That Sounds Familiar

Welcome to a(nother) new section of this blog, That Sounds Familiar, in which I give you two pieces of music that sound awfully familiar. (And yes, I'm going to retroactively apply this tag to the Mass Effect/Babylon 5 post and the Rains of Castamere/For A Few Dollars More post.)

Anyway, there's this...

And then this...

The Iron Maiden song was written by Adrian Smith, who borrowed the opening riff, with permission, from a good friend of his in White Spirit. That friend was... Janick Gers, who replaced Smith when he left Maiden.

Small world.

HotS Plot

So I wanna see if I got this straight.

Amon, the Dark Voice, was revived because Raynor de-infested Kerrigan because Zeratul told him to do it because otherwise Amon would wipe out all life in the Universe.

Wiping out all life in the Universe while you're dead is quite a feat.

What is dead may never die.

You may have noticed that my blogging of "A Dance with Dragons" has stopped

and is not likely to resume.

As you probably know, Books Two and Three contain several chapters in which Arya wanders about the war-torn countryside and various characters opine about the effects of the war on the little people. Book Four does the exact same thing with Brienne. So far no problem, because this trend was in place before the War on Terror. And yes, nothing whatsoever happened in the Brienne chapters, but it wouldn't be A Song of Ice and Fire without one character dragging us away from the main action and dicking around in the middle of nowhere (Bran in AGoT*, Dany and Arya in ACoK, and Jaime in ASoS - not saying these chapters are bad, just that they do not move the main plot forward, at all).

*After his second chapter, obviously. Getting thrown out a window and paralyzed for life because you saw the Queen shagging her own brother is a pretty important plot development.

But I cannot read another Daenerys chapter in A Dance with Dragons. It's so blatant in its political subtext that it is in fact text.

A quick refresher: a foreign ruler with a foreign religion and a foreign custom has conquered a backwater city in the middle of the desert and is trying to bring some semblance of civilization to it. The ruler's greatest weapons are unavailable because they're too destructive and would make everyone hate the ruler. Meanwhile, in A Dance With Dragons, Daenerys (the USA) conquered Meereen (Iraq) and now has to try to hold it against its own population without the help of her dragons (nukes) which would just eat (nuke) everyone.

Look, I have no problem with political subtext per se. I like Battlestar Galactica and the Third Doctor's run on Doctor Who. I have a problem with political subtext springing up where it did not previously exist. As I said, the travelogues in Books 2-4 showed us the sort of collateral damage endemic to all wars. If there were suddenly security checkpoints where the Red Priests of R'hllor found a way to look at you nekkid, then yeah that would be different. But there wasn't any political subtext directed at one specific event until ADwD. Surely there was some other way of demonstrating that Daenerys was completely inept at learning how to be a queen.

Let me put it this way. If Tyrion Lannister had spent the entirety of A Storm of Swords building a railroad from King's Landing to Casterly Rock and then defending it against a corrupt government aided by his own family, would you still like the book?

So yeah, in a nutshell, my problem is that GRRM decided to turn Dany Targaryen into Dagny Taggart. 

I will keep reading. But already this one has found its way into last place in the series.

HotS campaign II

So I finished the campaign. Please remember in my discussion below that I am not actually very good at the game; I understand the theory, but have a hard time putting it into practice.

Grumbles: no Nydus worm. Seriously, spamming Nydus worms late-game makes things more epic. Also you have to choose between Brood Lords and Vipers; you can't have both. The last level's a bitch and a half, but still a cake walk compared to Wings of Liberty's final level. So many levels force you to get at least one macro Hatch because there just aren't enough expansions.  Final cutscene OH LOOK I CAN FLY NOW followed by most of the lines from the trailer but strung together differently so as to change the entire meaning. Oh and hero units hotkeyed to F3 screws with my camera assignments, because I don't go for that Shift-F4 nonsense.

Cheers: Sarah Kerrigan is far and away my favorite video-game sociopath. Yes that's a hideously narrow category, but come on. Running around with her and wrecking shit is infinitely more fun than the turtle-fest that pretty much every WoL mission turned into. Even the gimmicky missions were generally more fun; spreading Creep as fast as you can > outrunning the world's slowest supernova. The music is f*cking awesome. Especially the fact that some of it shows up in multiplayer and just brings back memories.

Stupid mistakes I made: in the penultimate level you have to control two different groups fighting their way down two different maps, more or less. I hotkeyed the second group to 5 (because all my hatches are hotkeyed to 1, my main army to 2, and my heroes to 3 and 4). Muscle memory screwed me and sent my 2 army into a death zone more than once. Also I took the Deep Burrow evolution for the Swarm Hosts, meaning I could teleport them across the map to anywhere that had creep, which is a great idea for defense... and then neglected to use them at all on the final mission, when my jerk enemies kept harassing the only expansion I could grab in the first 20 minutes.

Most useful Kerrigan ability: Oh God there are so many to choose from. So you know what? I'm not going to name just one. Her dash attack grants a passive bonus to her movement speed, allowing her to stay near the front lines, and Spawn Banelings (when you have Splitter and Regenerative Acid) makes clusters of enemies that much easier. Hell, if you're at a lull, you can spawn Banes and have them go scout for you. No skin off your nose! Apocalypse + Broodlings is also absurdly fun.

And that in a nutshell is why this expansion wins. It was so much fun.

Blizzard, I salute you.

HotS III: Le Campaign, Parte Uno

Yeeeeeeeeeah.

So.

The first thing to say is that unlike Wings of Liberty, where yeah you could upgrade the various units and make them kind of OP, the whole point of the single-player campaign in Heart of the Swarm seems to be "get these ridiculous upgrades and then point them at the enemy and steamroll his entire army."

Now, I like to think I'm slightly better with the Zerg than I am with the other two races... but when Roaches, Banelings, and Kerrigan herself can all spawn extra units, and Zerglings respawn at no extra cost, basically all you have to do is point them in the right direction and watch madness happen.

Sour about that Hydra speed upgrade, though.

So I've been playing the game on Hard, and have had two missions now (the Chrysalis one and the Harry Potter one) where at the end I just gave up on defending my base and let the clock run out.  Then there was another mission (the one where you go around gathering all the eggs) where I broke the system by just walking straight into the enemy base with a giant army.  Uh, what I'm saying is that the difficulty curve is epically skewed.

Alternatively, that there's no clear indication of what order to do the missions in. See, the first two levels that were available were Ice-world and Char, and I did Ice-world because Roaches and Hydras are more important to me than Banelings and Aberrations. And once Ice-world was done, Zerus opened up, so I did Zerus. So yeah I reinfested Kerrigan like six missions into the game. But that last mission on Zerus was too tough for me (because again I'm not actually all that good at this game, or at least at Zerg micro), so I had to take the difficulty down to Normal. Then I went to Char, where the very next mission was the one where I steamrolled straight into the enemy base (on Hard).

I had this problem with the original Mass Effect too. As soon as I got control of the Normandy, my brain said "Noveria = novice. Go there." And what followed was about five hours of acidic death and frustration.

Now, I prefer games that give you multiple missions to go on at once. That way if one challenge is too difficult, you can go do something else for a while, hone your skills, level up, and come back. I'm not complaining about that. I'd just like some indication as to the level of difficulty I'm about to face. (Not that going to Zerus later would have helped, since you don't get to pick Kerrigan's abilities for that mission, nor do you get your specially mutated units.)

What about the story?  Well the beginning is overly sappy. Just as Dumas laid the injustices on thick and heavy in The Count of Monte Cristo to justify Edmond's epic revenge scheme, here Blizzard lays on the romance so that when (it looks like) Raynor dies, Kerrigan has this whole epic revenge arc to go through. It took me a little while to warm up to this approach, but I do like the notion that Kerrigan reluctantly becomes the Queen of Blades again. Or the Primal Queen. Or whatever she's calling herself now. The scene on the shuttle where the Zergling comes in and she realizes that it's the only way to get revenge is perfect. It's just...

Everything in the trailers suggested that Kerrigan was pissed to be human again, that she was going to break out of the facility Raynor and Valerian stuck her in, that she was going to beat up Raynor (and not a shapeshifter that looked like him... though I did like it when Duran took the form of Ghost-Kerrigan and they impaled each other. No idea if that mission's available before Kerrigan reinfests herself... but because Char's available right from the get-go, they had to have done some cutscenes twice, once with Zerglock Kerrigan and one with Primal Queen Kerrigan. 

Which reminds me: I really appreciate the fact that more than four cutscenes are fully rendered.  That was a nice improvement. I finally got to see what Horner looks like in ultra-quality graphics, for example.

Oh, and I'm pissed that Warfield died. What does Blizzard have against my favorite tertiary characters?

Mass Effect 3: Citadel

Okay, it had several parts I loved, two parts that were frustrating - one in a good way, one in a "I hate the jerk who thought this was entertainment" way - a plot twist that was silly, a plot twist that was brilliant, and the first boss battle since Saren way back in ME1 that hit the "enjoyably difficult" sweet spot. Ironically, of all the difficult parts of this DLC, the one that I hated was the only one that I couldn't have changed by dialing the difficulty back from Hardcore to Normal. It was cheese-tastic, but also satisfying in a way that no DLC since Shadow Broker has been.

And there's a simple reason for that last part.

It's personal. Whereas Shadow Broker was about Liara (not that I'm complaining), this DLC is all about Shepard.

Spoilers aplenty after the jump.

Citadel II

So the trailer's up today and it looks like Thane will be represented via Kolyat. Also Sam Traynor's in there, so it looks like even the non-squad love interests are making an appearance.

I have to admit I'm kinda psyched for this. Yeah Omega wasn't exactly Lair of the Shadow Broker II but the whole "it adds nothing to the story of the main game" critique ignores the fact that the story of Mass Effect 3 is by far the weakest story in the trilogy. I'm really interested to see how Blizzard caps this all off.

So. I have two Shepards either right before or right after the Cerberus Coup - I still have to get my Sentinel through the Coup, and I want to lock the Soldier's romance in before I start the Citadel mission just in case there's any romance-affected dialogue like there was in Leviathan. I've got an Engineer on Cronos Station right now, but I believe I have a backup save from right before the point of no return so I can see what it looks like once the entire ME2 squad has been "saved." I'm working my way through 2 with a Vanguard, but he's going to be a little while. And I have an Infiltrator in Act 3, but I think I screwed up and he's going to get Miranda killed at the end of the next mission. So yeah, I'm going to be able to play through this thing just a few times. (I can't play as an Adept in 3 because the biotic power targeting sucks turian ass.)

Making fun of POTUS

I just did a thing over on the political blog about how this is stupid. But sometimes I like being stupid.

So...

Once we get up to 88 miles per hour, we will have wormsign the likes of which God has never seen.

I don't know about you, but George Lazenby was my favorite Doctor Who.

We are the Borg. You will be exterminated. Cuz at this point I'm pretty much the Queen Bitch of the Universe.

"You are Number Six." "Who is Number One?" "Brother Cavil."

"You've never heard of Serenity? It's the ship that made the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs."

I really like that movie where Han Solo was hunting Cylons.

Also the one Starship Troopers film with Sigourney Weaver in it.

And that video game where Kerrigan fights the Reapers.

And Deep Space Nine, at least once they had that guy from Tron take over as the commander.

HotS II: trying to use Swarm Hosts

So last time I whined a lot about the Swarm Host and how it was virtually useless. As usual, I just wasn't using it right. 

To be sure, having three micro-intensive units (Swarm Hosts, Infestors and Vipers) is above my relatively useless skill level (check out this Terran wall! Am I gonna build Banelings or Roaches?  Nope!). But I've found two uses for these guys, one of which is less risk-intensive than a similar strategy I tried using in Brood War with Lurkers. 

Basically, you bury them on high ground near (but - and I can't stress this enough - not in) the enemy attack lane, and rally the Locusts to the far side of the attack lane.  The closer they are to the enemy base, the more warning you'll have that the army is on the way and the more easily you'll be able to use them for base harassment once that army is dealt with.  On the other hand, the closer they are to your base (or at least your army), the easier time you'll have saving them in the event that the other player has detection (and he better have detection - you're zerg) and decides to hunt down your Swarm Hosts. 

There was another game on Crossfire where I used them to harass an enemy's third while I went after his natural.  Since his army turned around as soon as I started attacking the natural, the Hosts were able to wipe out his third and then take that upper corridor towards his main, tear down those destructible rocks, and swarm in from the side.

One thing that HotS has definitely done to my Zerg build is force me to tech to a Hive as fast as possible, because my favorite new unit is hands-down the Viper. "Oh, you just blew 400/300 on a nice shiny Battlecruiser that you're keeping on the edge of the battlefield and trying to repair with SCVs on the high ground? Here, lemme just drag that baby over into the middle of my Hydralisk swarm." "Oh, you went through the trouble of properly micro-ing your units so your Siege Tanks were in the back of the line?  Yoink!"  "Hey nice Thor. Let me drag you away from my Ultralisks and into the middle of my Zerglings."  "Oh, I wasn't paying the macro any attention whatsoever, got curbstomped, and now all I've got to defend my base are a bunch of Speedlings and a Viper?  Blinding Cloud."  Go ahead and ask me if I'm even using Infestors any more. 

Starcraft HotS beta

Okay, you might have noticed the lack of a GoldenEye review yesterday. This wasn't a case of me being lazy all day, honest. It was a case of me spending the morning in the emergency room and then being lazy in the afternoon.

Apparently I'm fine, thank you very much.

Anyway I have about half an hour left in the movie to actually review, as well as screencaps to stick in... and I'm abusing my aunt's hospitality while my GoldenEye DVD sits back at my place. So I'm going to talk about HotS now, and maybe have the review up tonight.

First of all, I am by no means a professional player. Hell, the last level of the campaign on Normal gave me conniptions (and I recently re-played the campaign and tried to brute-force my way through the last level with nothing but Banshees... while playing at the "faster" speed. Whoops).  Secondly, I keep flipping back and forth between protoss and zerg, mainly because I only know one way to win as terran (mass Vikings and Banshees) and that gets old fast. 

So let's just jump in and complain about all the new units.

Terran

First off, the Medivac gets a speed boost so as to... give terran an advantage in combat drops, I guess. Now, this kind of makes sense because the zerg can Nydus and the protoss can warp. But both of those strategies involve buildings, and buildings are easy enough to kill if you, you know, pay attention. I always thought that the Nydus Worm and Warp Gate technologies were there to counter the terran ability to move their buildings and thus have less risky proxies.  (Of course, Warp Gate is basically what protoss get now instead of Recall from the first game, which was probably OP if I ever learned how to play the first game... I think the only hotkey I ever used in StarCraft was "A" for attack.)  Anyway, the devs said that it was hard coming up with new stuff for terran because they already have the coolest toys, soooo...

The Reaper is almost an entirely different monster now. They can still go up and down cliffs, but there's no speed boost upgrade and no anti-building grenades. And they regenerate health "outside of combat" which actually means "so long as they haven't been shot in the last five seconds." And they don't require a tech lab.  So basically now they're there for worker harassment as opposed to demolition, which makes the Hellions kind of pointless...

The Hellion can now transform into a Hellbat which does short-range splash damage. Good for blocking ramps, and guarding Siege Tanks and generally forcing your opponent to go air.

F*cking OP Hell God King Emperor Death N00bpwner Widow Mines are another means of forcing your opponent to immediately go air. Which is funny because as you can see, terran gets absolutely nothing to counter Mass Muta.  Except for F*cking OP Hell God King Emperor Death N00bpwner Widow Mines. For the price of a Baneling, terran gets a mine that homes, does splash damage, can target air units, and oh yeah doesn't freaking die once exploded. Oh, and you can unbury then and rebury them at will. Enemy players will need detectors and long-range units by the truckload. Why didn't terran just get the Perdition Flamethrowers from the WoL campaign? Heck, you could let them target air units and they still wouldn't be OP because they can't sodding move around the map. 

Protoss

Protoss now gets a Mothership Core, which functions exactly the same as a Mothership except is moves faster and doesn't cloak friendlies. The Recall ability now sucks (instead of Recalling all the units in a given area to where the Mothership is, it  takes the Mothership and all nearby units back to a Nexus), and instead of Vortex you now have Time Warp. The thing's available as soon as you have a Cyber, so you could take a map like Scrap Station, fly the Core over to the enemy base as soon as possible, and drop a Time Warp in the enemy mineral line. Boom you're ahead. Oh, and then it can stick a Cannon on your Nexus for a bit. So now Toss can Planetary Nexus rush.

The Oracle is basically gets a variation of the Parasite ability from the first game. It can also function as a detector or give itself a weak laser for a while. Haven't really figured out how to make it useful yet. Heck, the mineral disruption is really the only useful trick I've learned for the Mothership Core so far. However...

The Tempest is a flying siege tank.  That can target air units as well as ground units. So now Toss have two of the longest-ranged units in the game. Huzzah.

Zerg

Let's start with the good because there's a lot of ugly. First off, you can research Burrow and the Overlord speed upgrade without a Lair. Second, the Hydralisk speed upgrade from the first game is finally back.

Third, they have an awesome new caster called the Viper, which goes a long way towards countering enemy Siege Tanks and Colossi because it can either blind those units so they can't attack long-range, or drag those units right into the middle of the zergling swarm. Oh, and the Viper flies. So zerg have a flying caster again.

Which is a good thing because the Infestor's Fungal Growth ability got nerfed to hell. I probably shouldn't be complaining that much, because I only just learned how to use it effectively when I switched to HotS, but come on, I had only just learned how to use it effectively and then it got nerfed.

The zerg also have a unit called the Swarm Host which is effing useless because any competent enemy will have detectors in his army. The purpose is to give the zerg a siege unit, but, uh, we already have one. It's called the Brood Lord.

B5: The Coming of Shadows

This Season 2 episode is where the story really starts to pick up the pace. Really, B5 has an even slower burn than Game of Thrones, and that took an entire season to get to the war. With B5 we're eight episodes into Season 2, and it's obvious that war is on the horizon... but who's going to start it?

The Centauri Emperor is going to pay Babylon 5 a visit, even though he's old and doesn't think he'll survive the entire trip (at least judging by the way he says good-bye to his Hand Lord Chancellor). G'Kar of the Narn is naturally pissed about this, seeing as how the Centauri enslaved his people and the Emperor's father killed "over a hundred million Narn."

...yeah, sci-fi writers have no sense of scale.  Anyway Sheridan correctly points out that the current Emperor's hands are clean.  G'Kar doesn't care. He decides to assassinate the Emperor, apparently for kicks and giggles, because he records a message saying (falsely) that he's acting without the knowledge or permission of his government. So, uh, if they do believe him, all he's done is throw his life away in a pointless symbolic gesture. And if they don't believe him, it'll mean all-out war between the Narn and Centauri...

Speaking of all-out war between the Narn and the Centauri, Londo's new associate Lord Refa wants to send some sort of message while the Emperor is on-station. Londo is at first reluctant but decides that this is another opportunity for advancement, and if a Narn colony has to die for him to get ahead in life, so be it. And you thought Game of Thrones was full of jerks, petty rivalries, and magnificent schemers. So Londo has Vir get in touch with Morden, but we don't actually get to see Morden in this episode because the guest cast list is already quite long...

Garibaldi arrests a guy for following him, because in addition to the coming of Shadows, we're watching EarthGov slide into fascism and he thought he'd just get a head start on things. Okay, I kid. It's time for the Emperor's speech and he's the head of security, so naturally he's on high alert. Especially because about eight weeks ago (from his perspective) he failed to save President Santiago. Anyway, it eventually turns out that the guy following him is a Ranger (yes, named after the guys in that other really famous fantasy series, the same one that gave us Za'Ha'Dum) working for Ambassador Sinclair. So he's still in this game. And now Garibaldi knows about the Shadows.

Which is good, because the Shadows just went ahead and knocked out a Narn colony. Centauri ships came by to make sure the job was done, and some Narn ships caught them in the act, and now... yup, war.

But before news of the unprovoked attack reaches the station, there's still time for G'Kar to make his unprovoked attack on the Emperor. Unfortunately for him, the Emperor is inconsiderate enough to suffer a heart attack and die before G'Kar can kill him. Or rather, the Emperor suffers a heart attack, reveals that he came to apologize to G'Kar, and then dies. What follows is an amusing scene where Londo and G'Kar have a drink. Londo already knows that the news and the war are on their way, but G'Kar - who, again, was ready to throw his life away a few hours ago - is all happy for the future for pretty much the first time on the show. It's especially great because Londo's just had a dream showing exactly where all of this is going to lead: the Shadows will eventually swarm over Centauri Prime, Londo will become Emperor, and then he and a one-eyed G'Kar will strangle each other to death. He mentioned this dream all the way back in the first episode (the mutual kill with G'Kar part), but this is the first time we see it.

Well, then the news hits. G'Kar is pissed, naturally, but again this was a guy who was going to kill the Emperor. Now, yes, killing one guy is a bit different from obliterating a colony. Oh, wait, hang on. Despite the Shadows raining plasma death on the colony, apparently a lot of people are still alive down there. The Centauri intend to use them as slave labor, but Sheridan, acting on information from Garibaldi that the Centauri must have had help, says he'll be sending observers both to make sure the Narn civilians are well-treated and to investigate exactly how the Centauri were able to subdue the colony. Londo backs off. Garibaldi allows the Rangers to use B5 as a base of operations, and we learn that Delenn is going to get involved in their operation as well.

And there we go. The ante has been rather significantly upped. Great episode.