starcraft posts

One of the world's biggest e-sports tournament organizations is holding its grand finals event over in Los Angeles. On Thursday, the World Cyber Games started its four day tournament with players and teams from 60 countries competing for their share of $250,000 in cash and prizes at the LA Convention Center (also the long time home of E3).

The grand final of the WCG, which is held in a different country every year, has several PC games in its tournament line-up including Carom3D, Counter-Strike, FIFA 10, StarCraft: Brood War, TrackMania Nations Forever, and Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. In addition the free-to-play game League of Legends and the Asian only online game Quake Wars Online are in the tournament as "promotional games.

Just a week after Blizzard released a major 1.1 patch for its sci-fi RTS game StarCraft II, the developer has now issued a new smaller patch for the game via its auto-updater. The 1.1.1 patch deals with a few smaller issues that have cropped up in the game since the 1.1 patch.

Some of the bugs fixed in the latest patch include a few issues with some of StarCraft II's units such as a problem with the Phoenix's Graviton Beam cutting out if the unit reached 50 energy points. Another issue that's been fixed is stuttering when using older save games or replays. Finally an issue where some Mac gamers were unable to join games has been addressed.

Last week, Blizzard released its first major patch. 1.1, for its hit RTS game StarCraft II. It contained a bunch of balance changes, support for Nvidia's 3D Vision tech and more. But Blizzard isn't done yet. PC Gamer quotes the game's lead designer Chris Sigaty as saying the 1.2 patch should be out "by the end of the year."

This 1.2 patch will have some new chat features along with new features for the game editor. Sigatry also says the 1.2 update is "largely our e-sport patch." Hopefully that means pro tournaments will have some support for playing games without the need for a net connection. There will also be some bug fixes and more unit balance changes. Sigaty admits that unit balance is something that will take a year or more get just right.

Some StarCraft II players have complained that the Zerg faction is underpowered by Sigaty states, "We have fewer Zerg players overall. I avoid playing Zerg as much as possible because I find them to be just more complex in general."

As promised, Blizzard has now released the 1.1 patch for StarCraft II via the game's auto-updater. While the hit sci-fi RTS game has had a few small patches released since its release last July this is the first major patch for the game with a number of new features as well as many gameplay balance changes for a number of StarCraft II's units.

Some of the new features in the 1.1 patch include adding support for Nvidia's 3D Vision technology, a quick save feature for the single player campaign, the addition of a game clock so players can see how long they have been in a match and more. There are also a number of changes and bug fixes for the game as well as the editor. In addition the patch will allow players who have the English language version of the game in Australia and New Zealand to play on North American-based servers

We got a chance to check out Razer's line of StarCraft II-branded gaming PC peripherals at E3 last June and we really liked what we saw at the time. The Razer Spectre mouse (shown above), the Razer Marauder keyboard and the Razer Banshee headset were all supposed to be released this quarter, just a few weeks after the release of Blizzard's hit sci-fi RTS game.

Unfortunately it looks like we will be waiting a bit longer to get our hands on these cool devices. Big Download has learned via a Razer PR rep that the release of all of the above mentioned StarCraft II branded items have been delayed until sometime in the fourth quarter of 2010. The Razer PR rep told us that all three items will still be out sometime before the holidays so hopefully Santa will still be able to put these devices under the tree.

One of the highlights of any game by Blizzard are the cut-scenes, whether created by CGI or via the in-game engine as was the case with the recent sci-fi RTS game StarCraft II. But is Blizzard's parent company Activision Blizzard thinking about making a full-scale feature film using Blizzard's cut scene team that can then be released via online download? Maybe.

According to Gamasutra, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobbby Kotick hinted at such plans during remarks today at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch's Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference (say that three times fast). During the talk he speculated that if you took the cut-scenes out of StarCraft II " ... and we were to go to our audiences for whom we have their credit card information as well as a direct relationship and ask, 'Would you like to have the StarCraft movie?', my guess is that ... you'd have the biggest opening weekend of any film ever."

While that last statement about the "biggest opening weekend of any film ever" seems a bit farfetched to us the fact that Activision Blizzard's CEO is thinking about making CGI feature films based on its game franchises and selling them directly via online means is significant. Kotick stated, "Within the next five years, you are likely to see us do that. That may be in partnership with somebody, it may be alone." In fact Kotick claims that the company has done research that indicates "an extremely high percentage" of people who would purchase such a movie online "would then go to the theater then watch it again."

Last week we reported that Valve has been thinking of making a Half-Life movie by themselves after dealing with crappy movie pitches from Hollywood. One developer that likely has the resources and talent to make its own movies is Blizzard. Their CGI unit makes perhaps the best cut scenes of any game developer.

However it looks like Blizzard is looking to Hollywood to make movies based on its game franchisese. It's already teamed up with Legendary Pictures for its long-in-development World of Warcraft movie. But what about another big game franchise, StarCraft? Blizzard VP Rob Pardo told MTV Multiplayer that's its all up to finding the right people who are excited about bring their game properties to movies. He stated, "I think if Jim Cameron came to us tomorrow and said, 'You want to make a 'StarCraft' movie?' we'd probably sign that." We certainly think that the director behind some of the best sci-fi films of all time (The Terminator, Aliens, and The Abyss) would be a perfect choice for a movie based on Blizzard's RTS series.

In January 2009 we reported that the University of California at Berkeley offered up a course centered around playing and learning to master the original StarCraft. Now there's word that another US center of higher learning has Blizzard's classic sci-fi RTS game on its schedule. The University of Florida will have the course "21st Century Skills in StarCraft" on its fall 2010 schedule.

According to the course description, the enrolled students will be required to subject themselves to "weekly game play" of StarCraft along with "viewing and analysis of recorded matches." It's not all fun and games; the course also requires students to complete "written assignments which emphasize analysis and synthesis of real/game-world concepts, and collaboration with other students." Our question; do you get higher grades if you win the most matches in class?

[Via Joystiq]

Hey, we have all been there on playing games until the wee hours of the morning. But there's still some debate on whether or not you can become medically addicted to playing games. Now Wired reports that a Korean study claims to show that game "addition" can be tempered with drugs.

The study comes from the Department of Psychiatry at Chung Ang University, College of Medicine where researchers gave the antidepressant drug Bupropion to 11 very active StarCraft players. After a six week trial period, the researchers claim that the StarCraft players who were given the drug cut their StarCraft playtime by 35.5 percent. Of course these players could in fact be depressed already and turned to playing StarCraft because of it. So let's just say the jury is still out on the whole game "addition" theory.

[Via Joystiq]

Founded back in 1991 as Silicon & Synapse, the development team that later changed its name to Blizzard Entertainment has become one of the biggest and most influential PC game developers of all time. The company helped to popularize the RTS genre with its WarCraft and StarCraft series, made playing RPGs cool again with the Diablo series and exploded the MMO genre with World of Warcraft.

Now there's word that Blizzard is going to come out with a 20th anniversary book in 2011 to celebrate its long legacy. The book was revealed this past weekend by its author Jeff Green, formerly the editor-in-chief of the late and very much lamented PC gaming magazine Computer Gaming World (which switched its name to Games For Windows Magazine for its last few issues). Green took on gigs at Electronic Arts following the magazine's cancellation in 2008 but has now left EA and is now working on the Blizzard book along with writing gigs at "all of your favorite game websites and magazines."