Things I Hate About Things I Love

Posted on April 21, 2016 by Tyler F.M. Edwards

I think nuance is important in life. It’s always good to remind yourself nothing is entirely good or bad, to see the flaws even in things you enjoy. Blind devotion is never a positive trait.

To that end, I have compiled a list of things I truly hate about things I truly love. None of these things are enough to turn me off my passions, but that doesn’t mean they don’t really get under my skin.

This is by no means a comprehensive list; it’s just the things that stood out to me as I was writing.

And just so you know, to continue the theme of balance and nuance, I will also be doing a post on things I love about things I hate.

World of Warcraft: Mandatory subscription

There’s no shortage of things I could have picked where WoW is concerned. It’s a game with much that I love, but also much that I would gladly purge with cleansing fire.

I settled on the subscription. I’ve said it all before; I don’t like subscriptions and the psychological pressure they create.

In WoW’s case, I find the subscription is having an increasingly toxic impact on the game’s design. More and more the overriding thought behind Blizzard’s decisions seems to not be “How can we make this more fun?” but “How can we make this take longer?”

Star Trek: Enterprise: Gratuitous T&A

Enterprise’s infamous decon scenes and other acts of shameless fan service have received much criticism, and while I think it’s a bit unfair to act as if this was something new to the Star Trek franchise (mini-skirts — just sayin’), it does deserve to be criticized.

Yeah, it’s sexist. It’s also silly, ridiculous, and unnecessary, and it cheapened what was otherwise a fantastic piece of intellectual science fiction.

I mean, I was going through puberty when Enterprise was on the air, and even so, I still didn’t enjoy the decon scenes.

Much.

Seriously, though, even then I was like, “This is dumb. Why are they doing this? I mean, I like seeing Linda Park in her underpants and all, but really, this is dumb. Get back to the plot.”

At least they made some small effort toward being equal opportunity. Trip did spend an awful lot of time in his underwear and/or sweaty and covered in dirt.

Fun fact: TrekUnited’s “let’s drool over Connor Trinneer” thread was roughly ten to twenty times longer than the equivalent threads for Jolene Blalock and Linda Park combined.

This is not an exaggeration.

Battlestar Galactica: Season four

I have a lot of love for Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica reboot. My autographed photos of Katee Sackhoff and Aaron Douglas sit proudly next to my computer desk. My pilot’s wings pin occupies a place of honour on the headboard above my bed. One of my first major writing projects was a massive BSG fan fic up that ended being nearly novel length. BSG produced three of the best seasons of television ever made.

And then season four happened.

Sigh.

I mean, there was still some really great stuff in season four. I loved the mutiny arc. The acting and character arcs were fantastic until the end. “Revelations” was possibly the best episode of the series.

But most of season four was defined by random drama and shock value for the sake of drama and shock value. It killed off beloved characters for no apparent reason.

Worse still, it became clear that, despite what the opening credits said, they did not have a plan. The writers were clearly making it up as they went along, and in the end, the show “collapsed under its own weight,” as an old friend of mine aptly put it. The ending was a nonsensical mess that boiled down to two hours of “a wizard did it.”

The first three seasons of BSG were so brilliant that season four cannot diminish what they accomplished. But that’s not for lack of effort.

These days I mostly try to pretend season four ever happened. Though not as hard as I try to pretend Blood and Chrome never happened.

Stargate: Universe: Montages

I loved SG:U. After its shaky first few episodes, it evolved into one of the great sci-fi shows of all time. But there’s one nasty habit it never quite shook off.

Those damn musical montages.

Nearly every episode had to conclude with five minutes of the cast staring off into space and looking depressed while some crappy song plays in the background. It never stopped being irritating.

Take that time and come up with some proper opening credits instead. Would be as useful.

Mass Effect: Asari

With a few notable exceptions, I’m not fond of the alien races in the Mass Effect franchise. It feels like very little effort was put into them — they’re almost entirely bland archetypes the likes of which you could find in any generic sci-fi story.

The Asari stand out as the worst, though. They’re basically an entire species of adolescent sexual fantasies — gorgeous, bisexual alien girls. Considering how progressive Bioware tends to be, shameless fan service such as the Asari sticks out like a sore thumb.

I find it ironic that the games try to make it this offensive stereotype that Asari are defined by sex, but the games spend more time stereotyping them than any of the characters. There’s next to nothing unique or noteworthy about the Asari culture or temperament other than their sexuality, nearly all Asari plots revolve sex or relationships in some way, and Asari strippers are utterly ubiquitous.

Admittedly, my view has perhaps been skewed by the fact Liara is the most prominent Asari in the franchise. Her entire personality boils down to, “Gee, Shepard, you’re so awesome; wanna feel my boobs?”

In fairness, Samara is pretty cool.

Heroes of the Storm: Dragon Shire

I was going to mention the amount of filler in Bioware games, but then I remembered how much I hate Dragon Shire, and there wasn’t room for both.

Heroes of the Storm’s map variety is one of its great strengths… unless you get Dragon Shire.

I hate this map so very, very much. It’s just endless back and forth — you can easily go ten to fifteen minutes into a match without either team winning the map objective. It’s so slow, and so tedious. It’s also really easy to get screwed over by your team composition in quick matches because you need a very specific set of heroes and roles to hold all three shrines effectively.

It also seems very snowbally compared to other maps. Winning the dragon is such a massive advantage, and there’s no “consolation prize” for the team who doesn’t capture it. It’s agonizing to spend half a match fighting over the damn thing, only to have the enemy team cap it and wreck half your forts because your team made one mistake.

Oh, and it has the most boring visuals and the dullest announcer of all the maps.

I have my highest win rate on Dragon Shire, but even that does nothing to quell my hate for this awful, terrible, no good map. I have at times (briefly) considered quitting Heroes because of Dragon Shire — I’m not kidding.

Fantasy in general: Lack of diversity

This isn’t necessarily something I hate, but it confuses and disappointments me.

Science fiction has a pretty rich tradition of showing a future where humanity is more united and giving us diverse casts composed of a good balance of sexes, races, and even sexual orientations.

Fantasy, for whatever reason, isn’t like that. The vast majority of fantasy novels are about straight white guys. If an author is feeling really daring and progressive, it might be about a straight white woman.

There are a few exceptions. Ian Irvine and Glen Cook have made at least some effort toward racial diversity in their casts, Mercedes Lackey gives good representation to LGBT characters, and… that’s all I got.

I guess Dragon Age could merit a mention, too. Good balance of sexes and sexual orientations, at least.

StarCraft II: Too much macro

StarCraft II is one of the great RTS games of all time, and the countless hours I’ve sunk into prove my love for it. But it always bothers me how much of the game boils down to macro, to economy.

If you run your economy well, you can all but ignore what happens on the battlefield, at least until you reach the highest levels of play. I remember hearing a guy saying he made it from silver to platinum league by giving up on commanding his army and just devoting all his attention to macro.

That’s pretty messed up.

And it’s just boring. Way too much of every game is spent churning out workers, and pylons, and overlords, and so forth. “YOU MUST CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL PYLONS” is a meme for a reason, but it’s not necessarily a good reason.

Everything: The fans

“It’s not the band I hate. It’s their fans.”

The sad truth is I have yet to find anything that can’t have the fun sucked out of it by its fans. The worst part of playing WoW is the other WoW players. The worst part of being a Trek fan is the Trekkies. And so on and so forth.

That’s not to say you won’t encounter nice people in fandom. Some of the best friends I have were made through fan communities. But on the whole, I’ve found my every attempt to engage in the fan community for any game, TV series, movie franchise, etcetera has ultimately proven frustrating and lessened my enjoyment of the original product.

StarCraft II: Utter Brutality

Posted on April 11, 2016 by Tyler F.M. Edwards

Regular readers will know that, as a rule, I’m not much interested in achievements in video games, but that I make an exception where StarCraft II is concerned.

To that end, I have shed much blood, sweat, and tears completing each of its installments on the highest difficulty setting, aptly called brutal.

It wasn’t until two years after the game’s release that I earned my brutal completionist achievement for Wings of Liberty. I might have done it sooner, but technical issues forced me to repeat several missions — a very frustrating setback. It was a long, hard-fought effort, and very gratifying once complete.

Prior to the release of Legacy of the Void, I did a second play through of Heart of the Swarm to refresh my memory of the story, and I decided to do it all on brutal. It proved easier than Wings of Liberty had been, being barely more difficult than playing on hard.

And now we come to the present. Over the last few weeks, I have done a complete play through of Legacy of the Void, the final expansion, on brutal, and now, at last, I’ve completed it.

The journey is over, and I stand victorious.

Victory against all odds:

Let me tell you: After going a bit soft in Heart of the Swarm, they meant business this time.

I knew things would be different by the second mission. All I can make are zealots and stalkers with no upgrades of any kind, and they throw ultralisks at me.

You have to respect that level of evil.

There were still a few “easy” missions (I use the term loosely), like Templar’s Charge and Purification, but on the whole, Legacy of the Void on brutal was an incredibly nail-biting experience from beginning to end, perhaps exceeding even the challenge of Wings of Liberty. Probably didn’t help I made it harder on myself by trying to get as many achievements as I could along the way.

Last Stand, in particular, is a mission I would be happy to never repeat again. I learned the hard way that I am not able to complete that mission on brutal while also completing the bonus objective. I was forced to complete the mission on hard for the sake of the solarite, then repeat it on brutal via the archives, that time ignoring everything but survival.

There were other harsh challenges along the way, as well. Brothers in Arms proved tremendously difficult, and only a last ditch run to the Keystone during a disruption wave saved me. Even then, it took multiple tries to pull it off. But a win’s a win.

The greatest challenge of all, though, came from the final mission of the main campaign, Salvation.

It nearly broke me.

After many reloaded saves and trying everything I could think of, I just could not make it past 90% completion. So I returned to the Spear of Adun, selected totally different units and abilities, and tried again.

That time, I never even got past 75%.

To my shame, I was forced to turn to Team Liquid and read what players there had attempted. One odd but popular strategy was to simply mass corsairs and Dark Templar. Not something I ever would have considered, but I resolved to try it, lacking better options.

And amazingly, it worked. I wouldn’t call the end result easy, but it wasn’t as bad as Last Stand, that’s for sure. Because there are so many chokepoints on that map, the enemy can’t escape the corsairs’ disruption webs, and they’re just target practice for your army at that point.

I also heavily abused the mothership’s black hole ability, and I kept a small cohort of arbiters in reserve to put enemies in stasis when I needed to buy time. This mainly came in handy during the last few moments of the mission, when my defenses at last broke under the onslaught.

Finally, I tried to erect strong static defenses at all three entrances, though I could never quite get the Purifier base’s defenses to last. I still managed to preserve their base, though.

For Spear of Adun abilities, I picked chrono surge (for upgrades), solar lance, orbital assimilators, call down Talandar, time stop, and guardian shell.

I can’t tell you what a relief it was when the achievement finally popped up.

All in all, it was a rollercoaster. It’s a strange experience; at times, working through these missions was incredibly frustrating and stressful, but it could also be spectacularly thrilling, and sometimes even the frustration was in and of itself a sort of thrill. Each mission becomes a puzzle to be solved.

At times you really do start to feel like a real battlefield commander. I found myself spending much time planning my strategies even outside the game.

“I’ll reinforce the Nerazim base with static defense, and station the mothership there as further insurance. I’ll fortify the Purifier encampment, and keep a squad of arbiters in reserve. Meanwhile, the bulk of my forces will hold the Tal’darim front, sending out sorties to the other fronts as needed.”

I had initially planned to do the epilogue campaign on brutal, as well (as I did with Whispers of Oblivion), but there’s no achievement for that, and frankly, my strength is spent. I have completed the main campaign for each race and each expansion. I have defeated seventy-one missions of one of the modern era’s most challenging games on the highest possible difficulty. I think my mastery has been proven.

Achievement addiction:

Of course, while working on completing the campaign on brutal, my lust for achievements rose full force. I tried to get as many campaign achievements as I could along the way, even repeating a few missions via the archives to grab specific achievements, but even that was not enough.

I also worked on bolstering my achievements for the multiplayer and co-op missions categories enough to unlock the tier one medals for each. Along the way, I learned that I find most of the co-op commanders fairly dull, but surprisingly I kind of like Zagara, despite my usual dislike of Zerg. Vorazun remains my favourite by far, however. Love playing as her.

This all seems a bit strange at face value, given my usual disinterest in achievement-hunting. But StarCraft is special.

Too often, achievements are merely participation trophies. They’re measurements of how much you’ve played the game, not true accomplishments. It rather cheapens the whole concept.

But in SC2, achievements tend to more often be, well, achievements. And perhaps more importantly, it is a game that is both quite challenging, and challenging in a very pure way.

In StarCraft, there is little element of chance, no grinding for more power, and rarely any way for other people to directly help you. You can’t just level up a few times, come back, and faceroll something that was once challenging, nor can a friend carry you through.

When you think about it, there aren’t many “pure” gaming experiences like this left. The proliferation of RPG-style progression and multiplayer support have a lot of positives, but they do rather cheapen the challenge of gaming, I think.

RTS stands as one of the few remaining bastions of games that are purely tests of skill. I suppose shooters sometimes are, as well, though they often feature a fair bit of RPG-style progression these days, but shooters are mostly tests of twitch reflexes and agility.That’s all well and good, but RTS games test reflexes, agility, multi-tasking, planning, strategic thinking, and more.

RTS titles are also a little less “all or nothing” in their challenge than other genres. Eventually things can cascade to the point where you just lose, but there’s a lot of gray area. You can lose battles but not the entire mission or match. You can recover from mistakes. Whereas in most RPGs, for example, you die, or the boss does, and there’s no middle ground.

Nor is there any special punishment for failure. If you lose, just start over and try again. No repair costs, or corpse runs, or any of the other unnecessarily punitive measures you tend to see in, say, MMORPGs.

This is why, even if I enjoy playing other genres just as well, RTS remains the genre of gaming I most respect.

And this is why StarCraft has me addicted to achievement-hunting. Alone among the games I play, SC2’s achievements feel like true accomplishments. I normally scoff at the idea of taking pride in one’s gaming accomplishments, but considering the test of wits, reflexes, planning, and multi-tasking that StarCraft represents, I will allow myself a small measure of pride in what I have achieved.

* * *

By the way, if you’re wondering why I haven’t mentioned the new Nova DLC yet, I’m waiting until all three parts are out to play it.

Superior Realities

Tag Archives: Starcraft

Things I Hate About Things I Love

StarCraft II: Utter Brutality

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