Far From Neutral Notions - Philippine politics, culture and stuff

When you’ve been waiting TEN YEARS for this game like I have, you’ll understand why I came out of hiding just to post this.

To give you a glimpse of how badly I want this game, consider this: the original Starcraft is the only game I bought legally. I was in college, barely making do with my allowance, and I shelled out PHP 1,700 to get the original game, with the shirt, cap and mug. I still have the manual and the tech tree foldout. A decade and countless clones later, it is still the best real-time strategy game ever made. And now Starcraft II is here!

Hell, it’s about time.

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It went by so fast, but this weekend has been one of the most eventful, personally, in my recent memory — which, truth be told, isn’t all that good anyway. I’m kinda like Dory from Finding Nemo, only I forget stuff after a few days rather than after a few minutes. So just to pinch myself and make sure it really happened, I’ll recap:

Saturday

With Allan back in Manila, the troika of Czarelle, Allan and myself is once more complete, and we decided to cap the event by hanging out at Baang Coffee at Tomas Morato. Along the way, I met ran into Rome Jorge, the guy singularly responsible — by sheer example — for inspiring me to get into not only desgin, but citizen journalism as well. For those who don’t know him, he’s the man behind KaKosa.com and Hanep-Designs.com (both now defunct, but he says he’s working on getting them back up), and was a founding member (I think) of Philweavers.net, the premiere Pinoy web design community.

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To me, the villain is what truly makes or breaks a role playing game. They don’t need to be bad-ass mofos, or even the final boss, but they need to be interesting. They need to get under your skin. They’re the ones you either want dead or on your side. When you can actually hear the villain’s maniacal laughter in your head, when you lose sleep worrying about what he will do, when you not only hate him but understand him, you have a great villain.
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So Dan and I were playing this game right, and the two of us were neck and neck in the standings (I was ranked 15th and he was in the low 20’s at the time), and he walks up to me and says, “Wanna form a guild?” I’ve never been part of a guild before, so I say “yeah, count me in!” And so Team Bahala Na was formed, by two bored web designers, and lo and behold, after a couple of days we were at the top of the standings. Sweet.

If you have lots of time to kill and are into the fantasy-type MMOGs, sign up and play; it’s free, text-based so there’s no download, unobtrusive, and fun once you really start to feel for your character

Or just click on the link to give me some extra gold for that spankin’ new Ring of Divinity 5 I’ve had my heart set on

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