- Starcraft 2: Good, but...
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posted by
Saboteur
on
04.08.2010 11:39
(0 comments)
It's been a long time since I've touched upon gaming news, but after playing some SC2 I wanted to share some thoughts. Like many reviews I've seen on the web point out, the jist of it is that the game is not revolutionary, but instead "more of the same".
The game plays well, has nice visuals, and the campaign is fun. But instead of highlighting the good things that everyone agrees on, I'll just write up the things that rub me the wrong way. If you want to know what's so great about the game, go read some other review.
1. Nothing has been done to unit AI. This is unforgivable. Builders will build themselves into corners and get stuck, infantry has no formation abilities (your medics will charge in the front line before marines if they happen to be there when you issue the command), units easily clutter up and die before ever attacking anything because they can't find a way to a firing position, you have to manually stop a move order if you want the units to engage hostiles that would otherwise slaughter them while they are running... The only good thing about unit AI that I have seen is that Terran SCV's will automatically repair mechanicals in their vicinity. Why did they allow us this benefit and choose to ignore the many other shortcomings and outright flaws in unit AI? Other games did this so much better years ago already.
2. Nothing has been done to the user interface. A massive menu bar covers almost a third of the viewport, and the camera is severely limited just like in Warcraft 3. I refuse to believe this is the best UI conceivable for a strategy game, and am disappointed in the lack of innovation shown by Blizzard.
3. There is no LAN support.
4. Battle.Net is too tightly integrated to the game. I don't like my applications connecting to the internet unless I explicitly want them to, and yet to play a custom single player game of the game I paid for, I still need to get online to do it? And what happens when some time down the line, Blizzard goes bust or stops supporting the game and brings the servers down? Ok, they have a good track record of supporting their games, but our gaming experience is at the mercy of them - the product we paid for is less a game, and more an access license to a service. This is not a good trend for PC gaming, and it pains me that Blizzard seems to get away with it.
5. Achievements are a fad. How anyone thinks they add any value to a game is beyond me. I hope people tire of this crap and demand more and better content instead of grinding away at the same content to get shiny badges to show around.
6. The player is underestimated. There's too much hand holding (in the first Ihan crystal mission you are instructed not once, but twice to use your abilities in exactly similar situations). Most choices are obvious, and yet they are strongly highlighted. Much of dialogue and narration is clishé and uninteresting. I would have liked my game a bit more more mature, more adult. I guess this is catering for the children playing though.
Yes, SC2 is a good game in its own right, and I'll probably put in more hours. But it feels like Blizzard is underachieving by not evolving the game more. What are undoubtedly called design decisions, I call design flaws. Interface and AI simply pale in comparison to even games that are five years old now. Blizzard made so sure to not fix things that weren't broken... that they actually didn't even fix things that WERE broken.
- Samba fails to start?
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posted by
Saboteur
on
08.07.2010 21:33
(0 comments)
Free tip to anyone running a fairly minimalistic server, having issues where SMDB (Samba) is silently failing to start. You need to install CUPS even if you don't have and never intend to have printers in your network. Headache of the day for me, and not one google hit pointed towards the solution - thus this post.
- New server online
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posted by
Saboteur
on
21.06.2010 23:10
(0 comments)
Hey now!
Finally some good news. I have migrated to the new server platform, so no more unavailability and crashing databases. There will, as per usual, be a number of things broken, but I'm working on getting everything back the way it was.
Sorry about the extensive downtimes!
- Complete server crash in sight
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posted by
Saboteur
on
02.06.2010 19:13
(0 comments)
It's a hard drive crash, plain and simple. I'm switching to an SSD but I will coincide this with a complete system rebuild in 2 weeks. The server may crash completely before this time.
If that happens, I will point the site to a parking page informing of the situation. Full correction to the situation is still pending, like I said - 2 weeks.
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