StarCraft II Memoir

Here’s an essay I wrote for university where the assignment stated you could write any type of memoir. So I wrote about a topic rarely covered in memoir. StarCraft II.

This is the first draft. The draft I’m happiest with. The tutor did not understand this whole ‘gaming’ thing and requested rewrite after rewrite to clarify. As a result, the later drafts lost their uniqueness and eventually became a boring essay comparing study time and gaming time with much heavy-handedness and university pandering.

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Zerg Rush

There was a furore from early 2009 until 2010. It wasn’t on the downfall of Kevin Rudd, although that was what preoccupied many of the older and more politically informed folks. It wasn’t the financial crisis, which a lot of people had grown accustomed to from the year before. Instead, this slow building of hysteria cropped up in shopping malls, hinted at on computer screens in display windows, some cinematics even dating back to late 2007.

A man being geared up for a futuristic outer-space battle dominated posters inside game stores. Below, a date. Teenagers and people in their twenties would walk past in awe, some even lowering their voices. The title was on the tip of many tongues. StarCraft II. The long wait was over. Nine years in production, supposedly, or maybe five, depending on which tech article you read.

Blizzard, the company who listed StarCraft among their crowning achievements, outshining even World of Warcraftin some areas, were back behind the wheel.

South Korea’s entire economy is somewhat affected by the real-time strategy epic, and now there are sports channels dedicated to StarCraft competitions. It is by far the most successful computer game still being played. The sequel’s release coincided with my second year of university.

My friends Nicole and Martin had been bemoaning the wait for the game. They began to lose hope in Blizzard, believing the game company had replaced the StarCraft franchise with the massively-multiplayer role-playing game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft as the favoured offspring. Martin had even gone so far as to pre-order StarCraft II  the year before. And, being that Blizzard had talked about the release around that time, he was thinking of getting his money back. Nicole had given up on Blizzard entirely, her love of the Warcraft strategy games and storyline so irreversibly ruined by the World of Warcraft MMORPG.

But Blizzard saved Martin. The company released the game worldwide midnight of July 27th, 2010. Many turned up to midnight release parties, a few authorised by Blizzard taking place in major gaming stores. One of which was an Electronic’s Boutique (EB) in my city. Martin and Kieran attended, and both received StarCraft II T-shirts. Kieran won a contest to imitate the BattleCruiser General voice. I can’t imagine how he did, or what it would sound like. I wouldn’t like him to anyway. The General’s voice sounds pompous and clipped, like Roger Moore at a Toastmasters.

It wasn’t for a few weeks until I got my version of the game, spurred on by Kieran, Martin,  and Peter, wanting to play it together in a four-team, the biggest league in the online competitions. Four versus four. I ponied up $100 at an EB and bought the game. My Mac laptop from 2007 ran the game horribly, but soon after we learnt that Macs at university ran the game relatively smoothly. We’d play long into Friday nights after lectures and tutorials.

***

Nine Zerg Mutalisks, elongated bat-like freaks of nature, were converging on the heart of Kieran’s last expansion, flying over his Siege Tank defences, massing behind his mineral line. Kieran’s blood-curdling scream coupled by a polite alert that his ‘units are under attack’ startled everyone in the computer lab.

“Fuck!” He yelled, repeating the expletive over and over.

“I’m on it.” James muttered, swerving his Vikings away from the enemy Zerg base. They had been popping the floating Overlords with swarms of homing missiles. The Overlords provided a Zerg player with the population numbers to build armies.

“Shit. I’m screwed.”

The Mutalisks were picking off Kieran’s SCVs faster than he could click the little red miners away. They’d fly to the exit, regroup, kill some more of the fleeing cyborg peasants, and retreat back to the next point of attack.

My Marine army was thinning. Too many of my troops were shuffling off a mortal coil via an acidic splat from a larger group of Zerg Roaches. Even though they were fully upgraded in both armour and firepower, without medivacs, in the game’s own words “flying healing buses”, they were no match. James’s Vikings, huge vehicles that can transform into both air and ground units at player’s will (especially good against air units such as Mutalisks), met defeat at the hands of an enemy Marine army.

We were playing two Zerg and two Terran players. We were three Terran (Kieran, James and myself) and a Peter playing as his signature race Protoss. The opponent team was slightly favoured, according to Bnet’s (Battle.Net — the game’s multiplayer elements can only be run through this) match-up system, which is a gross understatement usually. The enemy marines, with their yellow suits, stimmed themselves with adrenaline shots, doubling their damage and speed. They, unlike mine, had Medivacs backing them up, healing them with green rays as their health fell away from the raw energy in their stim packs.

“I’m losing my Vikings.” James updated us, but I was already watching from my screen. His flyover the marine army, although he’d attempted to avoid, had cost him half his army. The attempt to save Kieran’s expansion was useless anyway, as by the time James’s Vikings got there the Mutalisks were safely across the map. Kieran’s SCVs were seeping into the ground. None were spared.

“Fuck this. I’m out.” James conceded, pressing the ‘Surrender’ button.

Peter’s Stalkers, marching to the opponent’s base, were met with the enemy Marine and Roach armies. My Marine army was a pool of acid, and there were a few marines still walking to their rally points in an attempt to form another army. The enemy Mutalisks were now harassing my mineral line.

I stayed on, even after Peter’s Stalkers met their bullet-riddled demise. Only when all our structures were rubble did I bother quitting. I skipped the typing of ‘gg’ in the chat box to our opponents. Good Game = gg. It’s a way of thanking them for an enjoyable game. Frankly, I didn’t believe the game was either fair or enjoyable.

An early six-pool from two Zerg players had been our flaw. Mass Zerglings, built six at a time from the core Zerg building, the Hatchery. The cheapest military unit and produced en-masse, can be deadly within the first two minutes of the game. They’re the fastest moving too. Peter had been on the back-foot the entire time since, having lost half his mineral-harvesting probes to them, and a few buildings. He was the most economically gifted of us all, and had lost his economy. I’m slow to get started, my build orders are usually off-put by early skirmishes. Kieran is used to one-on-one games, so he isn’t too good when a supporting player. Plus he lets his anger get the better of him in some matches, and this translates to overclicking the mouse. James is best after Peter, but he couldn’t support three at once without sufficient give the entire game.

All in all, we were roasted. On checking the scoreboards, Peter informed us that we played Diamond, Platinum and Gold players. Top three competition divisions in the region. Chances are, they play this game at least four to five hours a day.

We were screwed over. Royally. It’s the old jargon-laden dictum stemming from many matches online: The pros pwned the noobs.

***

Most games have gone this way since we’ve started playing StarCraft II. The ratio is around 1 in 3 games that we win. Yet, there’s something strongly addictive about the game. Every unit is well-balanced, the music immersive, the storyline well-written and thrilling, and the graphics are mouth-watering on ‘Ultra’ settings. Most will agree that the death animations are what people enjoy watching. It’s a little morbid to think about, but seeing as each tends to be individual explosions of gore and bits, sometimes rolling down ramps on the map or off cliffs, makes things look all the more realistic.

I won’t lie. We are addicted. We play this game almost every night, at the expense of university grades and sleep. But, this addiction is akin to one an athlete has for the track. It’s all about the training and the competition. It’s about the strategies to better yourself, the discussions of what units counter what, the build orders, the timing of base creation and army gathering.

But StarCraft II is also about the thrill of the win. After a night of losing to every kid who forfeited their actual lives and schooling to assimilate into a chair playing this game, you lose hope. Defeat once kicks your confidence. Defeat twice makes many get angry. Defeat coming four times in a row causes people an intense amount of grief.

As Einstein so succinctly put it, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”. StarCraft II is as much a test of your psychological endurance as it is a test of your hand-eye co-ordination. Can you handle four consecutive thrashings that cause you to be booted out of the Gold league into the Silver league? Does that giant blue bar of matches played in the profile poke fun at you while the green bar of successes cries out underneath?

The glorious win though, that moment of rolling tanks and explosive Banelings into an opponent’s metropolis knowing that their force of Stalkers and Collossi are lying dead by the entrance is a feeling as close to gaming nirvana as you can get. I’m sure many gamers would argue that it’s better than orgasm. Crushing an opponent into the ground and the empowering sight of absolute destruction.

It explains why my university results have dropped a grade. I’m holding out for that moment, which I haven’t attained yet without Peter’s High Templar, or James with his fully upgraded Roaches bringing up the flank. I still suck in the grand scheme of things, my fingers, although able to touch-type, miss the hotkeys for army creation. I fail to remember build orders. I lose track of game-time and fall behind. I send out an army and forget to keep making troops.

I’m just a measly Marine, dreaming of his future days as a Thor.