Off The Walt

If you’ve never picked up Half-Life 1 yet, fire up your Steam client and drop a whole dollar to help celebrate a decade of Gordon Freeman.

Amazon is offering unDRM’ed Christmas completely for free! http://tinyurl.com/5blosz will get you to the page and you just have to click the yellow button top right and you’re golden! Happy Holidays!

So Obama seemingly took the election by a landslide (is that what you call it?), 349-163 electoral and about 4% more popular vote over McCain. I’m glad McCain is not in the White House next year, but I’m not entirely satisfied by Obama, but we certainly could have been worse off, we could have 8 more years of President Clinton in The House, no longer hiding behind her husband as a proxy any more.

Given all the choices available, I would have liked Ron Paul, but failing him, Obama would have been my second choice.

I know The President doesn’t decide every factor in our nation, like unemployment, but that aside, I do feel very strongly that Barack Obama will help our great nation and have it realize dreams of its adequacy.

Welcome to The Presidency, Mr. Obama, serve our country well and I will serve you equally.

So Blizzard is to release their long-awaited StarCraft 2 . Many hoped, myself included, that this would be an MMO. I loathe the idea of paying for games once I’ve already paid for them, but I would have considered SCMMO.

Blizzard has recently revealed their plans for SC2 and while it does look neat, it really looks like the same old missions and such with pretty new graphics. Yes, there are a couple new units to play with, but it just doesn’t look all that compelling to me.

One thing that they further revealed was the game is going to be released in 3 parts… each race (Terran, Zerg and Protoss) are each going to get their own box on store shelves. This means fans will shell out $150 or thereabouts for the privilege to jump back into the StarCraft universe… Did ActiVision have any influence over how they are coming to market? I’d think yes, but it’s just an assumption.

I’ll likely grab the Terran game so I can get online, because you are apparently not restricted to which race you can play online. I’m mostly interested in seeing how the new UMS (Use Map Settings) maps are created and try to revamp my classic map that has had millions of plays and conversions, Test of Terran Survival. I did make a Protoss version, but the Terrans are more versatile than any of the other races, so I think I’ll focus on that. I hope there is a method to lock your maps in this release, because I’d like a single build of the map to go out there… also, something that recognizes you’ve made a revision of your map and gives the players the most recent would be great, too. I doubt we’ll see this, but I can hope, right?

Aside from the inital Terran release, I think I’ll wait to buy the other mission storylines until the battlechest comes out in a couple years.