a more in depth personal view of the teams.

The Teams:

MYM, ToT, LRM), Excello, Rox, MicroMedia, Face 2 Face, 50 CaL / LighT! + 1 Korean Pro team (eSTRO)

The Community sites:

MYM.com, GosuGamers.net, WGTour.com, Starfeeder.com, SC2GG.com, ICCUP.com, SC2Armory.com, and SCForAll.com

SC2GG.com will be hosting a live draft June 1st to see which team and community site will be paired up. Only team to be excluded form the draft is MYM since they will be playing for myMYM.com

Date & Location

Tournament dates: June 6th - June 28th.
Location - US West server, channel sc2gg

Shout Casting & Video

There may be various forms of casting done for certain matches throughout the tournament. Casts will be done while the tournament is running.

I suspect we may see more of the 3 person Korean style commentating as seen during the TSL teamliquid hosted tournament. Expect great commentating form the likes of Diggity, Moletrap, Combat and dozens more...

Format

The tournament will be conducted Korean dan war Style; a player keeps playing each round until he loses. 5 players per team vs the other 5 players from another team. So technically it is possible for the first player of team A to defeat all of team B themselves.

One team will face off against the professional Korean team eSTRO.

Prizes

Group A winner - Ktec 6500 mouse, eSTRO t-shirt, autographed eSTRO diary - 5 total for each prize.

Group B winner - Ktec 6500 mouse, eSTRO t-shirt, autographed eSTRO diary - 5 total for each prize.

Beat team eSTRO and get - Func 1030 autographed mouse pad, and an autographed Slayers Boxer DVD set signed by the man himself.

For more information & full list of rules check out scforall.com

To any veteran SC gamer, especially one that played in the PGL, i2e2 or on Kali this article should bring up some fun memories. I know it did for me, I could talk for hours/days about SC 1999-2004 the old school years.

Who is Old school? Brief BW History

Author Pillars

Someone over there asked me to talk a bit about my BW history after I linked him to the "Who is old school [Pictures]" thread on this site. Figured some of you might enjoy it as well.

I'll bang out some paragraphs for you...this will be an interesting exercise in memory, and I'll undoubtedly get some facts wrong:

Starcraft was my first competitive RTS. There was a whole brood of very strong RTS players who had played Warcraft 2 on Kali [an old IPX online gaming platform] who were able to translate many of the skills and principles they learned from that game and dominate competitive Starcraft during the first few years.

I came from something of the 'new school' and played almost exclusively on battle.net at first, but started frequenting the Kali community just prior to playing in the 3rd season of the PGL [Professional Gamers League, now defunct.] I managed to come in 4th [Grrr won, Soso came in 2nd, {PH}Boo! came in 3rd, Kain-the-Feared came in 5th] overall, and pocket $2,500 and a new computer in my first legitimate tournament. Playing on Kali gave me access to a much higher caliber of player [at the time it was the most skilled SC community in the world] and I was able to improve dramatically as a player in the months following the PGL.

Despite a fairly non-existent infrastructure of tournaments / competitions the hardcore community continued to thrive...because, well, the game was amazing, and new strategies / tactics / nuances were being uncovered on a daily basis. Back then the official Blizzard ladder was actually functioning and relatively well policed by Blizzard officials. In addition, the Kali community had a ladder of it's own (http://www.casesladder.com/).

I spent most of my time competing on these ladders, playing against the best players I could find, learning 2v2, and just generally attempting to enjoy the game and improve myself as much as possible. The PGL and another online league, i2e2, were the only real sources of profit one could derive from the game at this point, but both of those leagues floundered since there just wasn't enough general interest in e-sports to support them. The PGL had plans to host a 2v2 tournament which never materialized [much to the chagrin of players who had put in hundreds of hours training] and eventually they were bought out by http://www.firingsquad.com/ [where Thresh, an old school Quake god worked.] i2e2 did manage to pull off a successful 2v2 tournament, though my partner {PH}Pepe! and I failed to advance to the final rounds. I had considered us to be one of the top 4 teams in the world at that point, so this result was disappointing.

Eventually the official Blizzard ladder began to decay. Win-trading and hacking were becoming commonplace, and playing on battle.net against anyone but 'known players' was a risk [though even against 'known' players one could never be sure.] A popular hardcore SC community site "Tao of Gaming" eventually hosted it's own ladder, mostly for the Kali community. Later, another ladder [Cloud Ladder, I think?] took the reigns when the Tao of Gaming ladder fell apart.

I should also note in here that Koreans started popping up on battle.net in greater and greater frequency. Both Starcraft and SC:BW were released later in Korea, and it took them awhile to get up to speed. What one noticed about them at first was the relatively mechanical and robotic style of play.

The way many Koreans seemed to learn to play was to master a single racial match-up on a single map and come as close as possible to perfecting it. They followed build orders rigorously, and often very efficiently, but didn't adapt well to new situations or creative responses by their opponents. Often they would play a moderately strong game for the first ten minutes of the match, but once the game became more dynamic and opened up a bit they would have difficulty doing anything other than throwing the same mixture of units at you over and over again. Obviously, this didn't remain the case for long.

[I should note here that the above is an attempt to paint a generalized picture of the the 'standard' Korean play-style and approach to the game during these early years. I'm just stating the overall trends which I saw in Korean play; there were certainly exceptions.]

Personally, I had started college, while still playing Starcraft off and on. Mid-way through my first semester I was approached by a well-known Kali community figure named General~Khalsa and offered a business proposition. His plan [along with a former webmaster of Starcraft.org named 'Hone'] was to create a pro gaming team [at the time basically unheard of in the RTS world] composed of foreign players which would move to South Korea and compete in the burgeoning Korean professional Starcraft leagues. This seemed like a pretty insane / fun opportunity, and I eventually decided to go. X'Ds~Grrrr and Maynard [and later Thor] joined as well, and the four of us showed up in Korea in early 2000. We stayed in the international dorm section of a prominent women's college in Seoul for the few first months [Ewha Women's University] and made slki bang [the home of the best Korean pro team at the time] our training space.

During the 3-4 months I spent out there, the group's results were pretty lackluster. I had managed to pick up the 4th seed out of 128 players in a KBK tournament, the first of out tournaments during our time over there, but only made it as far as the round of 32 in the tournament itself, mismanaging some reavers against a sub-par Korean zerg player. If I recall correctly, Grrrr made it to the round of 16 before losing as well.

Another tournament highlight of mine including losing due to *score* when a tournament began running late and the tournament director decided to stop all of that round's games and declare whoever had the highest post-game score to be the winner. This is, of course, ridiculous, as the post-game scoring screen was never intended to be utilized in such a manner, and in the case of my game gave the victory to my opponent when I had a clear edge. We played in a 'foreign vs Korean tournament, one of our few successes during our time there [with Grrrr winning and Thor coming in second.] We lost a 3v3 [or 4v4?] tournament in the 2nd round. And I qualified for tournament called "Tooniverse" but only managed a 1-2 record, not enough to advance to the next stage of the format [this is the only tournament of mine that actually shows up on the Team Liquid Progaming Database.]

I had personally expected much more of us as a group. To be fair, though, the Koreans were just more dedicated than we were, and the formats of the tournaments made it nearly impossible for anyone but the best to succeed. After a few months it was clear to me that I just wasn't enjoying the game like I used to, and that I wouldn't be able to compete against the best in the world without this passion. I was also very homesick, and wanted to get back to college. Pro gaming, while a nice dream, didn't seem like it would lead anywhere useful. Maynard and Thor stayed for a bit longer, but both eventually returned back home [to Texas and Canada respectively.] Grrr continued to live in Korea [and still lives there today] and also managed to have some good competitive success over the years that followed.

I still played a bit of Starcraft after returning to the States, and actually won the USA WCG in 2000, beating Tsunami in an earlier round, and Jolly in the finals. I decided not to take the trip to Korea, though, as I knew my chances of winning were slim and I wanted to focus on school. A year or so later I came out of semi-retirement after being invited to 'LAN5ARENA' in France and played there as well, though lost to a fellow named 'zarma' in frustrating fashion in the 3rd round of competition. This was the last official tournament of my career.

To answer your exact question, I quit SC because it stopped being enjoyable. I played the game for thousands of hours over a 4-5 year stretch, and I'd had enough. In the past 5-6 years I've played maybe seven or eight other RTS games, becoming one of the top players in each of the games I dedicated more than a month to [this is much less of an accomplishment, though, given the relatively small playing pool of many other titles in the genre.]

Starcraft remains the best computer game I've ever played, and probably the best computer game I ever *will* play. So much of my life is intertwined with it, and it's had a huge impact on the direction my life has taken [from working as a designer on SC2 to playing poker for a living today.]

So, yeah, that was sorta rough, and I'm CERTAIN some of those facts / timelines are wrong. But it's reasonably close. Let me know if you want to talk about any aspect of it in further detail.

And sorry for creating a wall of text for those of you who don't actually care.

Originally posted here:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=71763

Old school Starcraft photos

Graciously & sarcastically accepting 1st place trophy at WCG.

My favorite 2v2 partner, {PH}Pepe on the left. X_Mage_X on the right.

Absurd 4v4 tournament. [Maynard, Grrr, myself, Thor.]

^ Yeah that is Maynard, the gamer which the Starcraft tactic Maynard Transfer is named after - Lipton

More photos of old school Pro Starcraft gamers here

Information about the Baneling has been uploaded to the European Starcraft 2 site, the US site always gets updated slower :/ anyways here is a new look at the Baneling and its story:

- Blizzard

More Lore: http://eu.starcraft2.com/features/zerg/baneling.xml

This last sentence is interesting:

Terran commanders now train their troops to watch for these abominations. In the meantime, scientists are desperately trying to develop chemical rounds that will cause Banelings to detonate before they reach Terran lines.

Sounds like the Devs may be thinking about an attack upgrade for Terran infantry, specifically made to counter Zerg units. This is just speculation of course, however it seems very possible to me, maybe even just in the single player campaign.

More Baneling Screenshots:

Beautiful artwork of the new Protoss Carrier

Related Posts

The Starcraft II Protoss Interface

To any veteran SC gamer, especially one that played in the PGL, i2e2 or on Kali this article should bring up some fun memories. I know it did for me, I could talk for hours/days about SC 1999-2004 the old school years.

Who is Old school? Brief BW History

Author Pillars

Someone over there asked me to talk a bit about my BW history after I linked him to the "Who is old school [Pictures]" thread on this site. Figured some of you might enjoy it as well.

I'll bang out some paragraphs for you...this will be an interesting exercise in memory, and I'll undoubtedly get some facts wrong:

Starcraft was my first competitive RTS. There was a whole brood of very strong RTS players who had played Warcraft 2 on Kali [an old IPX online gaming platform] who were able to translate many of the skills and principles they learned from that game and dominate competitive Starcraft during the first few years.

I came from something of the 'new school' and played almost exclusively on battle.net at first, but started frequenting the Kali community just prior to playing in the 3rd season of the PGL [Professional Gamers League, now defunct.] I managed to come in 4th [Grrr won, Soso came in 2nd, {PH}Boo! came in 3rd, Kain-the-Feared came in 5th] overall, and pocket $2,500 and a new computer in my first legitimate tournament. Playing on Kali gave me access to a much higher caliber of player [at the time it was the most skilled SC community in the world] and I was able to improve dramatically as a player in the months following the PGL.

Despite a fairly non-existent infrastructure of tournaments / competitions the hardcore community continued to thrive...because, well, the game was amazing, and new strategies / tactics / nuances were being uncovered on a daily basis. Back then the official Blizzard ladder was actually functioning and relatively well policed by Blizzard officials. In addition, the Kali community had a ladder of it's own (http://www.casesladder.com/).

I spent most of my time competing on these ladders, playing against the best players I could find, learning 2v2, and just generally attempting to enjoy the game and improve myself as much as possible. The PGL and another online league, i2e2, were the only real sources of profit one could derive from the game at this point, but both of those leagues floundered since there just wasn't enough general interest in e-sports to support them. The PGL had plans to host a 2v2 tournament which never materialized [much to the chagrin of players who had put in hundreds of hours training] and eventually they were bought out by http://www.firingsquad.com/ [where Thresh, an old school Quake god worked.] i2e2 did manage to pull off a successful 2v2 tournament, though my partner {PH}Pepe! and I failed to advance to the final rounds. I had considered us to be one of the top 4 teams in the world at that point, so this result was disappointing.

Eventually the official Blizzard ladder began to decay. Win-trading and hacking were becoming commonplace, and playing on battle.net against anyone but 'known players' was a risk [though even against 'known' players one could never be sure.] A popular hardcore SC community site "Tao of Gaming" eventually hosted it's own ladder, mostly for the Kali community. Later, another ladder [Cloud Ladder, I think?] took the reigns when the Tao of Gaming ladder fell apart.

I should also note in here that Koreans started popping up on battle.net in greater and greater frequency. Both Starcraft and SC:BW were released later in Korea, and it took them awhile to get up to speed. What one noticed about them at first was the relatively mechanical and robotic style of play.

The way many Koreans seemed to learn to play was to master a single racial match-up on a single map and come as close as possible to perfecting it. They followed build orders rigorously, and often very efficiently, but didn't adapt well to new situations or creative responses by their opponents. Often they would play a moderately strong game for the first ten minutes of the match, but once the game became more dynamic and opened up a bit they would have difficulty doing anything other than throwing the same mixture of units at you over and over again. Obviously, this didn't remain the case for long.

[I should note here that the above is an attempt to paint a generalized picture of the the 'standard' Korean play-style and approach to the game during these early years. I'm just stating the overall trends which I saw in Korean play; there were certainly exceptions.]

Personally, I had started college, while still playing Starcraft off and on. Mid-way through my first semester I was approached by a well-known Kali community figure named General~Khalsa and offered a business proposition. His plan [along with a former webmaster of Starcraft.org named 'Hone'] was to create a pro gaming team [at the time basically unheard of in the RTS world] composed of foreign players which would move to South Korea and compete in the burgeoning Korean professional Starcraft leagues. This seemed like a pretty insane / fun opportunity, and I eventually decided to go. X'Ds~Grrrr and Maynard [and later Thor] joined as well, and the four of us showed up in Korea in early 2000. We stayed in the international dorm section of a prominent women's college in Seoul for the few first months [Ewha Women's University] and made slki bang [the home of the best Korean pro team at the time] our training space.

During the 3-4 months I spent out there, the group's results were pretty lackluster. I had managed to pick up the 4th seed out of 128 players in a KBK tournament, the first of out tournaments during our time over there, but only made it as far as the round of 32 in the tournament itself, mismanaging some reavers against a sub-par Korean zerg player. If I recall correctly, Grrrr made it to the round of 16 before losing as well.

Another tournament highlight of mine including losing due to *score* when a tournament began running late and the tournament director decided to stop all of that round's games and declare whoever had the highest post-game score to be the winner. This is, of course, ridiculous, as the post-game scoring screen was never intended to be utilized in such a manner, and in the case of my game gave the victory to my opponent when I had a clear edge. We played in a 'foreign vs Korean tournament, one of our few successes during our time there [with Grrrr winning and Thor coming in second.] We lost a 3v3 [or 4v4?] tournament in the 2nd round. And I qualified for tournament called "Tooniverse" but only managed a 1-2 record, not enough to advance to the next stage of the format [this is the only tournament of mine that actually shows up on the Team Liquid Progaming Database.]

I had personally expected much more of us as a group. To be fair, though, the Koreans were just more dedicated than we were, and the formats of the tournaments made it nearly impossible for anyone but the best to succeed. After a few months it was clear to me that I just wasn't enjoying the game like I used to, and that I wouldn't be able to compete against the best in the world without this passion. I was also very homesick, and wanted to get back to college. Pro gaming, while a nice dream, didn't seem like it would lead anywhere useful. Maynard and Thor stayed for a bit longer, but both eventually returned back home [to Texas and Canada respectively.] Grrr continued to live in Korea [and still lives there today] and also managed to have some good competitive success over the years that followed.

I still played a bit of Starcraft after returning to the States, and actually won the USA WCG in 2000, beating Tsunami in an earlier round, and Jolly in the finals. I decided not to take the trip to Korea, though, as I knew my chances of winning were slim and I wanted to focus on school. A year or so later I came out of semi-retirement after being invited to 'LAN5ARENA' in France and played there as well, though lost to a fellow named 'zarma' in frustrating fashion in the 3rd round of competition. This was the last official tournament of my career.

To answer your exact question, I quit SC because it stopped being enjoyable. I played the game for thousands of hours over a 4-5 year stretch, and I'd had enough. In the past 5-6 years I've played maybe seven or eight other RTS games, becoming one of the top players in each of the games I dedicated more than a month to [this is much less of an accomplishment, though, given the relatively small playing pool of many other titles in the genre.]

Starcraft remains the best computer game I've ever played, and probably the best computer game I ever *will* play. So much of my life is intertwined with it, and it's had a huge impact on the direction my life has taken [from working as a designer on SC2 to playing poker for a living today.]

So, yeah, that was sorta rough, and I'm CERTAIN some of those facts / timelines are wrong. But it's reasonably close. Let me know if you want to talk about any aspect of it in further detail.

And sorry for creating a wall of text for those of you who don't actually care.

Originally posted here:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=71763

Old school Starcraft photos

Graciously & sarcastically accepting 1st place trophy at WCG.

My favorite 2v2 partner, {PH}Pepe on the left. X_Mage_X on the right.

Absurd 4v4 tournament. [Maynard, Grrr, myself, Thor.]

^ Yeah that is Maynard, the gamer which the Starcraft tactic Maynard Transfer is named after - Lipton

More photos of old school Pro Starcraft gamers here

Starcraft 2 short comic makers fftcomics.com have relaunched with a new layout and new comic to boot!

Latest comic

http://www.fftcomics.com/day27.htm

Check out their archives for previous Starcraft 2 related comics

http://www.fftcomics.com/archive.htm

My first podcast interview was with FFTCOMICS

Emphasis on "first"

There is already a Starcraft WCIII mod, now the talented crew over at wccampaigns.net have created a Starcraft 2 mod Now if only I can find my WCIII CD...

Check out their site for more details. (and bigger screenshots)

You can even download this mod from CNET

From abriko of wccampaigns.net:

"I released the version 2 of Marine Assault ...the map is very very different. This version is more like a RPG-melee. RPG because you start with only your heroe, nothing can be done without the heroe and spell and items are necessary to complete the mission. Melee because you can have many units, earn money by a small ressource system, attack enemys bases but don't have any troop production."

Related Posts:

Starcraft Heroes - WCIII Mod

Star Killer Screenshots - WCIII Mod

For one we are switching servers and that may cause the site to go down for a little bit, but depending on the domain name forwarding may be longer. Anyways these are just minor things to prepare for bigger things

Also note that the Blog is not going to be updated during this time...
please follow the Starfeeder Blog here: http://www.gameriot.com/blogs/The-Starfeed

If you have already registered to play then you should have already gotten an email from Joneagle of starcraft2forums.org with the time and location.

Again I would like to apologize to anyone effected by this, please check on their forums here for more information and check your emails!

We are working with the Blizzard eSports team to figure out the problem, but to develop the fix will take a lot of time and sadly the tournament cannot be played on the league.

BRACKETS

http://www.starfeeder.com/league/starcraft/tournaments/128manSC2forums/