Introducing Humble Bundle Acquisitions: Live!

This weekend my wife and I were talking about The Future. Long story short, I'm going to start a regularly scheduled show on my stream! This show will be Tuesday and Thursday evenings from 8pm to 10pm (Mountain time. That's 7pm to 9pm Pacific). The format of the show will be as follows.

Tuesday: I will pick a game that I received through a Humble Bundle and start playing it on my stream. I will have made an effort to go into it as blind as I can without any prior knowledge or opinions about the game. I'll provide as much charming commentary and observation as possible. Audience participation is greatly encouraged.

Wednesday: I'll do my homework about the game. Who made it? How was it received critically? Did it win any awards? Were there any scandals in production or afterward?

Thursday: We'll dive into the game for another two hours, this time armed with all kinds of context. I will again provide as much charming commentary and observation as possible. Audience participation will again be greatly encouraged.

Friday/Saturday: I'll write up an analysis/review of the game and put it here on the site.

Fun, right!? I'm very excited to get started, and Humble Indie Bundle 11 was released this morning. We're going live with Antichamber tonight! See you then! :D

Positive Experience #5

Sorry I'm late on this one. 20 (or maybe 10) min starting  now.

So it's been a really exciting month. We had two Thanksgivings, one with my sisters and their families up in Cow Town, and another with my wife's mother's parents and some uncles/aunts/cousins. Both had fantastic food. Aubrey's maternal grandparents are totally "do-it-yourself" types to an extreme degree (even though they're both super old and poor and have medical problems), and wouldn't even give us a food assignment for dinner. So we bought them a couple little presents and surprised them. That was really nice. It always feel good to help people who don't generally get much in return.

Also, I totally landed a job! It's for inthinc doing tech support. The pay's good and it's fully benefited  Yay! I feel like such an adult suddenly. From the sound of it, there's room to go up in the company as well, or at least sideways, once I get some experience and get farther along in my degree. I can't say just how lucky I feel about that. It's even in a nice part of town too. I took Aubrey to see the building after church today and there was even a little canal with ducks that I hadn't noticed before. Seriously, my workplace has a duck stream. I'm going to miss the library a lot. There were a bunch of cool people there and the benefits of working at a library are many. I think they'll still let me get away with fines but I don't think I should try to stretch it too much. I told my boss I was looking for other work a couple months ago, so it wasn't a surprise when I was leaving. But it was a little short notice for my last day. I feel a little bad about that.

Things are going well in Starcraftiness too. I'm currently on an 8-game winning streak and hopefully I'll be out of bronze soon. I've been getting a lot better but I psych myself out a little bit. The group I've been casting in Spanish for seems to have taking a liking to me too, so once I submit some casts in English I'll be able to cast for them in English too. Might even be able to make some moneys off of it one day when we get enough viewers. Sweet! Also in Starcraft streaming, I totally met a bunch of guys from Norway that play the Heart of the Swarm beta every morning (my time) that are fun to talk to/play with. Work's going to throw a wrench in that, but I'm sure I'll still see them around.

As a result of the Spanish casting, my Spanish has gotten much much better. I still forgot a lot of easy words. but things are much more fluid. I'm trying to stay sharp with that. I was hired at my new job in part for the Spanish skills (thanks mission and Starcraft!) so I've been reading "The Hobbit" in Spanish again to pick up more words and to get ready for the movie when it comes out. (Already got tickets!) I should probably try to watch some movies or something too to try and get better at understanding dialects. Unfortunately, most Spanish language TV we get here are Mexican news and soap operas...those don't really hold my attention. I guess Disney movies are all translated though, I should get out a new dvd's and watch them in Spanish. That wouldn't be bad at all!

Positive Experience #4

Got it!

I was asked to cast some of the first matches for Six Pool Gaming's tournament! In Spanish! Ha! I love that it's in Spanish. I start tomorrow. Maybe one day I'll work my way up to English, but Spanish is still a lot of fun. I'll post a link when it's showtime. I'm really grateful that they're giving me a shot.

Speaking of grateful, I am so glad the presidential election is finally over here in America. It's just so long and drawn out and exhausting. I'm going to have to go through Facebook now and unblock all of the people who couldn't keep it nice over the past several months. My Dad's really lucky he didn't get blocked. He wouldn't be able to get away with that stuff on my Feed if he were anyone else. Anyway, I'm super glad it's over. Maybe now we can all just try to get along. I'm being optimistic there, but I really wish that were the way it worked. All we can do is try to find what is helpful for the most people. If people tried to see what they had in common with each other and actually treat other people like people, I think we would have a lot less problems.

Anyway, back to Starcraft. I cast my first series of games in Spanish today. It was a blast! I'm still in the process of learning the names for everything but it shouldn't be too bad. I'm not 100% sure that I'm ready for the matches tomorrow because I can't get my normal account to run in a Spanish version of the game. Blizzard's language support is apparently known for being kind of sucky, but I don't want to pay for another copy of the game. That would be kind of awful. Either way, I'm excited for my first real gig casting Starcraft matches. It should be a party.

Imma cut this post short so I can put in a few links. I hope everyone is having a great week and that we can all try to stay positive.

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Here's the games I did in Spanish. I was streaming it as part of my ReHacked series so all the technical goofs are still in there. Feedback is always appreciated!

ReHacked Valencia 2012

I haven't heard anything yet but I'm pretty sure I didn't get picked for the IPL contest. That's okay though. I totally get why I didn't get picked (I started the day of the announcement) but I'm not going to let that get me down at all. I just need to keep on playing and keep on casting. 

Speaking of casting, I've been watching MLG Dallas over the weekend and watching the casters and I had an idea. Casting a full on tournament is pretty hard work. There's time between matches they have to fill and everything's live and if the caster straight screws something up they have to save face and can't restart the video and try again. So I've decided that I'm going to cast a major tournament. The tournament is going to be DreamHack Valencia 2012. I know this already happened a couple months ago, but I didn't watch any of it and DreamHack made all of the replays for the entire event available for download (like a bunch of sweethearts!) So starting at the round of 32 I'm going to go through the entire tournament match by match until the finals as if it were live and unfolding as I watch them over the course of several weeks. And that I was the only person there to commentate. That could totally happen. 

This will (hopefully) give me a more realistic tournament-style experience. I'll be taking some notes to remember what each player did during their matches as well as what maps they were on to help me with commentary. This will hopefully help me to be more cohesive through the entire event. I'll be doing it live on my Twitch channel and I might even have my webcam on and dress up as if I were at a real event. That's to be determined. 

All in all I think it'll be a lot of fun and I think it will be a great learning experience. Tournaments generally have two people watching together (and a third person controlling the observer camera) so I'll really have my work cut out for me trying to get it all done myself. I feel up to the challenge, however. Frankly though, if anyone wants to join me and try to co-cast it some we might be able to figure something out with Skype. That would be fun too.

I'll get started on Monday. I'll tweet when I get started (@mikeysce) and it'll be on my Twitch channel. I'll also edit them into match-by-match videos for YouTube. Links to all of those pages on are the sidebar. See you there!

MLGSCE is Official!

I've finally done it! I've cast six professional level game and uploaded the videos to my YouTube page. I'll embed the one I think is best here. I was super nervous doing this at first but I felt like I was just getting better and better as I went. Not that hard after all!

Last day for DOTA 2

Hey. Today's the last day to register for the DOTA 2 giveaway. You MUST have signed up using the widget to qualify. Click anywhere on this first paragraph for details. 

Secondly, I casted my first two pro Starcraft 2 games. There is definitely room for improvement. But I'll keep it up. You can check them out on my YouTube channel. Feel free to comment if you had any constructive feedback.

Thirdly, remember when I was all like, "I'm making a video game plan and I'm sticking to it!" That's been going pretty well so far. Granted, I decided to switch back to Zerg this morning because it's just better. But other than that things have been going pretty smoothly.

Feeling Ambitious!

I'm going to apply for this: IPL Starcraft II Caster Search Contest!

Sure, it's a long, long shot. But hey, I gotta start trying at some point, right? I'll be trying to put together a good application package over the next couple days and I'll keep you updated! Maybe we can at least get some more readers for the blog, right?

Also, news broke today that Heart of the Swarm will have leveling and cosmetic rewards incorporated into the ladder system. Exciting! Now let's hope that they put in separate ladder ranks for each race. So it's not all wonky with matchmaking if you want to change things up. That would make me happy.

Finally, DON'T FORGET about the DOTA 2 giveaway! More info here!

Mike's Starcraft Story

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an Alaskan in need of anything at all must be in want of a Costco. Seriously. They really do. When I was growing up we looked forward to going to Costco more than we did the mall (this is still true for me). We even got a lot of our clothes there. And I definitely bought all my computer games at Costco.

This is The Costco of my youth. Google Street View will
get you right into the parking lot!

In the early summer of 1998, I began to hear rumors of two new games. Unreal and Starcraft. I was a little more excited about Unreal because I the graphics were supposed to be amazingly awesome. Starcraft looked cool too, but I already had Warcraft 2 and Red Alert and I figured it couldn't possibly be better than those.

I was fortunate enough to have a friend with both of them. I went over and we tried them out. Unreal was, just like I expected, completely awesome. The guns all did more than one thing. And you could aim up and down, in addition to left and right. Then we tried out Starcraft.

Starcraft blew my mind. The three races were fundamentally different from each other. The campaign was full voiced acted with a dramatic storyline. The Terrans were funny, the Protoss were mysterious, and the Zerg were scary. There was blood! When you used nukes, they actually blew things up! (This was Red Alert's major downfall.) To the point: I had to have this game. My friend let me borrow it (what a pal!)  so I could show it to my brother or something. And we proceeded to play the crap out of it for about a week. We went all the way through the storyline, cheated like crazy in skirmishes against the AI, and I even gave it a whirl online. I got my butt handed to me, of course, and we only had one phone line at the time so that complicated things a little. Then Friend wanted it back. Boo.

So my brother, Dave, and I hatched a plan. We'd save all our money and the next time we went to Costco he would get Unreal and I would get Starcraft. Somehow this happened pretty quickly. I'm not sure how we ended up with $80 together but I distinctly remember us having a budgeting summit where we had all of our money (and all the money we could find) lined up in piles on our bedroom floor. Now that I think about it, I think I was a little short and Dave gave me another $5 or so. That's a good brother for you. A few days later, we heard the magic words: "We have to go to Costco."

We went. I had done my homework too. There were three different covers for Starcraft, one of each race. There also appeared to be a re-release of some kind because the version with the three different races was rated M, while the originals (of just the Protoss cover) were rated Teen. I definitely had to get the Teen one. I was 11 at the time, so I guess I wasn't going to try and get away with any more than I had to. Game ratings were so new then I don't think my parents even knew to look. Either way, I got the Teen rated Protoss box, Dave got Unreal, we paid, ate Costco pizza (why wouldn't you?) and we headed for home!

I recall few drives home from Costco more joyous than that one. We both had awesome games in tow and each had a good manual with lots of info in them. We read our own manuals, switched, and then switched back. It was the best of times.

That's when things started going downhill.

Unreal, it turns out, wouldn't run on our computer because it didn't have enough RAM or something. That sucked. Then, two days later, my mom overheard Arcturus Mengsk swearing up a storm during a campaign mission and she said I had to return it! CURSE YOU MENGSK! It got worse from there. Mom then mobilized The Mom Grapevine and pretty soon all the moms in our neighborhood knew that Starcraft had cussing in it and all the kids were getting in trouble. I didn't take too much flak for it in the end, but it was sad knowing that I had blown it for everyone.

I was now Starcraftless. At the beginning of the next year, I heard about Brood War coming out but didn't get to play it until three years later (at that same friend's house). I wasn't even aware of the pro scene or anything. And I spent a few years being obsessed with the Final Fantasy series. But that nostalgic feeling came back when I heard that a Starcraft 2 was approaching. Naturally, I pirated it off the internet and playing through the campaign again. It...hadn't aged well. Still awesome, but pretty ugly by 2008.

Starcraft 2 happened a couple years later and I bought it the first week it came out. Thinking back, I should have sprung for the collector's edition, but whatever. After a few weeks of playing the campaign and messing around against the computer, I decided to go online and see if I could get some tips. I found a lot of tips. I also found the infamous Husky, The Starcast, Day[9], Teamliquid, and the Global Starcraft League. This was when Starcraft became much more than a game to me. It was a skill and an art with a huge community of players and followers. For lack of a better word: it's a sport. The first computer game to make eSports a real thing in my mind. The first sport I ever really cared to follow and be a part of.

Sure, I've had some long spans of time between actually playing the game and I'm still in Bronze league, but I've finally decided on one race and I'm determined to start climbing that ladder! I bought the digital edition of Starcraft with Brood War a few months ago to finally make good on it (it's even uglier after playing SC2). I even wrote a critique of it for a term paper last year. I am psyched for Heart of the Swarm and want to get into some casting once I have some better game understanding. There's totally some wing places near my apartment where I'm hoping to get some BarCrafts going in the next couple months. Watch for it on this blog!

Also, should you come by a Heart of the Swarm beta key, feel free to send it my way.

Mike Likes Games: Starcraft Edition

The times are a changing!

I've decided to take this blog in a new direction. I'm still going to do (semi) regular posts about whatever I feel like. However, I've also decided to really buckle down on Starcraft 2 and start laddering more seriously as well as to start casting pro games! I'm really excited about it. Kind of nervous, yes, becuase I know my game knowledge isn't exactly Artosis level, but I've been wanting to get more involved with the Starcraft community because it is awesome. I'm feeling brave right now, so it's now or never.

If you don't know much/anything about Starcraft, just check out this video. If you think this all just sounds kind of dumb, you should totally watch this video when you have some time.

In order to be a little more clear/recognizable, I've changed (or acquired) everything related to MikeySCE, Mikey:Starcraft Edition. So I've got the Twitch.tv stream, the Twitter, the YouTube channel, mikeysce@gmail.com, and the domain! This site is now accessible through mikelikesgames.blogspot.com as well as mikeysce.com. How fancy! I don't have any sweet content to share at the moment because I've still had to go to class and do homework this week. But I'm going to pull some replays off the internets and start casting this weekend. The first few (or several) will probably be pretty rough but I'm optimistic and I think it'll be a good time! Be sure to subscribe to my YouTube, Twitch, and Twitter to keep up with new content and don't be shy about leaving feedback at the new official email (again, mikeysce@gmail.com).

Furthermore, I'm going to see if I can spruce the design of the blog up a little. That might only mean changing the backdrop and some of the colors, but it means that there are more changes coming to the site. Tell all your friends!

Speaking of casting and your friends, let me know if you have any experience with shoutcasting or even just some pointers. I could use them.