EPTI think one of the greater pleasures in my life so far has been playing SC with a really close friend. Back when Jae was in Singapore, I remember how often we used to play together and just talk about the game. We would watch pro matches during recess, try employing random strategies when we got home, and it was glorious. There was so much discussion about SC between us. The drama, the strategies and whatnot. We usually played 1v1s, but I remember there was one time we decided to play a custom game type, which was Phantom. Some of you may know what Phantom is, and some may not. For those who do not - Phantom is a game mode with 8 players where 1 player is secretly selected to be the "phantom", and must try to kill all other players with his/her additional resources. Everybody is allied at first, but players can un-ally each other if they have their suspicions. Anyway, what he did was ruin the game for everybody by killing everybody without any regard to the meaning of the game. We never played anything other than 1v1s and 2s after that.
I did play my fair share of Phantom games without Jae though. I made some friends, and played a lot of games with them, but now they've disappeared. One by one, they logged off and never came back. They probably went on to other games or just decided to stop gaming. There was these two guys, dontspearme and Soulpectre. I played many a Phantom game with them, and dontspearme was the kind of person who got really into the game and would play very seriously, using standard strategies and unit compositions. Soulspectre was different. He was a very fun and engaging person, not to say that I didn't enjoy dontspearme's presence, but Soulspectre was just more fun. He enjoyed rushing Dark Templars and would randomly attack a person because he happened to just know that this person was Phantom. I don't know how he did it, but he was very often right.
Soulspectre was the first to go. Slowly he started to log on less frequently, and suddenly just stopped altogether. dontspearme disappeared almost immediately a week or two after Soulspectre left. Although, dontspearme did come back for a couple of weeks after a month or so. We played some ones when he felt like it, and the rest of the time we were back to playing custom games. Mostly Phantom.
There was another guy, Wazzz. He was quite a character. He was actually quite skilled at the game itself, and was quite high on the ladder for the times that he played. What he enjoyed doing was being a weird person in general. Sometimes he tried too hard. In pre-game lobbies he would sometimes ask people what they thought of the "5 minute rule". Of course, almost everybody didn't know what the rule was for, but Wazzz always made sure to tell them, "If you're not done, just keep on humping right? 5 minutes should be enough." Yeah, he was that kind of person who enjoyed that kind of humour.
Right now, with Phantom rapidly losing popularity, with all these friends gone, I'm left with playing Monobattles by myself most of the time. Sometimes I'll play a few games with people on TL, but it feels like everything isn't the same anymore and never will be again. It feels a little bit forced if you just randomly decide with someone on TL that you want to play games together, something doesn't feel right. Something doesn't feel as fun as compared to meeting someone over and over and over again and you two decide buddy up and try other game modes.
So, today I just watched Proleague live for the first time. I know, sctoo, and all that derogatory labelling and such. I loved all the games, and the Kespa players actually displayed a remarkable level of skill - although I don't know what I was really expecting. I really hoped that Jaedong would do well, and I was left bitter and disappointed. EG-TL's debut was unsatisfying to say the least. I had dreams of a foreign team absolutely crushing the Proleague, but as I said, it was a dream.
+ Show Spoiler [Potentially NSFW] +
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/gYkIi.jpg)
Taking a page out of dovocs's book
Fantasy vs. Classic on Arkanoid was an amazing game. I thought that Fantasy was surely going to lose the game for a moment there, but by some miracle he managed to break the contain and deal a devastating counter-attack taking out Classic's two expansions. Anyway, I'm looking forward to watching more Proleague.
