badger2d

What's the ballyhoo about with mechanical keyboards for gaming? I've never used one. What does it improve on?

Been toying around in custom games a bit vs sleepwalking AI to warm myself up for doing some ladder play again, been a long time. Trying to get used to the new maps and to shake the rust off my macro, building up to 3 bases and 200 supply as smoothly as I can. Bit wobbly at first, but then it starts to click and I get that "like riding a bike" feeling.

Frigidman, on 28 April 2013 - 07:15 AM, said:

You're pretty much an unstoppable badass for most of that first scene so far as I recall. It is epic and in your face with a lot of popsnizzle going on, but you can button mash your way through it. The game does actually do a good job of teaching you how to play and you get more time to take it in and practice at your own pace in the areas that follow.

If I ding this game points in any categories it would be: 1) somewhat wonky console-port controls take a while to get used to, although most of the real clunkiness is in the non-action screens like inventory, combat is good and easy to get into. And then 2) the story didn't quite make sense, which was a little disappointing for a world with such a well-done aesthetic. Had a sort of curiously disjointed feel, where the story-exposition dialogue scenes are individually good and each feel like they could be part of a good story, but they somehow didn't connect up smoothly enough and I often felt like I was missing something. I think it's safe to call both of those minor quibbles though. Game was just a ton of fun to play, bottom line.

Just finished Darksiders. Whoo, that was a blast! I loved Zelda games in days of yore and playing this over the top grimdark Zelda homage was a joy from start to finish. Great art style, some of the most viscerally satisfying combat I've ever played, and that particularly Zelda-ish satisfaction of going back all around the map after each dungeon to cash in on all the treasure that you'd been teased with, that was visible but just out of reach because you didn't have the right equipment yet to get across that chasm or smash that barrier.

Looking forward now to diving fully into Heart of the Swarm, played a few levels into the campaign and was loving it, but found I didn't really have the time to properly enjoy as many games as I was trying to juggle with as little gaming time as I have, so I had put HotS to the back burner until I finished Darksiders which I was further along in already.

Heart of the Swaaaaaarm!

Bought it the other day. I'm about five missions into the campaign. From what I've seen so far, they've done a great job making appropriately Zerg-y missions that are about mobility and aggressively controlling the map. Given that I've favored playing Zerg in multiplayer since Starcraft the First because I really enjoy that style of play, I'm delighted to see it finally being translated well into campaign missions.

Also enjoying the variations on upgrade mechanics from how it was done in the Terran campaign in WoL. There is no money-based upgrade system like the Terrans had where you choose which units to invest permanently in and which to ignore, but rather you get a mix of different kinds of choices specific to a unit. With my Zerglings, I was just given a permanent choice I had to make between two very different but both awesomely OP evolutions. But in addition to that there is also a loadout choice between 3 mutations of smaller effect, where I can only have one of them active at a time, but can freely change it up between missions. Fun stuff to chew on. I'm looking forward to seeing the various ideas they've had for all the units and I can imagine it being fun to replay later with all sorts of different mutation combinations.

Oh, and Kerrigan is a leveling hero unit. That also brings more choices to the table with her skill tree, which is made up of mutually exclusive but flexible choices like the unit mutations.  And the cinematics are fantastic. And...oh hell I'm going to go play some more. Bottom line, you should definitely be playing this too if you enjoyed WoL at all! It's damn good stuff.