EPTFebruary 2007:
I play what is officially the best PvZ in my life. Map is Rush Hour III, I open with 1 gate tech, zerg goes 12 hatch. Zerg keeps an ovie over my ramp so I decide to trick him a bit and keep producing zealots from my gate while only showing him those two who are blocking the ramp. After my leg upgrade finishes, I run out of my base at the same time starting an expo nexus since storm is soon to come. Arriving at his base I find a 3 hatch hydra passed economic stages and just started massing. I did some gross damage, killing several drones and his troops, but he managed to defeat my zealots so I had to turn back. The next 15 minutes was basically him fighting with his hydras all-in and me defending my nat. I've lost the nexus 3 times total and he never gave me breathing room to setup defenses. Tons of hydras, tons of storm and tons of fun. The game ended when he started mining out and tried to get another expo - his unit flow thinned and I was able to overwhelm him. I saved the replay with the feeling "StarCraft is the SHIT!!!" and went to sleep because I was completely drained.
February 2007 entry 2:
I started another game on RH III the day after. All goes well, I send my first obs to scout and suddenly everything freezes and I start hearing some weird sounds. Upon further investigation, my motherboard is officially dead. No money to buy another one, though.
March 2007:
Fear not! I have another computer (a very old machine used to write emails) that can barely handle SC, but at least I can go mapmaking and do tests in-game while I'm gathering the money for the new machine. After 2 hours of work, my CD-ROM gives a strange sound. I open it to find about a hundred pieces of my BroodWar CD.
March 2007 entry 2:
Another CD is about 20 bucks, that's not a problem. However, I soon find out that I'm facing a zerg economy problem - even though a drone costs 50 minerals, a drone and 50 minerals are not the same thing. Much like that, 20$ != BroodWar CD. After a week of searching, I give up. StarCraft isn't being sold in Russia. At all.
April 2007:
All hope lost.
May 2007:
I finally get the money required to buy a new machine. However, I soon discover that buying a computer is unbelievably hard - the standards for basically everything I knew have long changed and the selection of whatever components is limitless. This is the stage where I learn that just getting a new mobo won't cut it - new mobo means a new processor socket and a PCIE slot, so bye-bye my AMD K6 and Radeon 9700 Pro. Since I'm also spending a large amount of time working in my lab, the process of choosing computer parts is postponed till summer.
1 July 2007:
I leave Russia on a vacation to Czech Republic with my gf. During that vacation, I stumble upon a small shop that (whoa) has 1 copy left of "Blizzard Anthology". The set contains SC:BW, Diablo and War2BNE. I don't even remember how much I had to pay for it, because at that point it was totally irrelevant.
Second part of July 2007:
Upon returning home, I seriosly get into buying a new machine. After a week of brainfucking, it's finally home with a 5200+ 65 watt processor, 2 Gb RAM and a 512 MB GDDR3 Palit Radeon HD 2600 XT video card. After some more brainfucking, Windows XP is successfully installed on my computer.
July 2007 entry 3:
FUCK!!!
StarCraft doesn't launch, giving me a nice DirectDraw error and stating that I need to buy a new video card that can handle 8-bit 640x480. ATI Catalyst 7.7 is bugged and no older version works for this card. Despair surrounds me.
August 2007:
Battle.net tech support is helpless on the subject and I don't really need their help anymore because the driver issue is already identified. No ideas how to get around it, however. A guy named Sixen on the tech support forum suggests using Virtual PC.
August 2007 entry 2:
I've read about virtualization before, but never though it could be used in such a way. I download the package and start tweaking with the setup. My first attempt to install Windows 98 on a virtual machine fails miserably.
6 August 2007:
Today I've unearthed a Windows 2000 setup disc and the virtual machine had to succumb to my immesuareable might. 2 hours later, after a lot of trial and error, StarCraft finally loads without performance issues. A milestone, indeed.
6 August 2007 entry 2:
So, Battle.net bithes, I'm fucking back and better than ever! Tremble in my wake!!!
