Pro gaming

Hi!

I was planning to talk about pro gaming in this post, and as it happens I catched via the almighty Interwebz that there was going to be a few matches tonight. It was the TSL starcraft league, whatever that is, and some players I recognized competing like Huk and Jinro. Now, I don't play multiplayer SCII I prefer to watch it instead for various reasons. As long as the casters are good you still understand what is going on enough to enjoy the games. About a year before SCII was released, I watched Brood War from Korea religiously, even the replays. Part of the fascination was not only that koreans get so excited about this game, but the fact that Starcraft was a really old game by then with ancient (ugly) graphics, and despite this still going strong.

I think Blizzard took the easy way out when they used the old resource-gathering system for SCII instead of a more modern one - but they had their reasons - and from what I gather even the koreans have adopted to play primarily SCII instead of the first one. This could be wrong, but at least the GSL uses SCII and that's the only thing I watch these days when it comes to SCII pro gaming. In the first Warcraft game, your workers chopped down trees and went into a mine for gold, which made perfect sense but various workers collecting glowing minerals and some sort of gas makes less sense. Oh well, the point is rather moot anyway since the game is already finished and released and has been so for over six months.

For some reason I think that games of SCII are less diverse than BW, again I'm no expert, but it seems that there certainly is more of a chance of a long macro game on BW which in my opinion are the most interesting ones to watch. So after a while I got tired of watching random dudes playing eachother each and every day on GSL. However, things change around when someone like Jinro is playing (or even Idra for that matter). I'm from Sweden so being able to root for a countryman makes watching the games all that more entertaining, much like any other random sport which I guess makes sense when you think about it. Just any foreigner (as in non-korean) is fun to root for as well, since it's inspiring that they make it all the way to Korea in order to duke it out with the godly koreans with their insane APM. If this sounds racist that's not the case, for example the name player koreans are often very cool to watch as well even though that was more of the case with the BW leagues. Besides from Starcraft, Counter-Strike and Quake Live are great games to watch pro gaming matches of, although they're not as popular and I'm not as involved and knowledgeable about exactly when and where you find these games streamed.

Until next time, signing off.