EPTThere was a time, you know, when I was good at computer games. Unfortunately for my SC2 rating, that time was the 1980s. There was scarcely anyone in Australia (this being before .au was invented, you see...) who could get through Sabre Wulf as well as I could. I hit Elite in Elite years before anyone thought of spelling it with numbers. That was then. A few years later, I was a computerless University dropout who discovered Contract Bridge, which I then proceeded to play five nights a week. I was a talented player, but never really worked hard enough at it to be really good. By the time I had a computer again, I had missed the boat on the whole Warcraft/Starcraft thing and ended up playing Baldur's Gate.
I guess you can tell where this is going. Yes, I'm a WoW player. When I started playing WoW, I was back at at Uni (only this time with people half my age) and playing WoW five nights a week (hmmm... a pattern?) was a great way of having a kind of a social life without the hassle of having a social life, staying at home and not spending any money. I was a decent player too, a pretty good healer. Of course, I never farmed enough, researched enough of worked hard enough at it to be top of the line (another pattern?) but I was a handy member of the raid team and priests were important back then, dammit!
I got into Starcraft because a few people in the WoW communities I knew were excellent propagandists for the game at a time when I was going through one of those bored with WoW moments. They happen. While the game was like nothing I had played before, it had a few things I liked immediately: a truckload of history and trivia I could slurp up; a commitment to serious analysis of play and an active community built around the game, all things the bridge and WoW had as well.
Something was different though. In the other games, I had always been at least a decent player. I could have been better, but I was good enough. In SC2, I started out by losing my first 26 games in the copper league, and if it hasn't been absolutely downhill from there, the upwards gradient is pretty slight. I'm in silver league and likely to stay there for a while yet. So the question is, why am I fine with this? Well, to find that out, it looks as though you're going to have to wait until Part 2, since I have an appointment with a curry that is truly excellent, whatever Waxangel thinks...
Footnotes: (any real history text has to have footnotes, right?)
You can play Sabre Wulf online (without sound, alas) here:
http://www.twinbee.org/hob/play.php?snap=sabrewulf
Controls are Q (left) W (right) E (up) R (down) and T (Sword) Enjoy that, all you interface-is-too-simple types:
Elite exists in many versions for a host of emulators. I played the ZX spectrum version. Check out the wikipedia page here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)
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