EPTI didn't have a beta-key, but because one person is FUCKING AWESOME(ZELNIQ), I was able to sign up and download the beta. Took forever, but every minute that passed watching the download move along caused my heart to beat just a bit faster.
Finally, the download finished after five hours, and it installed. I jumped in right away and made a custom game against a computer and messed around with things. My laptop, being the bastard that it is, was lagging up a shitstorm. Finally I got it settled down so the lag was gone, only to be met by the dreaded bluescreen crash, or repeatedly having the game lockup.
Undeterred, I took another three hours to update everything that needed to be, and cleaned my laptop like it was spring. Satisfied I did everything I could, I hopped back on and played for a little over two hours. Those two hours were probably the most entertainment I've had from a game in a long time, probably since I stopped playing broodwar competitively.
It's not perfect, but I attribute that to lack of experience with the game more than the game itself. Things I remember reading about like mbs or automining turned out not to be so bad, if anything it felt more natural to have the worker a.i not be completely retarded. Out of habit I hotkey'd buildings seperately (btw, I'm playing terran), though on occasion I'd pair more than one up if they had a different add-on.
So overall, my small delve into SC2 was great in the game (the new b.net sucks balls though). It was smooth and mostly fast paced, and wasn't just a remake of broodwar, it is its own game. I can see really, really fun games coming from it when there are more people playing that are skilled, instead of a protoss who sits and watches all his probes die to four reapers...
If you were worried about SC2 before, don't be. We're at the beginning, so it's all uphill from here.
Oh and so far terran is great, I haven't played zerg or protoss but I'm liking terran a lot. I haven't played enough to give a real in-depth report about them yet, but maybe after tomorrow (playing allllllllll day)
