StarCraft II Has Aged Well

A Zurge, a Terran, and a Protoss all walk into a bar. Bartender looks at the Protoss and says, why the no face? And he looks at the Zurge and says, why is he in such a rush? Welcome to Trivaclick, where we sometimes have to apologize for our intro jokes. This week we return to StarCraft 2 with lots more to say after finishing the campaign for Legacy of Devoid. So let's talk real-time strategy, shall we? I'm Kirk Hamilton. I'm Maddie Myers. And I'm Jason Shire. Hello. Hello. Welcome back for another episode and it's us entering the void. We are. We're entering the void. Re-entering the void. I thought the void was gone because we're just discussing the legacy of the void. That's a great point. Yeah, that's true. That's true. We're talking about all of the many ways that the void informs our current lives, the legacy of the void. That's what we're talking about this week. But before that, you all know the deal. 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I always just remember the call of duty-modern war for episodes. I don't know why. That's the one that always comes from a memorable one. Yeah, it was a while ago, but that was a memorable one where Jason had not played modern warfare, call of duty for modern warfare. Yeah. So we talk about video games. We talk about TV shows. The next one that we're going to record is going to be about the legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. It'll be a little bit later. It'll run a little bit into September because we have some exciting, scheduling things going on. It's true. Yeah. That we're working around. But it'll be worth the wait. It's going to be a lot of fun. So that's Maximumfund.org slash join to become a member. Thanks so much for supporting the creation of this show. All right. Jason Shryer. What are we talking about this week? This week we are talking about Starcraft II legacy of the Void, a game we have all been playing as part of our ongoing predictions bet, extravaganza, short version is Maddie and I tied a bet and we each got to pick games that we would play this year. Earlier in the year, we played perfect dark and discussed it as per Maddie's selection. And now we are playing Starcraft II. Really, we've all played Starcraft II legacy as a Void. It's true. We've all beaten it. Played through the campaign and played a little bit of multiplayer. Um, although. Played the epilogue. Prologue. Yeah. Prologue, of course. Kirk didn't really play. Multiplayer was really just me. No, he didn't. Just kind of watched. He was kind of there. But still. Remember. Okay. Hold on. Listen. Kirk and I both played against Jason. That's true. Getting this Jason. We all played a multiplayer match together and we, we severely handicapped Jason in order to make it a fair match. That was true. That's right. And it was honestly so fun that it kind of made me want to do it again. But there's so many other things we could stream together, but I feel like the competition is fierce. Uh, but someday we will again anyway. Let's talk about it. And so now that we've all beaten really, we're going to focus on the game as a whole. Look at it holistically. We're going to talk about the campaign. Um, so we will be getting into spoilers for Starcraft II. Legacy of the Void just as a warning in case anyone out there has been waiting, waiting eagerly to play this game, we will be talking about the story and the void and the void and the void. And yeah. And we're going to be going through it. So let's go around, um, a little bit Kirk, why don't you start. I'm curious as to like kind of overall thoughts now that you guys have completed the entire legacy of the void campaign. What do you think of it? What do you think of Starcraft II in general? What's your tape? Um, I think this game is really interesting and feels more like a snapshot of a moment in time than I was expecting, even though it's, you know, it still has this, uh, vitality to it. It still feels like a really exciting competitive game came out in November 2015 for what it's right. 2015. And even then I would say it maybe felt a little bit past the time when this type of game was center stage. So the first, the first Starcraft II, Starcraft II really came out in 2010, July of 2010. Yes. Yes. This is the, uh, I guess second expansion or third entry in the series, which was 2015. So yes, you are correct at that point. Starcraft II had been like in existence and an esport and played competitively for five years at that point. Right. And isn't there even kind of an argument that Starcraft II in its entirety was a little bit past the peak moment of real-time strategy, unfortunately. Yeah. Yeah. Especially the rise of MOBAs also happened very shortly after, uh, wings of liberty came out. Like I feel like over the course of these campaigns, uh, that was when we kind of saw that happen. So yeah, I think it's hard for me to not think about Baldur's Gate 3 as I played this game as well. Of course. Or maybe because the real time versus turn-based juxtaposition is just so strong between those two games. And it's really interesting that the biggest game, the PC game that everyone wants to talk about now in 2023 is a turn-based game where for so long real-time strategy and real-time games were dominant and became dominant in part because of the competitive scene and because you can play them, you know, they require so much more skill that they're a kind of more exciting, uh, and more engaging competitive experience. So playing this game, it just really, uh, it really feels like a different time in gaming to me just from a design perspective and as a, from an experience perspective, like from the perspective of the experience that I have when I play it. But it's also really charming. And that's just mechanically. Narratively, there's, there's a lot more that we can say too. I think, uh, the narrative is, it's really funny jumping into the deep end, I guess, of the narrative of game like this. But I enjoyed my jumping into the third entry in the trilogy. I mean, even, even if you had played the first two games, this is the protest stuff is always pretty dense with proper nouns and exposition and it's, it can be, it can be a tough hang the story if you're not like full-on like embracing the Starcraft stuff. Maddie, to your point, not only did the rise of MOBAs really happen, like you said, between Wings of Liberty and the release of Legacy of the Void, it also had a big influence on the campaign design of both Heart of the Swarm, the 2013 Zerg expansion. And also this in that, in both, uh, this and Heart of the Swarm, even more so in Heart of the Swarm, you control hero characters. You have the kind of the MOBA set up with the QWE, the specials and stuff, the special of it, like the four abilities. Um, uh, you could trace that lineage all the way back to Warcraft 3, but still it feels especially in MOBA like when you're doing it. There's one mission in like a sea of the void where you're controlling both Allerak and Kerrigan, and it's kind of like a, uh, a little, a little MOBA-ish experience so that there are no other armies or anything like that. But yeah, it's, it's very, you can feel the influence here. And also you can feel at that point, even when this came out that like real-time strategy games were getting kind of usurped by MOBAs and other genres. So yes, it really does feel like a kind of a moment frozen in time. Also a fun fact. Like I say, the way it came out on the same day as Fallout 4, just a little, a little piece of trivia. Well, that might be relevant for a future top like on the screen. It might be. It might be. Yeah, you know, it's funny. You mentioned that, that mission, Jason, because I was, I was streaming the game to some friends, and that was the exact mission where they were like, did this game come out before MOBAs or after MOBAs, because this is looking so much like a MOBA right now. And we had to do some googling to kind of try to figure out exactly when and it all kind of happened at the same time. But yeah, you can really sense the strain on the game and some of these creative campaign missions where they kind of want it to feel like an adventure game where you're controlling just one character, but then have the big epic scale of controlling entire armies and, you know, click, click, click, clicking and doing all the Starcraft 2 of it all while still having that individuated story between all the hero characters. I think that it masters that tension pretty well and it's almost too bad that I think a lot of people had the experience that I did and then I think Kirk did where I played Wings of Liberty. I was really excited to play the next two campaigns and then I completely forgot about them. Like they came out. I just didn't play them. So I've been very happy with it, even though it does kind of feel like something that should have come out in 2010 and it feels like a snapshot of another time. I'm so glad that this bet got us all to play it because I had such a fantastic time with it and it felt like closing the loop on a story that I had really enjoyed. And I actually kind of want to go play Heart of the Swarm now because I had played Wings of Liberty and now I've played Legacy the Void. So why not complete the trilogy in the completely wrong order and complete the game? The healing joy. Yeah. Heart of the Swarm is, Heart of the Swarm is really cool and it's got a different sort of spin because you're kind of, you're upgrading Karrigan over time and you control her in most of the missions. Yeah. She's so cool. Yeah. That is something about Heart of the Swarm that I had remembered from having played it that you have Karrigan on the field in, I don't know about every mission, but a lot of the missions. And there's that even stronger hero focus that I was actually expecting more of in Legacy of the Void since it came next and like we both said or we've all said there was that move toward hero based games happening already. Yeah. I don't know. I think that mission, the mission you referenced Jason were Allerak and Karrigan are down. I don't remember where exactly. Did I say Artannis? Yes, Artannis. I was sorry. Artannis. Yeah, you said Allerak but that's my fault. Yeah, it's my fault. Didn't quite sound right. Artannis. Who can remember all the names? Yeah. Why did we get that wrong? What? So obviously, Artannis. Artannis, the extremely memorable faceless man and Karrigan are having their little adventure together. It looks like sort of an uncharted thing, right? I think some sort of an action adventure. They even Karrigan boosts Artannis. Right. We have to open this door. Yup, yup. So use your special ability to go over there. They're exactly like Joel and Ellie. It's the same story, be for me. And really, as emotionally affecting, really is that too. But you can see them wanting to do more of that kind of storytelling, which is an interesting additional wrinkle to the way that this game reflects its place in a changing games industry because it's not just that they're sort of embracing the moba style of game design where you're controlling a single character and you're putting all of your strategic thinking into that one character. There's also just a different kind of storytelling that happens in a game where two people are alone in a big, exciting, weird place, exploring it and moving from challenge to challenge while talking to one another. And that's just not the kind of story that a real-time strategy isometric view game that is able to tell. It just isn't awkward fit. It doesn't really work in that level either. It's fun to see them trying to do it. It's like watching a dog stand up on its hind legs and walk up to a takeout order at a restaurant. And it's funny because you're watching a thing that doesn't normally do a thing. Do that thing. But it's not a totally natural fit. I found it charming, but not actually all that effective. And it kind of made me want to play a game about these characters that is actually designed to function as that kind of a game, like a more narrative-focused action-adventure game. Yeah, man. OK. There's a lot of interesting context here. So back in the Cerkuff one day, as a Cerkuff in Brudwar, there were these missions called hero missions, wherein said it would kind of shake up the formula a little bit. Most of the time, you would be building a base in training and army and doing the kind of traditional RTS mechanics. But every once in a while, you would be controlling Rainer in a small squad and you'd have to survive your way through this baseful of Zerg enemies or whatever. Or you would just be a Zerg tool and you have to zip around kind of like in the prologue of this game. And those were kind of cool. And then Cerkuff teacher things further. And I think one of the main reasons for that is that they have this super robust map editor where they could play around and experiment in all sorts of ways. And also part of the idea of this whole experience of Cerkuff 2 experience was like, we want multiplayer to be super traditional. And then with single player, we can play around. And you'll notice in legacy of the void, all of the games, all three of the different Cerkuff 2 modules have kind of different upgrades you can experiment with. You can equip units with different things in heart of the swarm. You can mutate your Zerglings and mainlings in the different strains and have them perform in different ways. And this you can choose up to three of each type of unit. Like you can choose between three different variations on it, including it's super cool. And what they did was they actually added pretty much every unit that was in brood war that had been cut for Cerkuff 2 like Corsair is in Revers and all this other stuff that they just tossed into this game. And then the mechanics of each mission I think are very similar and that they're like, you know what? Screw it. Let's experiment. Let's play around with as many different variations and mechanics as possible. And man, if you guys want to explore some real crazy stuff, there is a set of mission packs called Novak covert ops that came out after Cerkuff 2 like a sea of the void. And this was kind of like them experimenting team one at Blizzard, which is the team that made Cerkuff. They're development teams of Blizzard are like team one team two team three, etc. Team one, they were trying to figure out they were like, Hey, what are we going to do after this? We haven't really gotten a new RTS Greenland or anything like that. We're just going to have a year of like experimenting with DLC stuff and they came out with these mission packs. They're nine of them revolving around Nova the ghost hero and they basically feel like Starcraft Ghost that old canceled game was supposed to feel because you're going around as Nova. There's one mission where you like have to infiltrate a base and it's like you're playing Splinter Cell like you can go around and switch your gear from like covert gear to like Marauder gear and like whatever. It's crazy. There's one mission, man. You guys, your minds will be blown. There's one mission where you're on a ghost and you are racing and it is a side scroller racing mission. What? I shouldn't say racing. It's more of like, you know those old arcade games like turtles, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and stuff. I'm the NES and Super NES when sometimes you'd get into one of those modes. I'm thinking specifically of turtles in time and sometimes it'd be on a vehicle and you'd have to like whack away at enemies as you ran like as you like skateboarded or whatever. This is that and it's all sorts of crazy stuff like that. So check those out if you want some really wild experiments. But yeah, to your point, I mean it's trying a lot of new things and I think that was one of the goals and obviously hit or miss as to whether they accomplished it but it's fun to see and it's fun to play at least. Yeah. Yeah, no, I totally agree. To call it a couple of hits since I think that the narrative mission, it's not really meant to be that mechanically complex and it's fine that it's not super successful at doing what it's kind of trying to do. But some of the other experiments are really cool, a couple that I really liked. One is where you're on a moving platform and your base is moving through a sort of series of stops. That was so cool. So there are like buttons that you power up and then you're sliding left and right and it's fairly open ended. I kind of just went straight through it in a fairly straight line but it looked to me like there were a lot of areas on the map that I could have gone and that I just wound up not going. It was a pretty chaotic experience playing through this because you have to use a lot of aerial units because you're kind of floating in space. I don't remember the narrative, like the reason that we're doing this. It's like some sort of refueling station or something that we're moving through. I don't remember either. And I was really trying to pay attention and I have no clue why we were there. But it was so cool to even figure out that that was what we were supposed to do because at first I was like, what the heck, I'm out of minerals. All the guys are really far away. Now I'm even supposed to get to them and then I was like, oh, maybe I'm supposed to hit these huge arrow buttons at the top of the screen that I've been ignoring and confused by what it's moving my entire platform. This is so freaking awesome. It was a very fun strategic layer to then move your base around and have that be on top of everything else. I was also using a bunch of stalkers and teleporting them around because most of the teleportation was long enough that I could get them to and fro without only relying on ear units. And that was pretty fun as well to kind of have them leaping over the gaps, collecting extra minerals, whatever. Very, very fun. There were a lot of missions that were just creatively designed, could never happen in a multiplayer setting and could only be for the campaign. And that was what made this so special to play was just having those very unique mission styles where it would just be like, okay, all these different kinds of units are attacking from different places. My base is moving around. I'm having to think on the fly. That's just really cool. It's cool. Yeah. There's definitely a feeling of playing a game made by designers who are at the peak of their power. Yes. They've just been experimenting with this fundamentally, this basic template that they started with of a real time strategy game where you make a big army and you go something other army industry, their base. And they've just been asking for so many years at this point, okay, that's the basic setup of the game. What can we do to make it surprising or how can we, what can we change? In the case of this level, it's, okay, you have very limited resources and you have to keep moving your base. And the map itself is mobile, so you have control over where it goes. Another mission that I really, really liked, Jason, you alluded to it in our last episode where we talked about the first part, kind of the first half of the story. And that's when I'm going to get the names right. That's when Allerak fights high Lord Malash for control over the Tal Dereem. I've got the Wikipedia page. I was about to be so impressed, but all right, there you go. To explain this mission, it's really neat. They do a good job of setting it up beforehand, which is something the cutscenes don't always do, but I value it whenever they do. So you get an explanation from Allerak about what's going to happen. And he's like, well, I have to like challenge this guy, Malash, to an honor battle basically of Rakshaire. Rakshaire. Rakshaire, right. And the way it works is we each sort of can bring our forces to help us, but the two of us are going to be locked in this globe fighting. And we're just going to need support from our armies. And that's going to mean like kind of pushing us along a track and whoever's getting better support is going to be able to win the fight. And hearing that, I was immediately translating that into game mechanics thinking, okay, yeah, this is going to work. This is basically a football that I have to push down the field with my team while his team tries to push it back. It's a rugby scrum, I guess. It's kind of a reverse MOBA. It's like a MOBA where you're the army instead of being there. I like that. It's an awesome idea. And it was probably my favorite level of the whole campaign. It was just so cool, so well designed, so logical, and very straightforward in a way that sometimes this game isn't. And I really like that. Like you know exactly what you're supposed to be doing. There's just this globe with these guys in it and you need to just push it forward. There isn't that sense of, okay, I don't know what's going to happen on the map. I don't know where I'm supposed to be going. I'm kind of scouting out. I'm building up my forces, but I'm not sure what I need. It was a lot clearer. And I think that, yeah, that made for a really fun game. So that gets to a point I wanted to ask you guys about. So something that I found really interesting about this is that the game really expects you to be doing the sort of multitasking that you would need to be doing to play competitive in StarCraft. Because not only are you having to train your units and worry about resources and stuff, you also are engaging in a lot of missions that have time limits. At the same time as you're going to be attacked. And I played on, and remember if I was playing on Harder Brutal this time round, but I played on the higher level difficulties. I know you guys played on a little bit lower difficulty, so I don't know if I was being attacked at a more frequent cadence or something like that. But I'm curious. Did you guys find it difficult to juggle like having to go in and complete your mission objectives while at the same time defending your base and maintaining your economy and building stuff? And did you guys find that it was like you were able to control multiple armies? Did you set up base defenses and then make one big army and use that to go do all the missions and stuff? How did you approach that? And how did you guys feel about it, Mattie? You want to start? Sure. So the first mission where I really started to feel the pain personally was mission 18. I think it's called the host. It's the one where you have to defeat all of those huge kind of diamond-shaped purple gems. And they're infinitely spawning guys. And every time you defeat one of those gems, the rest of the guys become stronger, who are attacking you. Oh, yeah. It's not just that it's sort of in the last 90% of the main campaign. It's like the home stretch, basically. So it makes sense that that's where the game starts to get really hard and really challenging. That was the first time that I started actually looking up some tutorials because I was like, I'm not going to get through this unless I start using some strategic thinking. Like in addition to managing multiple armies, like Jason was saying, I needed something more than that. It was like, I need to be thinking about what units I'm building and when I'm building them. So I actually want to recommend a guy that I had never seen before. He's probably ridiculously famous. But heck if I know about Starcraft content creators, but his name is Jay burino plays. And he does a bunch of videos where he just goes through exactly which units he created and what his upgrades were, like back on the ship for each of the levels. And he does them on normal difficulty and brutal difficulty and everything. And he's like, here's how I did these build orders. They're very clear videos. I loved them. I definitely use some of his recommendations and also just looked at the comments from other people being like, here's my build order. And it really got me back in the zone. I just, I was just like, this is so freaking fun. It's so challenging, but in such a fun way to be like, oh, there's a lot of different ways to beat this. This person did it this way. These other commenters did it this way. I ended up in that fight building a bunch of Colossae, Colossus's. They're really big, stompy stalker guys. And that really worked super, super well. And also taking advantage of, of course, Phoenix. How could we forget Phoenix tapping him in his special attack? He is incredibly powerful. He really, I'm so glad. After subjecting it to Final Fantasy VI since we got into it. I know. This is my speed in jade. Enjoy it. I think. This is great. This is amazing. Well, I knew I would love it. As soon as you said it in the bet last year, I was like, oh, that's going to be fine. I'm going to have a great time with this. But Kirk, what about you? Yeah, I definitely found it pretty difficult. This isn't a type of game that I've ever gotten really good at or spent too much time learning. And there does come a point in a young man's life when he is past 40 years old and he looks at himself and says, you know what? Maybe I'm not going to get good. There are limited number of years I have left to master new skills and real-time strategy games from the 2010s might not be. You're not going to spend 10,000 hours playing soccer. No, probably not. So I found that the difficulty of this game was interesting because it works across a couple of different levels. I played through a lot of these missions on casual or normal. Kind of both. I played normal if I was really getting worked, I'd switched to casual. Some of the missions later, I beat them on casual and would go back and play them on normal. And I found that it made a really big difference just knowing where everything was going to be coming from and what units would do the best job of dealing with what enemy sort of techniques and what enemy strategies. So there's a mission, I forget the name of it, but it's near the end where you're, it's just defense. It's like defense against waves of enemies coming from all four corners of the map. It's an incredible mission. It's really exciting. It's another one that lays out the stakes really clearly at the beginning and as a result, you just know exactly what's going to be demanded of you and you know what to expect. I'm like, okay, great. So they're going to attack from one direction and I'll probably hold that off and then right as that's ending, they're going to come from another direction and at some point they're going to come from two directions and then pretty soon at the very end, it's going to be all three and you're waiting while this timer kind of counts down until you're finally clear. So you just have to survive long enough to win the mission. And I found that to be easier, the more I knew which units I should be building. So kind of like what you were saying, Maddie, that like knowing which units to build and where to put them, who I could just kind of leave there, like what kind of towers to put up where, what's the name of the, what are the name of the two types of towers you build in this game? The photon cannon and then there's the like tells a ring tower or whatever it's called and that's that the photon cannon for what is worth is in multiplayer. So it's a standard unit, whereas the other cannon thing is not in multiplayer. That's just for saying. Oh, really? Oh, interesting. Okay. Because yeah, the tower is real good. And then there's shield batteries also, which you have to. Right. That's true. I guess. Well, those were actually really important to learn how to use as well as mission. Oh, yeah. Those are in multiplayer also. So those you get the hang of, if you, or I guess you can get the hang of it. You're thinking about your form, multiplayer use. Right. Right. So that was something that I had to kind of get my head around. It was okay. Where do I place the turrets, which have a shorter range, but can, you know, are kind of not going to, like you can put them up much more inexpensively and have them in the front with the towers behind them and the towers are going to be more useful for longer range attacks. What actually is the range of each of these units? And that's just one example. It was true for pretty much every type of unit that I had to build. And with so much going on in a mission like that, you know, three separate fronts that you're defending against where you're losing units kind of all over the place. The game is constantly saying, your units are under attack, you know, when it feels more alarming. Very stressful. Oh, yeah. Like, of course, my units are under attack. That's the idea. Like, you're always going to be under attack. So I did find that reading walkthroughs actually just read the IGN walkthroughs, which are still up. And we're also really helpful just because they kind of tell you what to expect and give you a couple of tips for, okay, you're going to want to use, you know, this type of unit here, that type of unit there. And a lot of the sort of best practices, especially for defensive strategy, which I found really useful because it would have taken me a long time to figure that stuff out on my own. So did you guys find that you were able to like successfully juggle back and forth? And like an army and also the base and training units, like, were you able to do that or were you just kind of like, uh, uh, lost when you tried it, yeah, honestly, I felt myself getting better at it as I went along. And I definitely was significantly improving at just adding more, more guys to different groupings. I got used to having certain numbers that corresponded with like my, my, my air units versus my ground units and so on. I really got that down. And then what was kind of funny about late in the game, switching over to starting to watch Jayberino plays is that he doesn't do any of that at all because I guess he's some kind of freaking super genius who just never has that and just will constantly select his units individually, just while clicking around the map at lightning speed. So that was kind of wild to go. I know he doesn't use hockey. He uses hockey's for certain missions and for other missions, he just doesn't. And I was just like, I can't believe what I'm saying here. Has his buildings on a hotkeys, but his army's not on hotkeys. And he is truly just clicking around the map and selecting certain units just like a mouse ninja. Yeah. I mean, for certain, certain battles, like especially that gem battle that I mentioned where your units are actually getting destroyed so quickly and you're rebuilding them so quickly in order to keep up with demand, essentially hot keying them. I guess is kind of a waste of time. But yeah, I mean, it was just sort of interesting to see all the different strategies that are possible. I certainly got better at using hotkeys. Kirk, did you start hot keying your buildings after our stream? Yeah, I did. And I still generally just use a sort of a location hotkey where I just go back to my base and that's kind of like I can get to everything there with my mouse. And because I wasn't playing on anything above normal difficulty, it wasn't that big of a deal if I was moving a little bit slowly. Like I found most of the time that I had more units than I needed, which is something that I actually find really satisfying in these days. Going all the way back to Warcraft 2, the way that I always played these real-time strategy games, these Blizzard games was to just build a huge army and to just overwhelm the enemy with sheer numbers rather than spending too much time fine-tuning and optimizing my strategy where I probably didn't need half of the units that I built. But I like to just have a million zealots and there's just a ton of zealots and then they just run in and there are just so many of them. It's world-winning around that they destroy the enemy. And it's funny you say that because I feel like a lot of the missions in like a sea of the void are designed to prevent that because there's some sort of time limit. Yeah. I was thinking about this. I was thinking about this one. I was doing that one mission where like you have to like escort these things and like I forget what they're called. It's all just nonsense terminology like the parafires or something like yeah. They come out of the ground on short trips and you have to escort them and kill Zerg long the way. I was thinking about how like if you try to just like turtle which is what it's called when you just kind of like sit in your base and build up an army and just like defend your like defensive place so you can just build up a massive army and then stomp them up. You wouldn't be able to do that mission because there's a timer and once the things start to move you have to go defend them. So I feel like yeah, I feel like this mission, these missions specifically force you to play the game a little bit more the way it was intended to be played. Although it could be different on casual, I'm actually not sure. No, no, it is, it you're correct and I think that that's true. It pushes you outside of doing that just because that's not really a strategy that will win a lot of these missions. It's just not what's required. I was mostly talking about how I used to play Warcraft too. Right. And did this change it? Well, that's what I was getting at. Like did this force you to think differently about the game? So it did though on the lower difficulties, even on normal, you still kind of can win with sheer numbers. A lot of these missions, your production can outstrip the casualties that you're taking just because you have a lot of really powerful units by the end of the game. You've just unlocked a lot of stuff on your unit tree. And so there's just like huge colossi, roaming around just destroying stuff at range. And you know, I have so many towers that are doing such a good job of defense that I'm kind of just making dudes to make dudes pass a certain point on some of the missions. Making dudes to make dudes. Just making dudes to make dudes to make dudes. That's the way to play. Yeah. An RTS. So I found that I wasn't needing to super optimize my army, but at the same time, I had a much better sense of the build rhythm and of just where you want to be placing your resources, which you know, basically that meta that you're doing, the way that you have to think about your resources, what you're building, and making sure that everything is working at the same time. There are just rhythms to this game that I'm sure when you start playing competitively, or even on really high difficulties in single player, you have to be very attuned not just to the rhythms, but to the sort of the amount of energy, the amount of attention that you need to give to any one thing. So you're both like feeling the way that, okay, I know I've got this cooking. It'll be done in a second. I've got to go back and assign those. This is about to be done producing this unit, so I have to assign that again. And you're also aware on a bigger level of, and I'm going to need more of these, and I'm going to need not many more of those, so I don't need to worry about that after this last time. You're kind of always thinking of those different rhythms, I suppose, different subdivisions of the more. Yeah. Well, so the thing, it's interesting, not to get too granular here, but one thing I'll point out is that if you're just going by location, then what you can't do is you can't have your buildings be training units while you're controlling your army, which is really the best way. Which wasn't something I was ever really doing. Right. Which is the best way, when you get into harder difficulty, you pretty much have to do that because your army is doing something, and at the same time, you want to be training probes back and base there, you want to be training units back and base. And so yeah, there isn't interesting and interesting rhythm that you have to pick up on if you're going to get better at the game, which it's totally fine if you want to play casually and you don't. Like I think it's interesting that you guys both had a good time in lower difficulty settings because I think that I actually think it's really cool that the game allows for that. And it isn't forcing you to be this expert level RTS player to have a fun time playing sarcophad. I think that's always been that approachability has always been when a blizzard's strong suits as a designer and it's it's always cool to see. Yeah. The game is really fun and normal. And that's pretty much all I did with some exceptions, just if I was like, this is pretty easy. And I think that just the fact that that's possible is is so great. And even the fact that there are YouTube videos that are still like, here's how to beat the game on normal without that being something that people are making fun of in the comments, at least not that I saw. It's also really cool. Like there's still people out there who care about that. Also not to change the topic, but I was kind of curious if you guys had any favorites of the special power ups that you designate your solar right towards because I personally, like any of the airstrike ones, I just picked these every time all I ever want to do is destroy the guys from the air. There's like that solar one that's like just a huge delight that just freaking destroys stuff for a billion years. But it was also very hard for me to get away from using any of the passives because I love having one fewer thing to think of like passively collecting the vest being gas, the best ability in the world. How could anyone not choose that one? That's a good one and an interesting type of difficulty modifier because it just removes one thing that you have to think about otherwise, like it doesn't really make the game easier in any kind of difficulty damage kind of a way. But it does make the game easier and that there's just lots to think about and I definitely had that turn. Well it makes the game easier and that you have to like train six fewer pros and so you can. So that's true. That's true as well. And also it gives you more vest being from the start so you can train units faster. So there were times that I found myself short on vest being and being like, oh my god, I shouldn't have taken this option. I should have just mind it or refined it myself that it would have been better. I do really like the orbital strikes and I really like the mission. I think it's toward the end where you start to lose functionality on this, the spirit of a dude. That's what it's called. This weapon that you've been coming, I have been coming to rely on and they're like, oh no. Yeah. You're losing functionality. You're losing this. You're losing this. I have to make do with just my army on the ground. My favorite was always reinforcements that I relied on quite a bit. Classic. When you get a pile on and four units with it, which is nice because then you can also warp in units at the pylons that very full. Which is amazing. It is kind of too bad that you don't get any of those special abilities and multiplayer. I understand you would never work, but when you're cool, you just fall on feet and it's every now and then. Balance for you. Yeah. That's the thing. I mean, in a different type of game, it could work. It just needed to be, it would need to be balanced and in multiplayer. I mean, you already have enough to think about in multiplayer. It's true. Like, you don't need another variable on top of that. One of the reasons that MOBAs have overtaken RTS games is because you don't have to multitask as much in a moment. Yeah. And so there's still like a barrier for entry and a skill level that you have to hit to be good at in MOBA, but it's not quite the same. You don't have to have the APM of hundreds, the way actions per minute, hundreds of actions per minute, the way that the best start craft to players have. Yeah. And I also think something like MOBA or even Overwatch or team shooters like Overwatch are part of what's tapping into that sensation of, oh, my special ability, cool down is ready or even picking out your special abilities. I mean, it becomes picking your characters based on what special abilities they have, but I think that that's naturally so attractive to most people, not just me, to be like, oh, great. Now I get to choose my special abilities between each mission. I get to think about what they're going to be and sometimes I would even go back to my ship again and be like, I'm going to need different special abilities for this mission based on the layout of it now that I've played it and seen what I need. And that's just a very different way to play starcraft as compared to classic multiplayer missions where everybody has identical everything. And you know what everybody has. Right. There's different races, but you know what they have. You guys should definitely check out. There's this mode called co-op commanders in Starcraft 2. And it's super cool because it's kind of a hybrid between multiplayer and single player in that it is multiplayer, but it's PVE. So you and another player are playing against the computer in some sort of mission and there are a bunch of different types of missions you can do. One is like defend a train or destroy a train or whatever. There is go kill some others, some waves of enemies or whatever, they're all very similar. But the way it works is you pick a hero and it's all the different heroes from the game from Martynas to Phoenix to Allerak and each of them has a different suite of units and abilities and you can play around with each of them in like as you're going through this kind of RTS campaign, this kind of weird custom campaign to complete your objectives and some of them are bonkers, like they experimented with abilities in a way that even the single player campaign doesn't do. And so those are really fun and if you want more of Maddie what you're looking for with that kind of ultimate power experience, you should check that out a little bit because there's some really fun ones to play around with. The only annoying thing is that to unlock, well some of them you have to buy, some of the characters you have to buy, and then to unlock all of the powers for each character you have to level them up by continuing to play missions. So you don't start with all of the abilities right away, but still it's pretty fun. Like one of them is, man I haven't played this in a while, but like one of them is just like Zerg robots and this guy creates like only Zerg robot units or something like that. There's some wild ones. You guys should check them out. Yeah, we should just get really into Starcraft extended universe stuff. Like let's forget modern games, let's just play a bunch of old Blizzard games now. Let's make this a Starcraft podcast. One thing that I think that I would get really into would be a real time strategy game that's just as complex as this, but that allows you to pause and assign actions. I've been playing through Shadow Gambit or I just started playing it, which is the latest game from Mimi Me, who made Desperado's three and they made Shadow Tactics, so they make these real time stealth games that actually function a little bit like Starcraft for the most part. It's an isometric view and you're moving in real time around this battlefield you have to multitask, but they allow you to pause the game and queue up these amazing sort of synchronized attacks so you can have one character throws a cloud of gas and the other character sneaks in through the gas and stabs the guy and then they both move back and you've kind of queued up a sequence of events and it's really satisfying and it allows at least it allows me a level of mastery over very complex systems that I find really satisfying and it makes the game feel accessible without feeling simplified. There are a ton of different systems going on, but because I'm able to pause and take a little bit of time with them, I'm able to really get my head around them. I would really love that for something like Starcraft where you can just stop time, I mean you would have to be a single player game I guess, but then you can just go through and look at what everyone's doing in this moment and then assign them different tasks and then start time again. I guess something like FTL is another good comparison. It's the one thought I've kind of had while playing this while also playing Shadow Gambit and Baldur's Gate 3 and these different sort of hybrid and like fully turn based like Baldur's Gate 3, hybrid like Shadow Gambit and just how being able to pause and being able to look at all of these complex systems actually makes those systems more accessible without needing to simplify them. They can still be really complicated. I have a capacity to understand that level of complexity. I just, it's a little bit of a stretch for me sometimes to do it all in real time, all the time while dealing with a changing battlefield, so just a thought I've had. Yeah, I think what you're describing would need fewer units and more, it would be a different game essentially, but yeah, that would be an interesting approach to the general. Maybe, you could just play a single player version of Starcraft 2 where you can pause the game at any time and other than that, it's the exact same game, that'd probably be pretty fun. Pause and give that command. No, no, no, no, because War doesn't pause. War. Who said that? War doesn't pause. You yourself told me. It's true. It's true. I'm eating my own words now. I wish War paused, but it just doesn't. It simply doesn't pause and Starcraft 2 knows that and it's completely accurate. It's a historical document. All this stuff really happened, I think, I mean. That's true. This is just the legacy. Right, we're actually going to put a pause on our War right now and take a break and then we'll be back with one more thing. I'm Emily Heller and I'm Lisa Hannah Walt and we're the hosts of Baby Geniuses. We've been doing our podcast for over 10 years. When we started, it was about trying to learn something new every episode. Now, it's about us trying to actively get stupider and it's working. Coming out with us and you'll hear us chat about gardening horses, various problems with our butts and all the weird stuff that makes us horny. That's so weird. All that stuff. Baby Geniuses, a show for adult idiots every other week on Maximum Fun. The following pro wrestling contest is scheduled for one fall. Making the way to the ring for the tights and fights podcast are the baddest trio of audio. The hair to be wear, Daniel Radford. It really is. Great hair. The Brit with a permit to hit Lindsey Cal. The Queen is dead, long live the Queen. And the fast-talking, fist clocking, how lovely. See I can wrestle and be an announcer. Get ready for tights and fights. Listen, every Saturday or face the pain. Find us on Maximum Fun. No ring the bell. And we are back. War has been unpossed. Let's talk about that one more. Things Maddie, what's your one more thing? My one more thing is a movie called Asteroid City. Streaming on peacock and that's where we watched it. This is a really weird movie. It's a Wes Anderson movie. So sure, it's Tweet. It's cute. It's got vibrant colors. Everything looks like a set in the classic Wes Anderson style. But it's also really strange and surrealist in a way that Wes Anderson isn't always. Like reminds me of French surrealist plays that I was really into when I was a pretentious high schooler. It's a movie that is also purports to be about a play. Like you start the movie and it's like this is about a play called Asteroid City. And it's divided up into acts accordingly and there's sort of a host of the play and like the curtains part at the outset and the wall drops periodically and Edward Norton plays this character who's directing the play that you're watching. And you sometimes get to see the actors break character and talk to each other as the actors off stage. And I really like that as a concept but it's also very confusing to watch because I mean the movie just keeps switching around on you. And you got to kind of keep up with that and it's very heady stuff and just in terms of how much you have to keep track of like you have to kind of remember like okay this is the actors feeling about the character he's playing and then okay now I'm back in the play again and he's playing his character. You guys are following what I'm saying it's it's confusing and for the first 25 minutes or so I was like I don't know if I like this. This might be too much and it might be dumb and annoying. And then somewhere around the hour mark I was like this is awesome I love this I'm totally on board. I love this. I don't know. It happened it kind of clicked together for me. The play is a science fiction play. There's an alien in it I mean I don't know I don't know how to describe it but it was really cool and it was a kind of really strange thing that eventually hung together into a statement that I thought was really cool you just have to give it a bit. You have to kind of be willing to watch something that you probably would have liked as a call. Do you know what I'm saying it's something like so much interesting movies they they come together in the end and you realize what they were building exactly like it I kind of started getting on board an hour in and by the time the credits rolled I was like I understand what this was about and I I really liked it actually but it's real weird at the beginning. So yeah it's called Asteroid City it's about an alien it's a play within a movie Edward Norton's in it Jason Schwartzman's in it a bunch of other old standbys from Wes Anderson things are in it. Wes Anderson players. Yes except also Tom Hanks is in it and he's not usually in Wes Anderson things. I really like to introduce a new face every now I really I really liked him in it. So yeah I I recommend it I guess but just be a little patient with it be patient with it. Greg what's your one more thing? My one more thing has a bit of a Wes Anderson connection as well it's the after party season too. This is a show on Apple TV plus the second season yes of a show that we all really enjoy season. Yeah it's first season. So this is a show where someone is murdered and then the cast of characters try to solve the murder by reliving the night of the murder over and over again at Rashomon style and each reliving of the night is told by a different person and then shot and recreated in a different cinematic style. That's the best I can come up with for the for the sort of general hook of the show. Yeah. It's a comedy it stars Tiffany hadish Sam Richardson and Zoe Chow are kind of the three main characters and they're the three characters who return for season two from season one. They are back in the midst of another murder that they have to solve. It's really the Tiffany hadish and Sam Richardson show and really it's the Tiffany hadish show. She's so funny. She's so good. She gets this to be the star of the funniest episode at least so far in season two. Is it is it all out yet or it's not all out yet and I actually wasn't totally sold on it at first the first episode which is Sam Richardson's character Enneke telling his version of this wedding so it's he is now dating Zoe Chow his ex-girlfriend from the first season they're now together and her sister is getting married and at the wedding her to be husband or now husband who is played by Zach Woods who we were just talking about the hilarious Zach Woods is this steals every scene in Silicon Valley he's playing a like weirdo tech billionaire kind of guy he is murdered and no one knows who did it and so now they're back stuck in another murder and they call in Tiffany hadish who has since left the police force and become an author because she wrote a book all about the murder from season one and she kind of comes back in before the police come because no one wants to call the police yet because they're worried they don't really know who it's going to be so they bring her in as a kind of consultant and she begins you know interviewing everyone again just like in season one so at the beginning it's an eke's episode the opening episode I wasn't totally sold it's like a rom com everything goes wrong at the wedding like meet the parents kind of a thing and it was okay but I was like I don't know is this show going to really have juice in season two but it's gotten really really good as it's gone on it's had a couple of really standout episodes there's a very funny West Anderson set up uh send up starring Anna Conkel who uh Maddie you'll know from pen 15 yes I love her she's so good on that she's extremely funny and it's cool to see her getting work but um Ken Jiong is also in this and John show his episode actually just aired he's there uncle or their fun call he's there fun uncle and his story is told in the style of a kind of sweeping melodramatic epic and it's really good it's just the mystery has been really fun um it's constantly surprising each character has revealed sides to themselves that you know you don't see when you first meet them in the first episode and the other standout episode is Tiffany haddish's episode that focuses on her which is basically in the style of a basic instinct like sexy thriller that's from the 90s like adult thriller absolutely hilarious she's so funny the way that she's just like totally the start of the show and that episode we were dying laughing it was one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time so uh yeah it's it's been really great I don't know who did it I have my theories but they're constantly surprising us every every episode so I'm not sure who it's gonna be could be that it's kind of a letdown but in the end the show isn't really about being satisfied with who did the murder it's more just about the comedy and the journey so I've been really enjoying it that's on Apple TV plus uh it's the after party season two cool first season is great I'll probably wait until so when is the entire episode it's almost done I think there's one or two episodes left yeah oh yeah I probably wait for the whole season but yeah that's exciting um cool my one more thing is book called traffic by Ben Smith which I was also my one more thing yeah last week but actually I finished the book so I figured I would talk about it again because last week I just scratched the surface and so I figured I'd discuss it a little bit this is uh an interesting book as I mentioned last week it's kind of a strange experience to be reading a book where you know some of the characters involved especially one of the two main characters and the book is really interested in telling the story of like the rise of BuzzFeed and the rise of Gawker and their respective creators Jonah Peretti with BuzzFeed and Nick Dent with Gawker and how they may or may not have changed the internet um and by the end of the book it's kind of like it it's it's it's really uh he Ben Smith writes that like perhaps they were the Rosencrabson-Gildon-Gildon cert and the real characters were these kind of like host of villains that are on the periphery because they did they change the internet or did the internet change the people like well really I mean the the real story here is that like characters like Andrew Breitbart and uh baked Alaska and a bunch of other kind of right wing troll type personalities. There's a name I haven't heard in a little while right or like Benny Johnson misplagerus conservative dude all these characters were kind of like like on the periphery here learning about traffic and kind of using it for their own and for their own gains and their own goals um the book is weird I don't know if I would recommend it to anyone unless they're like super media junkies because it doesn't really I don't know it doesn't have the sort of details and anecdotes that I was looking for and in fact having lived through a lot of the Gawker stuff I was actually um expecting more for example there's uh uh one section where it's like a couple of paragraphs where he talks about the kind of infamous 2015 Gawker story that outed a C-suite executive a Condé Nast and uh really kind of breezes past it when internally a Gawker media that was like one of the most dramatic moments of the company's history we like had uh it was the first time a post was ever removed the editorial director and the editor in chief resigned over it it was pretty wild it was a huge a huge thing do you get the sense that because Ben Smith's background is really at Buzzfeed that it's just a little bit more of a Buzzfeed focused story no it's more that because it's trying to cram in so much it just really does a cursory job of of hitting a lot of the scenes which it was just kind of inevitable with a buck like this but there just isn't enough like really good behind the scenes like media gossip for you to be like oh man this is fascinating there's some juicy stuff in here because there isn't and I I didn't feel like I came away learning that much um from it the way I was hoping to you have to wonder what Nick Denton's book would be like it's interesting so get this you know it's fascinating so both Jonah and Nick and a host of other characters um participated in this book and we're willing to do interviews except Nick in true Nick Denton fashion would only do interviews by either text message or in a Google document like you would explain the questions and a Google doc oh and he could make them in suggesting mode or he could accept a reject paragraph of a book no no it wasn't it wasn't the book it was like no it was like then right questions to him in a Google doc and and you would write responses so only written bizarre completely bizarre way to connect very strange very strange there were a couple of good scenes here's one scene that was like a Disney executives trying to buy Buzzfeed and afterwards they all like get high on a roof and start arguing over whether they should accept the deal and that that sort of stuff was fun to read about but yeah I don't know I guess I was expecting a little bit more um also unsurprisingly the word kataku is mentioned zero times and well that's what's really not even a footnote to his not even a footnote and yeah they should have had a part that was like kataku staffers were not present during like all the scenes were people are just drinking just like in parentheses are like by the way no one from kataku was there for that wild party either yeah they should put that in but yeah I mean it says it feels like it's an interesting kind of snapshot in time in terms of the media world and it's interesting I guess if you're a media junky but it's not like you'll and also it's very well written it's very easy to get through it's a very breezy it's a good writer yes for sure but it's not like you're gonna read this and like come away with some big revelations about the world of media and if anything I kind of came away with the this kind of like nihilistic message not intentional from the book but but my own interpretation was like man this whole snapshot in time like did not matter at all like this is a femoral like moment this period just like amounted to very little deep change anything or the course and that's not to say that like like there were good scoops along the way that led to some change I suppose but like in terms of the media world yeah very little was accomplished from this whole this whole saga and in fact some job experience well no that yeah but like in the in the end or over in fact the most interesting part I thought was there's a chapter about the New York Times and their kind of internal politics over going digital and how they like Jonah Prattie came and like did a did a speech for them and stuff and Jonah Prattie and like other people thought like look at this dinosaur like we're gonna eat its lunch and then the New York Times turned around and just destroyed everybody by like making this incredible digital digital adaptation and turned around and really reinvented itself in in a way that just blew the buzz feeds and gockers of the world out of the water so yeah it was really it's I guess there's some interesting stuff I I should say it's not all it's not all cursory and boring but I do think it's it's more of a book for journalists and media junkies and like your average your average connoisseur of news in the world but yeah no that's that's that's the book I just wanted to talk about it now that it's finished all right that is my one more thing it is time to say goodbye Kirk Manny I'll see you both next week yeah see you next week bye triple click is produced by Jason Shryer Maddie Myers and me Kirk Hamilton I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music our show art is by Tom DJ some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration you can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes triple click is a proud member of the maximum fun podcast network and if you like our show we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at maximumfund.org slash join find us on twitter at triple click pods and email the triple click at maximumfund.org and find a link to our discord in the show notes thanks for listening see you next time maximum fun a worker-owned network of artist-owned 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