BlizzCon 2008 - Anaheim Convention Center

Oh man, what an experience.  I'm so glad I went and at the same time curse it 'cause now I want to buy Starcraft II and Diablo III (seriously guys, when was the last time you heard me buy a PC game?)  BlizzCon 2008 is an event held by Blizzard Entertainment (Known for the creation of Starcraft, Warcraft, and Diablo) that allows the fans to gather and try out the newest games, listen to the panel and ask questions, meet your WoW buddies in real life, get exclusive items and prizes, and buy a whole bunch of hardcore gaming products.  I'll make brief summaries of the highlights at BlizzCon so that you know why I had so much fun.

StarCraft II

Starcraft, I'd say, is one of the best PC games I've ever played throughout my gaming life thus far.  It has a intuitive gameplay that allows a steady flow of action and strategy.  And the one thing that got me super hooked onto the game in my early years of high school was the map making program it came along with it.  I used to stay up on nights working on a map that I'd play with Danny the following weekend.  It pretty much started my real progress in making videogames.

Anyways, the demo had a 20 min time limit, and during that time I remembered that I always sucked at Starcraft because the computer rushed up and destroyed several of my supply depots.  I started picking up the pace after a while and man, such beautiful graphics and much nostalgia while I was playing.  They used a lot of the same voice acting as well as the music, though that may change when the final game comes out.  The animation for each unit is much more detailed, so it looks like they move faster.  There are new units and implementations in the game, and so the bar on raising new strategies just went up.  I can't wait to start making maps again, and since I've gotten so much better in design and game concept, I'll be making better maps than I did before.

Diablo III

I gotta say, it's been a while since a good multi-player co-op game has been out for a while.  When I arrived at BlizzCon, the opening cermony revealed the "Wizard" class of Diablo III.  She kicks butt, seriously!  Possessing the skills of fire, ice, and lightning and wrecking havoc upon the legions of enemies that come your way is such a relaxing activity.  I played it with Jimmy and his two cousins the second time I got in line on a co-op campaign.  It might seem a bit like a button mashing game at some point, but strategy and communication will be required for harder enemies.  This is another game I'm considering of buying (if not, I'll just play LAN with my friends).

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

I wasn't super excited about this one since I'm not even currently playing WoW; however, I still went ahead and tried it.  I had noooooo idea what I was doing since I was running around getting killed by npcs and other testing players around me.  I died so many times that my weapon and armor broke and all I could do was punch things (which got me murdered by various beasts).  I managed to somehow kill one certain hunter who kept shooting me and running away when I was randomly pressing my hotkeys.  To make all you WoW players jealous, I was trying out the Death Knight as my character, bwahahaha.  Not much I can say except that he has some interesting effects on players when using certain skills.

Starcraft/Warcraft Tournament

I didn't get to watch the WoW tournaments (which I would have loved to see, WoW matches are pretty fun to watch), but I did get to watch the Starcraft and Warcraft III: Frozen Throne tourneys.  They were amazing matches with all the pros from around the world competing for the $25,000 prize.  All of them exposing the craziest techniques and blinding speed of gameplay that seemed beyond human comprehension.  The Starcraft match was very interesting in terms of how each player utilized each unit and used different strategies against different opponents.  In the end, the player who won the finals was as Zerg player, and he was in full control of the game the whole way (those crazy pro zerg players....).  What was cool was the interview they had with the winner, as many of the competitors came from Korea, they all needed translators to help them out.  The winner, "Savior", had a small speech at the end of his interview on thanking his english speaking fans by SPEAKING in english and ending it by saying "and I will come back next year to destroy my competitors".  It blew the crowd away.  The Warcraft III match was more exciting to me and I was a lot more into it, even though I never played the real Warcraft III game (only DotA).  The finalist were Lyn (21 yo Jun Park) from Korea vs. Lucifron (16 yo Pedro Moreno Duran).  I gotta say, it was a pretty close match and I saw some of the craziest skills put into motion by both players.  Lyn was fast and unresting while Lucifron was relaxed and careful in his decisions.  Lyn had lost to Lucifron during the semi-finals and brought Lyn to the lower bracket; however, he worked his way back into the finals and won after 5 straight games played with 1 loss in between.  It was an astounding match and to make it all the better, I got to take a picture with him and the commentator for the tournament:

Trenton: omg, I'm touching a gaming god~~~~~~~~~XD