Undead Astronauts

WSJ has an article covering Barcraft, or bars that have a special Starcraft viewing night every so often. The trend has caught on at bars across the US partly for the novelty I’m sure, but partly because it’s just more fun watching these tourneys with friends. The Street Fighter community has regularly held “Bar Fights” around California since SF4 came out where they actually gather to compete over beers, but I don’t know of gatherings just to watch streamed events.

I’m not surprised this happened, but I am a little surprised that it took SC2 before it took off. Why not a shooter like Q3, Halo, or CoD? Q3 might be slightly too fast paced for the non-initiated to enjoy viewing, but Halo and CoD certainly move at a viewable pace. Why not a fighting game like SF4? Even if you don’t understand the mechanics, high level matches are compelling. For the life of me, I don’t understand why professional gaming organizations don’t include SF4 as a pro-gaming staple. Its fans are so thirsty for action they have to organize and broadcast all the events themselves, and there are weekly tournaments going on everywhere around the country. Surely some of the pro-circuit gaming organizations could inject some bling and polish to the shoestring budget operations that have operated up til now.

Regardless of the reasons, it’s nice that SC2 pros are getting recognition in mainstream areas. If I had a choice of sports programs to watch at a bar, there’s no question SC2 would rank above baseball, hockey, golf, NASCAR and soccer. Sometimes it would rank above pro football, basketball and tennis. It would not rank above college football however… there must be limits after all. The average age of gamers is in the 30s and they have money to spend. Bar owners ignore this at their own peril.

Last night boxer played in the round of 64 beating his opponent (T) 2:0. GomTV estimates that close to 800,000 viewers logged onto their site to stream the matches. In both games, just when Boxer’s opponents would counter to Boxer’s base, the GomTV website would die due to the explosion of viewership. Numerous other sc websites and media sites also crashed due to Boxer’s matches. While popular user streams jumped to hold 12,000 viewers, tripling their previous records. The GomTV website downtime angered Koreans so much that “Zoo Gallery, Dusan Bears (Korean Baseball Team) Gallery, other Korean Baseball team galleries, and other sites with gallery’s that had anything to do with bears (Korean word for bear is Gom) were bombarded with insults and profanities.”

Oh and the games were pretty amazing too, looks like Boxer was holding back his real skills in previous replays as I suspected.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=161828

Here is a link to the first game of the match

http://www.sc2rep.com/replays/show?id=2211

Here is game 2

http://www.sc2rep.com/replays/show/id/2212

e-Sport’s first Grand Slam title holder, the Genius Terran NaDa, also called the “Living Legend” announced that he will be moving onto Starcraft 2. NaDa is the only one to win six individual leagues while winning 3 contests in each league, succeeding in a “Grand Slam”. To those that don’t follow the SC1 scene, Nada was boxer’s successor in SC1.

Nada is practising so that he can enter the GSL this upcoming October. He has also announced that he will be active as an individual in Starcraft 2, without belonging to a progame team.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=153567&currentpage=All

JulyZerg is also coming to SC2, he is one of the most famous SC1 zergs as well as a golden mouse winner and 2 time osl winner for SC1.

http://www.gosugamers.net/starcraft2/news/13036-julyzerg-goes-starcraft-2

AS I mentioned in a previous post, the GSL SC2 tournament in Korea entered into its round of 16 yesterday. The level of play and creativity in the replays so far have by far exceeded all my expectation. It brings back memories of Boxer from SC1 and Thresh and Immortal from Q2. I am not exaggerating. The replays are a bit hard to find as GomTV is holding a monopoly on the broadcasting, but here’s a gem I found with English commentary for you guys:

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjA0ODY4OTY4.html

On the first day of round of 16, the great white hope, Greg Field, aka Idra, aka the ‘best’ zerg in the world, was knocked out by an unknown Korean kid. I will try to be unbiased and not make any comments on that…

Pzed has asked me to write about SC2 for a while, but I have been too busy actually playing the game. First off, just a summary, the game is played on battlenet only. Games are played in a ladder system, so that all games are recorded and linked to your battlenet account. There are five leagues in the game, bronze, silver, gold, platinum, diamond. Diamond being the league comprising of the most competitive players and bronze being the least competitive.  So far I know already several of our people are playing SC2, but perhaps you didn’t realize how big the game has already gotten globally. In addition to the numerous tournaments going on in NA and EU, the biggest tournament to date is the GomTV Global SC2 League in Seoul. http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=141496

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