First a quick note for any former DarkFall players, today Aventurine started their welcome back program, giving inactive accounts 14 free days to come back and see what has changed. All the details can be found here. If you have been looking for a reason to come back and check out the recent changes, now is your chance. Offer ends May 31st.
On the PC issues front, the secondary PC is back up and running. I installed the StarCraft 2 beta on it and so far no technical issues have popped up. SC2 itself is… well its exactly like SC. At first that’s a very good thing, as SC was an excellent game, but I can’t help but think that the sequel being little more than a graphics update is going to seriously limit the games long-term appeal, at least for me. For now though it should prove to be a fun little distraction. More on SC2 itself as I spend some time with it.
My main PC is still out of commission, although I’ve at least now identified the issue: CPU overheating due to the liquid cooling unit not doing its job. Hopefully tonight I’ll get the chance to clean it out with some help from my buddy (who knows a lot more about this than I do). If that fails and the actual cooling unit itself is busted, I’m guessing I’ll just end up replacing it with a standard fan setup, but hopefully it does not come down to that.
Going back to DarkFall, Aventurine has completed another round of mass bannings for people who used third-party programs. The most amusing part of it all is the crying at the cheating forum; people shocked that their ‘undetectable’ software cost them months of character development. Idiots will never learn I guess. Should be interesting to see who has ‘retired’ a character from DarkFall in the coming days.
Oh, and Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn for the Wii is brutally hard early on. Like punch-you-in-the-nuts-over-and-over-and-over-again brutal. Looking forward to playing that more as well.
Hardcore Casual 
Fire Emblem for the Wii is a mans game. The first few missions are pretty tough, but the game doesn’t soften up too much. If you don’t like having your characters dead for good, you’ll find yourself loading the game a lot like I did. It is an immensely satisfying game because of the difficulty which was preserved from the Japanese version of the game at the request of fans of the series. After you beat the game you can try on Hard Mode and really have your balls crushed.
Starcraft 2 is a solid game, but I am terrible at it. Looking forward to the day they turn on the 3v3 and 4v4 so more of us can cram into a game or tackle the ladder. Be prepared for some cheese against strangers and learn some yourself, a lot of game can end within 10 mins.
Yea the GC FE game was tough but not this soul-crushing. Just more motivation to try though, and yea, hopefully it does not get easier as I go along, I hate when games do that (future blog post).
As for SC2, I won my first game by doing the double barracks marine rush, worked just as well as it did in SC1 (which is funny/sad). Looking forward to playing with you guys when I get back into it all.
MMM (marines, marauders, medivacs) has been all the rage for a while with Terran, and Blizzard’s been trying to un-nerf the Zerg since the first patch. Still hasn’t worked. Right now Protoss-Terran is the work-in-progress, since the Protoss at the moment (well, maybe no longer, haven’t played in the latest patch yet) have hard counters to so many Terran units. One of the main problems with SC2 that have been discussed so far is the limited viability of so many units. Whereas in SC1 units retained a degree of usefulness even into the later game portions, now the lower-tier units lose almost all value against teir 2 and tier 3 units.
I just finished watching the latest Game Breaker video cast and Gary Gannon says that Blizzard has said they are not trying to be innovative with SC2. The speculation was that Blizzard doesn’t want to upset the Korean market.
Blizzard doesn’t ever try to be innovative, they just try to do what works better than anyone else.