Welcome to my Blog

Hi, and welcome to my blog. My screen name is ShinDig and I live in Tasmania, Australia. This is going to be the place that I record my journey to Grandmaster League and beyond (hopefully) in Starcraft 2. To set the scene, here's a bit of backstory of my gaming life and StarCraft history.

I started playing games at a very young age (I think about 4) on my father's Mac. This was in the mid 90's. All the games I played were basic (Load-Runner and Cobra Gunship, anyone?). One day I was being looked after by my uncle and to keep me occupied he booted up his computer (also a Mac, my family have only ever had Macs since the early 80's). It was now that I came into contact with my first 'real' game, WarCraft 2. I didn't play it much that day but I remember the awesome graphics and how deep the gameplay was. This was the battle.net edition which came out in 1999 so I was a bit late to the party as StarCraft was already out at this point. Still, I was only 7 years old in 1999. I remember telling my father about this amazing game and so one day he came home from work with a copy and proceeded to finish the human campaign before I even got a go.

Not long after, I was at my other uncle's house and he had StarCraft. It was there that the obsession started. Being only about 8 at the time, I was quite terrible at the game. I would turtle in my base and never expand until I had a 200/200 army (no upgrades of course) and then go and crush the enemy. My father, being and adult, was a lot better and progressed through the campaign much faster. Eventually I got up to the last level in the Terran campaign but couldn't beat it so I started the Zerg campign. I remember getting up to a level where you have a heap of bases all linked with nydus networks but my child brain couldn't handle moving my army through the network quick enough. I then switched to the Protoss campign but I didn't get very far., only a few levels.

As I got older, I spent a lot of time playing StarCraft, it remained my main game for many years but I basically just played the Terran campaign over and over and over. I tried Brood War a few times but the missions were harder so I could only do a few levels and I couldn't be bothered learning the new units. This whole time I didn't even know people played multiplayer and none of my friends played so I had a pretty isolated StarCraft life.

Eventually I got Age of Empires 2 for Mac and played that a ton. I played that for a few years and basically ignored WarCraft 3 because at that stage my father rarely bought games for me. Around 6th grade I started to mature as a gamer and discovered WarCraft 3 and Halo for the Mac. Halo was the first FPS that I played (as a younger child I was afraid of being shot and killed lol) and really got into. I actually managed to finish it and I started to play games other than RTSs. Medal of Honor Allied Assault was another FPS I got into at the time. Despite these new games, StarCraft was still something I occasionally went back and played, althogh basically just the Terran campign for the nostalgia. Through all these years the PlayStation 1 and 2 had been a big part of my gaming life but I never became exclusively a console gamer, I always liked computer games.

Grade 8 in highschool was when things started to change. Three of my friends had World of Warcraft and it sounded really good. I hadn't really played any RPGs before but I decided to get it and surprisingly my father said he would pay the monthly subscription fee. He had given up playing games at this point due to work committments but we still had a family Mac for gaming. WoW was my first social experience playing a game and that made it addicting as hell. I began to play with my friends after school for two, three and eventually four or more hours a night. I played it seven days a week and it was almost the only game I played. After almost a year of playing WoW my dad cancelled the account because of my obsession and I was devestated, I literally cried (yes, I was almost 15 at the time lol). I thought my WoW days were over.

A few months later my dad actually let me start my WoW account up again and I got straight back into it with my friends. This WoW gaming went on for a few more years. I eventually reached the level cap up to Cataclysm and had many lower level characters but many of my friends quit and I started having breaks of several months where I wouldn't play.

In 2007 Apple brought out a new iMac with a dual-core processor that allowed you to install Windows. Finally I had a way of playing all the Windows games my friends raved about. I got Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike: Source and we started having CS:S LANs at a local gaming cafe. Crysis also became a favourite of mine. I played many many different games now that I had Windows, most of which were FPSs. I hadn't played any RTS games like StarCraft in a long time and I really missed that style. I found Company of Heroes boring and I loved World in Conflict but it just didn't fill that emptiness that StarCraft had filled.

I started wanting more powerful graphics to play all the latest games and our iMac was getting a bit long in the tooth. In September 2010 I built a new gaming PC. I researched which parts offered the best value for money and shipped all the parts to my house. It was pretty awesome to have my own computer just for gaming. It had a 2.8Ghz i7, 6Gb of DDR3 RAM and two EVGA GTX460 1Gb in SLi which I overclocked. Even now it runs almost any game on max (including Battlefield 3 when just playing the singleplayer). I also made sure to get a nice big Asus 27" 1080p monitor. StarCraft 2 was already out at this point and I had been looking forward to it a lot but I just kind of forgot about it because I had so many other games to play.

Finally in about December 2010 I finally got StarCraft 2 and played through the singleplayer. I absolutely loved the story and it completely lived up to my expectations. I thought they did a great job of modernising the game while still making it a true StarCraft experience. I didn't want modern gameplay like Company of Heroes with sector control and weird economy mechanics. By this point I started to realise that there was a pro multiplayer scene outside Korea and this intrugued me. Since the last time I had played StarCraft 1, I had gotten a lot older and played many multiplayer games so multiplayer was something I actually decided play in StarCraft 2. I went online thinking 'oh I played StarCraft one and I finished the SC2 campign pretty easily, I should make gold league'. Well, I placed bronze and I was a little annoyed. I played about four or five ladder games, the first of which I turtled until I had a huge amount of reapers and then proceeded to be thrashed. Then I went for mass battlecruisers and thors (they're strong units, right?). That actually won me two games but this was in the depths of bronze league after all. Getting fed up with being terrible, I stopped playing.

I don't quite remember why, but one day I was searching on the internet about the StarCraft 2 pro scene even though I wasn't playing the game anymore. I came across an article about how to improve at the multiplayer and it was then that I discovered Day[9]. I am so glad that I did, I owe him so much and I doubt I would be playing SC2 now if it wasn't for his daily. It was then that I started to grasp the game and understand how to actually play it. This marked the start of my SC2 multiplayer journey, the rest will be in my next blog post. If you got this far, thanks for reading.