Triple Click - StarCraft II Has Aged Well

Episode Date: August 24, 2023

Jason, Kirk, and Maddy have played through all of StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void, a game that has aged quite well. They talk about multitasking, the impact of MOBAs on RTS games, and a very epic game of tug-of-war.One More Thing:Kirk: The Afterparty S2Maddy: Asteroid City (2023)Jason: Traffic (by Ben Smith)LINKS:Support Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinBuy Triple Click Merch: https://maxfunstore.com/search?q=triple+click&options%5Bprefix%5D=lastJoin the Triple Click Discord: http://discord.gg/tripleclickpodTriple Click Ethics Policy: https://maximumfun.org/triple-click-ethics-policy/ Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/jointripleclick 🚀  SUPPORT TRIPLE CLICK:Join Maximum Fun | Buy TC Merch💬 JOIN THE TRIPLE CLICK DISCORD🎮 Triple Click Ethics Policy📱 SOCIALS | @tripleclickpodInstagram | YouTube | TikTok | Twitch

A Zerg, a Terran, and a protas all walk into a bar. Bartender looks at the protas and says, why the no face? Then he looks at the Zerg and says, and why is he in such a rush? Welcome to Triple Click, where we sometimes have to apologize for our intro jokes. This week, we return to StarCraft 2 with lots more to say after finishing the campaign for Legacy of the Void. So let's talk real-time strategy, shall we? I'm Kirk Hamilton.

I'm Maddie-Meyers. And I'm Jason Shrier. Hello. Hello. Welcome back for another episode. It is us. Entering the void. We are.

We're entering the void. Re-entering the void. I thought the void was gone because we're just discussing the legacy of the void. That's a great point. That's true. That's true. We're talking about all of the many ways that the void informs our current lives. The legacy of the void.

That's what we're talking about this week. But before that, you all know the deal. We are a totally listener-supported podcast, which means that listeners like you are the reason that we're able to do this. thing every week. And it's the only way that we make money off of the show. We really, really appreciate all of the wonderful Maximum Fund members who support the creation of this show. And if you would like to join their ranks, you can go to Maximumfund.org slash join to become a member. And if you do that, you will be a member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network, which is a cool thing on its own and also means you get all kinds of bonus episodes from every Maximum Fun show. There's a ton of them.

there's like all these great comedy shows, shows about movies, shows with real bonafide celebrities on them, all kinds of things. And you get bonus episodes for them. And of course, you get monthly bonus episodes from us, including, geez, I don't even know where to begin. 30-something episodes that we've recorded so far. I always just remember the Call of Duty Modern Warfare episodes. I don't know why. That's the one that always comes to mind. Yeah, it was a while ago, but that was a memorable one where Jason had not played Modern Warfare, Call of Duty for Modern Warfare.

Fair. So we talk about video games, we talk about TV shows. The next one that we're going to record is going to be about the legend of Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom. It'll be a little bit later. It'll run a little bit into September because we have some exciting scheduling things going on in all of our lives right now that we're working around. But it'll be worth the wait. It's going to be a lot of fun. So that's maximum fun.org slash join to become a member. Thanks so much for supporting the creation of this show. All right, Jason Schreier. What are we talking about this week? This week we are talking about StarCraft 2 Legacy of the Void, a game we have all been playing as part of our ongoing predictions bet extravaganza. Short version is Maddie and I tied a bet and we each got to pick games that we would play this year earlier in the year. We played perfect dark and discussed it as per Maddie's selection. And now we are playing StarCraft 2. Really, we've all played StarCraft 2 Legacy of the Void.

It's true. We've all beaten it. He played through the campaign and played a little bit of multiplayer. Played the epilogue, prolog and epilogue. Kirk didn't really play multiplayer. It was really just me. No, he did. He just kind of watched.

He was kind of there. Remember? Okay, hold on. Listen, Kirk and I both played against Jason. That's true. We all played a multiplayer match together, and we severely handicapped Jason in order to make it a fair match. That was honestly so fun that it kind of made me want to do it again.

But there's so many other things we could stream together that I feel like the competition is fierce. But someday we will again. Anyway, let's talk about it. So now that we've all beaten, really we're going to focus on the game as a whole. Look at it holistically. We're going to talk about the campaign. So we will be getting into spoilers for StarCraft 2 Legacy of the Voy, just as a warning. Spoilers.

out there has been waiting, waiting eagerly to play this game. We will be talking about the story. What's gonna happen in Kerrigan? And the Raider and The Void. And the Void. And yeah, and we're gonna be going through it. So let's go around a little bit. Kirk, why don't you start?

I'm curious as to like kind of overall thoughts now that you guys have completed the entire legacy of the Void campaign. What do you think of it? What do you think of StarCraft 2 in general? What's your take? I think this game is really interesting and feels more like a snapshot of a moment in time than I was expecting. Even though it's, you know, it still has this vitality to it. It still feels like a really exciting competitive game.

Came out in November 2015, for what it's right? Right, 2015. And even then, I would say it maybe felt a little bit past the time when this type of game was center stage. So the first StarCraft. StarCraft 2 really came out in 2010, July of 2012. doesn't take. This is the, I guess, second expansion or third entry in the series, which was 2015. So, yes, you were correct at that point. StarCraft 2 had been in existence and an esport and played competitively for five years at that point. Right. And isn't there even

kind of an argument that StarCraft 2 in its entirety was a little bit past the peak moment of real-time strategy? A hundred percent. Unfortunately, yep. Yeah. Especially the rise of MoBas also happened very shortly after Wings of Liberty came out. I feel like over the course of these campaigns, that was when we kind of saw that happen. So yeah, I think it's hard for me to not think about Baldersgate 3 as I play this game as well. Of course. Only because the real time versus turn-based juxtaposition is just so strong between those two games. And it's really interesting that the biggest game, the PC game that everyone wants to talk about now in 2023 is a turn-based game where for so long real-time strategy and real-time games were dominant and became dominant, in part

because of the competitive scene and because you can play them. You know, they require so much more skill that they're kind of more exciting and more engaging competitive experience. So playing this game, it just really, it really feels like a different time in gaming to me just from a design perspective and as a, from an experience perspective, like from the perspective of the experience that I have when I play it. but it's also really charming and that's just mechanically.

Narratively there's a lot more that we can say too. I think the narrative is, it's really funny jumping into the deep end, I guess, of the narrative of a game like this. But I enjoyed my time with them a lot. Jumping into the third entry in the trilogy. I mean, even if you had played the first two games, the Prochow stuff is always pretty dense

with proper nouns and exposition. And it's, it can be a tough hang, the story if you're not like full on. like embracing the Starcraft stuff. Maddie, to your point, not only did the rise of mobas really happen, like you said, between Wings of Liberty

and the release of Legacy of the Void, it also had a big influence on the campaign design of both Heart of the Swarm, the 2013 Zerg expansion, and also this in that in both this and Heart of the Swarm, even more so in Heart of the Swarm, you control hero characters

you have the kind of the MoBA set up with the QWE, the specials, and stuff, especially like the four abilities. You could trace that lineage all the way back to Warcraft 3, but still, it feels especially mobile like when you're doing it. There's one mission in Legacy of the Void where you're controlling both Alarack and Kerrigan, and it's kind of like a little moba-ish experience, although there are no other armies or anything like that.

But yeah, it's very, you can feel the influence here. And also you can feel at that point, even when this came out, that like real-time strategy games were getting kind of usurped by mobas and other genres. So yes, it really does feel like a kind of a moment frozen in time. Also, a fun fact, Legacy of the Void came out on the same day as Fallout 4. Just a little piece of trivia. That might be relevant for a future topic on this podcast. It might be. Yeah, you know, it's funny you mentioned that mission, Jason, because I was streaming the game to some friends and that was the exact mission where they were like, did this game come out before mobas or after movas because this is looking so much like a mova right now and we had to do some googling to kind of try to figure out exactly when and it all kind of happened at the same time but yeah you can really sense the strain on the game and some of these creative campaign missions where they kind of want it to feel like an adventure game where you're controlling just one character but then have the big epic scale of controlling entire armies and you know click click click clicking and you know click click

and doing all the StarCraft 2 of it all while still having that individuated story between all the hero characters. I think that it masters that tension pretty well, and it's almost too bad that I think a lot of people had the experience that I did and that I think Kirk did, where I played Wings of Liberty,

I was really excited to play the next two campaigns, and then I completely forgot about them. Like, they came out. I just didn't play them. So I've been very happy with it, even though it does kind of feel like something that should have come out in 2010 and it feels like a snapshot of another time. I'm so glad that this bet got us all to play it

because I had such a fantastic time with it and it felt like closing the loop on a story that I had really enjoyed. And I actually kind of want to go play Heart of the Swarm now because I had played Wings of Liberty and now I've played Legacy of the Void. So why not complete the trilogy in the completely wrong order and complete StarCraft 2? Yeah, Heart of the Swarm is really cool and it's got a different sort of spin because you're kind of you're upgrading Kerrigan over time and you control her and most of the missions. Yeah, she's so cool. And that's pretty cool. Yeah,

that is something about Heart of the Swarm that I had remembered from having played it that you have Kerrigan on the field in, I don't know about every mission, but a lot of the missions. And there's that even stronger hero focus that I was actually expecting more of in Legacy of the Void since it came

next. And like we've both said or we've all said, there was that move toward hero-based games happening already. Yeah, I don't know. I think that mission, the mission you referenced, Jason, where Alarach and Kerrigan are down, I don't remember where exactly. Did I say Artaanus? Oh, sorry, Artax. Yeah, you said Alarac, but yeah, it's my fault. Didn't quite sound right. Artanis, who can remember all the names. Yeah, why did we get that wrong? What? It's so obviously Artan. Artanis, the extremely memorable faceless man.

It's not. and Kerrigan are having their little adventure together. It looks like sort of an uncharted thing, right? Like some sort of an action-adventure sequence. They even Kerrigan boosts our tennis. Right. We have to open this door, so-and-so use your special ability to go over there. They're exactly like Joel and Ellie.

It's the same story, B for B. And really, as emotionally affecting really is that, too. But you can see them wanting to do more of that, kind of storytelling, which is an interesting additional wrinkle to the way that this game reflects its place in a changing games industry, because it's not just that they're sort of embracing the MoBA style of game design where you're controlling a single character and you're putting all of your strategic thinking into that one character. There's also just a different kind of storytelling that happens in a game where two people are alone in a big, exciting, weird

place, exploring it and moving from challenge to challenge while talking to one another. And that's just not the kind of story that a real-time strategy isometric view of game is able to tell. It just is an awkward fit. It doesn't really work in that level either. Like, it's fun to see them trying to do it. It's like watching a dog stand up on its hind legs and, you know, walk up to a takeout order at a restaurant. And it's funny because you're watching a thing that doesn't normally do a thing, do that thing.

do that thing. But it's not a totally natural fit. I found it charming but not actually all that effective. And it kind of made me want to play a game about these characters that is actually designed to function as that kind of a game, like a more narrative-focused action adventure game. Yeah, man. Okay, there's a lot of interesting context here. So back in the StarCraft one day is the StarCraft and Brutwar, there were these missions called Hero missions where instead it would kind of shake up the formula a little bit. Most of the time you would be building a base and training an army and doing the kind of traditional RTS mechanics. But every once in a while, you would be controlling Rainer and a small squad,

and you'd have to survive your way through this base full of Zurich enemies or whatever, or you would just be Zarutuel, and you have to zip around, kind of like in the prologue of this game. And those were kind of cool. And then StarCraft II took things further, and I think one of the main reasons for that is that they have this super robust map editor where they could play around an experiment in all sorts of ways. And also part of the idea of this whole experience,

The StarCraft 2 experience is like we want multiplayer to be super traditional. And then with single player, we can play around. And you'll notice in Legacy of the Void, all of the games, all three of the different StarCraft 2 modules have kind of different upgrades you can experiment with. You can equip units with different things. In Heart of the Swarm, you can mutate your zirglings and mainlings into different strains and have them perform in different ways. And this you can choose up to three of each type of unit. like you can choose between three different variations on it. I love that.

It's super cool. And what they did was they actually added pretty much every unit that was in Brood War that had been cut for StarCraft 2 like Corsairs and Revers and all this other stuff that they just tossed into this game. And then the mechanics of each mission, I think, are very similar. And then they're like, you know what? Screw it. Let's experiment.

Let's play around with as many different variations and mechanics as possible. And man, if you guys want to explore some real crazy stuff, there is. a set of mission packs called Nova Covert Ops that came out. I've heard of this. After StarCraft 2 Legacy of the Void. And this is kind of like them experimenting Team 1 at Blizzard, which is the team that made StarCraft. Their development teams of Blizzard are like Team 1, Team 2, Team 3, et cetera.

Team 1, they were trying to figure out. They were like, hey, what are we going to do? After this, we haven't really gotten a new RTS greenlit or anything like that. We're just going to have a year of like experimenting with DLC stuff. and they came out with these mission packs. There are nine of them revolving around Nova, the ghost hero. And they basically feel like StarCraft Ghost, that old canceled game, was supposed to feel. Because you're going around as Nova.

There's one mission where you, like, have to infiltrate a base. And it's like you're playing splinter cell. Like, you can go around and switch your gear from, like, covert gear to, like, marauder gear and, like, a flamethrower or whatever. It's crazy. There's one mission, man, you guys, your minds will be blown. There's one mission where you're on a ghost and you are racing and it is a side-scroller racing mission. I shouldn't say racing. It's more of like, you know those old arcade games like turtles, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and stuff on the NES and Super NES when sometimes you'd get into one of those modes.

I'm thinking specifically of turtles in time. And sometimes you'd be on a vehicle and you'd have to like whack away at enemies as you ran. Like as you as you like skateboarded or whatever, this is that. And it's all sorts of crazy stuff like that. So check those out if you want some really wild experiments. But yeah, to your point, Kirk, I mean, it's trying a lot of new things. And I think that was one of the goals. And obviously, hit or miss as to whether they accomplished it.

But it's fun to see and it's fun to play, at least. Yeah. Yeah, no, I totally agree. To call out a couple of hits, since I think that the narrative mission, it's not really meant to be that mechanically complex. And it's fine that it's not super successful at doing what it's kind of trying to do. But some of the other experiments are really cool. A couple that I really liked.

One is where you're on a moving platform and your base is moving through a sort of a series of stops. So there are like buttons that you power up and then you're sliding left and right. And it's fairly open-ended. I kind of just went straight through it in a fairly straight line. But it looked to me like there were a lot of areas on the map that I could have gone and that I just wound up not going. It was a pretty chaotic experience playing through this because you have to use a lot of a lot of aerial units because you're kind of floating in space. I don't remember the narrative, like the reason that we're doing this.

It's like some sort of refueling station or something that we're moving through. I don't remember either. And I was really trying to pay attention. And I have no clue why we were there. But it was so cool to even figure out that that was what we were supposed to do. Because at first, I was like, what the heck? I'm out of minerals. All the guys are really far away.

How am I even supposed to get to them? And then I was like, oh, maybe I'm supposed to hit these huge arrow buttons at the top of the screen that I've been ignoring and confused by what? It's moving my entire platform. This is so freaking awesome. It was a very fun strategic layer to then move your base around and have that be on top of everything else. I was also using a bunch of stalkers and teleporting them around because most of the teleportation was long enough that I could get them to and fro without only relying on air units. And that was pretty fun as well to kind of have them leaping over the gaps, collecting extra minerals, whatever. Very, very fun. There were a lot of missions that were just

creatively designed, could never happen in a multiplayer setting and could only be for the campaign. And that was what made this so special to play was just having those very unique mission styles where it would just be like, okay, all these different kinds of units are attacking from different places, my base is moving around, I'm having to think on the fly. That's just really cool. It's cool. Yeah, there's definitely a feeling of, playing a game made by designers who are at the peak of their powers. They've just been experimenting with this fundamental, this basic template that they started with of a real-time strategy game

where you make a big army and you go stomp the other army and destroy their base. And they've just been asking for so many years at this point, okay, that's the basic setup of the game. What can we do to make it surprising? Or how can we, what can we change? In the case of this level, it's, okay, you have very limited resources and you have to keep moving your base, and the map itself is mobile, so you have control over where it goes.

Another mission that I really, really liked, Jason, you alluded to it in our last episode, where we talked about the first part, kind of the first half of the story, and that's when, I'm going to get the names right, that's when Alarack fights High Lord Malash for control over the Tal de Ream. I've got the Wikipedia page. Classic. I was about to be so impressed, but all right, there you go. To explain this mission, it's really neat.

They do a good job of setting it up beforehand, which is something the cutscenes don't always do, but I value it whenever they do. So you get an explanation from Alarach about what's going to happen. And he's like, well, I have to like challenge this guy, Malash to an honor battle, basically. Arakshir. A rachshir, right. And the way it works is we each sort of can bring our forces to help us, but the two of us are going to be locked in this globe fighting. and we're just going to need support from our armies and that's going to mean like kind of pushing us along a track

and whoever's getting better support is going to be able to win the fight. And hearing that, I was immediately translating that into game mechanics thinking, okay, I got how this is going to work. This is basically a football that I have to push down the field with my team while his team tries to push it back. It's a rugby scrum, I guess. It's kind of a reverse moba. It's like a mobile where you're the army instead of the game.

I like that. Yeah. It's an awesome idea, and it was probably my favorite level of the whole campaign. It was just so cool, so well designed, so logical. Very fun. And very straightforward in a way that sometimes this game isn't. And I really like that. Like you know exactly what you're supposed to be doing.

There's just this globe with these guys in it, and you need to just push it forward. There isn't that sense of, okay, I don't know what's going to happen on the map. I don't know where I'm supposed to be going. I'm kind of scouting out. I'm building up my forces, but I'm not sure what I need. It was a lot clearer. And I think that, yeah, that made for a really fun game. So that gets to a point I wanted to ask you guys about.

So something that I found really interesting about this is that the game really expects you to be doing the sort of multitasking that you would need to be doing to play competitive in StarCrop. Because not only are you having to train your units and worry about resources and stuff, you also are engaging in a lot of missions that have time limits. at the same time as you're going to be attacked. And I played on, I don't remember if I was playing on hard or brutal this time around, but I played on the higher level difficulties. I know you guys played on a little bit lower difficulty, so I don't know if I was being attacked at a more frequent cadence or something like that. But I'm curious, did you guys find it difficult to juggle, like having to go in and

complete your mission objectives while at the same time defending your base and maintaining your economy and building stuff? And did you guys find that it was like, were able to control multiple armies. Did you set up base defenses and then make one big army and use that to go do all the missions and stuff? How did you approach that and how did you guys feel about it? Maddie, you want to start? Sure. So the first mission where I really started to feel the pain personally was Mission 18. I think it's called the host. It's the one where you have to defeat all of those huge kind of diamond-shaped purple gems. And they're infinitely spawning guys. And every time you defeat,

one of those gems, the rest of the guys become stronger who are attacking you. Oh, yeah. Okay. It's not just that. It's sort of in the last 80, 90% of the main campaign. It's like the home stretch, basically. So it makes sense that that's where the game starts to get really hard and really challenging.

That was the first time that I started actually looking up some tutorials because I was like, I'm not going to get through this unless I start using some strategic thinking. Like in addition to managing multiple armies, like Jason was saying, I needed something more than that. I was like, I need to be thinking about what units I'm building and when I'm building them. So I actually want to recommend a guy that I had never seen before. He's probably ridiculously famous, but heck if I know about StarCraft content creators. But his name is Jay Barino plays. And he does a bunch of videos where he just goes through exactly which units he created and what his upgrades were,

like back on the ship for each of the levels. And he does them on normal difficulty and brutal difficulty and everything. And he's like, here's how I did these build orders. They're very clear videos. I loved them. I definitely used some of his recommendations and also just looked at the comments from other people being like, here's my build order. And it really got me back in the zone. I was just like, this is so freaking fun.

It's so challenging. But in such a fun way to be like, oh, there's a lot of different ways to beat this. This person did it this way. These other commenters did it this way. I ended up in that fight building a bunch of colossi, colossuses. They're really big, stompy stalker guys. And that really worked super, super well. And also taking advantage of, of course, Phoenix, how could we forget Phoenix?

Taping him in is the special attack. He is incredibly powerful. Maddie, I'm so glad. After subjecting you to Final Fantasy series, since you could into you. I know, right? This is my speed, Jason. Enjoyed a game that I picked. This is great. This is amazing. Well, I knew I would love it.

As soon as you said it in the bet last year, I was like, oh, that's going to be fine. I'm going to have a great time with this one. But Kirk, what about you? Yeah, I definitely found it pretty difficult. This isn't a type of game that I've ever gotten really good at or spent too much time learning. And there does come a point in a young man's life when he has passed 40 years old and he looks to himself and says, you know what? Maybe I'm not going to get good at this.

There are a limited number of years I have left to master new skills, and real-time strategy games from the 2010s might not be one of those skills. You're not going to spend 10,000 hours playing StarCraft until you've become a master. So I found that the difficulty of this game was interesting because it works across a couple of different levels. I played through a lot of these missions on casual or normal, kind of both. I would play normal if I was really getting worked. I'd switch to casual. Some of the missions later, I'd beat them on casual and would go back and play them on normal.

And I found that it made a really big difference just knowing where everything was going to be coming from. And what units would do the best job of dealing with what enemy sort of techniques and what enemy strategies. So there's a mission, I forget the name of it, but it's near the end where it's just defense. It's like defense against waves of enemies coming from all four corners of the map. It's an incredible mission. It's really exciting. It's another one that lays out the stakes really clearly at the beginning. And as a result, you just know exactly what's going to be demanded of you.

And you know what to expect. I'm like, okay, great. So they're going to attack from one direction. And I'll probably hold that off. And then right as that's ending, they're going to come from another direction. And then at some point, they're going to come from two directions. And then pretty soon at the very end, it's going to be all three. And you're waiting while this timer kind of counts down.

until you're finally clear. So you just have to survive long enough to win the mission. And I found that to be easier, the more I knew which units I should be building. So kind of like what you were saying, Maddie, that like knowing which units to build and where to put them, who I could just kind of leave there, like what kind of towers to put up where?

What's the name of the two types of towers you build in this game? There's like a basic turret. The photon cannon cannon, and then there's the like Talzerim tower or whatever. it's called, I don't know, because that's that the photocan canon for what it's worth is in multiplayer, so it's a standard unit, whereas the other canon thing is not in multiplayer, that's just for single player. Oh really? Oh, interesting. Okay. Because yeah, the tower is really good. And then there's shield batteries also, which you have to. Right,

that's true, I guess. Well, those were actually really important to learn how to use as well on this mission. Those are in multiplayer also. So those you get the hang of, if you, or I guess you can get the hang of in Singapore for multiplayer use. Right, right. So that was something that I had to kind and get my head around was, okay, where do I place the turrets, which have a shorter range, but can, you know, are kind of not going to, like, you can put them up much more inexpensively and have them in the front with the towers behind them and the towers are going to be more useful for longer range of attacks. What actually is the range of each of these units?

And that's just one example. It was true for pretty much every type of unit that I had to build. And with so much going on in a mission like that, you know, three separate fronts that you're defending against where you're losing units kind of all over that. the place. The game is constantly saying, your units are under attack in a way that feels more alarming than it should because, like, of course my units are under attack. That's the idea. Like, you're always going to be under attack. So I did find that reading walkthroughs, actually just read the IGN walkthroughs, which are still up, and were also really helpful just because

they kind of tell you what to expect and give you a couple of tips for, okay, you're going to want to use, you know, this type of unit here, that type of unit there. And a lot of the sort of best practices, especially for defensive strategy, which I found really useful because it would have taken me a long time to figure that stuff out on my own. So did you guys find that you were able to successfully juggle back and forth, like an army and also the base and training units? Like, were you able to do that? Or were you just kind of like lost when you tried to? Winging it? Honestly, I felt myself getting better at it as I went along. And I definitely was significantly improving at just adding more

guys to different groupings. I got used to having certain numbers that corresponded with like my air units versus my ground units and so on. I really got that down. And then what was kind of funny about late in the game switching over to starting to watch J. Barino plays is that he doesn't do any of that at all because I guess he's some kind of freaking super genius who just never has that and just will constantly select his units into. individually just while clicking around the map at lightning speed.

So that was kind of wild to go. I know. He doesn't use hotkeys. He uses hotkeys for certain missions. And for other missions, he just doesn't. And I was just like, I can't believe what I'm saying here. This guy has his buildings on a hotkeys, but his army's not on hotkeys. And he is truly just clicking around the map and selecting certain units.

It's just like a mouse ninja. Wow. Yeah. I mean, for certain battles, like especially that gem battle that I mentioned where your units are actually getting destroyed so quickly. and you're rebuilding them so quickly in order to keep up with demand, essentially. Hot-keying them, I guess, is kind of a waste of time. But, yeah, I mean, it was just sort of interesting to see all the different strategies that are possible.

But, yeah, I certainly got better at using hotkeys. Kirk, did you start hot-keying your buildings after our stream? Yeah, I did. And I still generally just use a sort of a location hotkey where I just go back to my base and that's kind of, like I can get to everything there with my mouse. And because I wasn't playing on anything above normal difficulty, it wasn't that big of a deal if I was moving a little bit slowly. Like I found most of the time that I had more units than I needed,

which is something that I actually find really satisfying in these games. Oh, yeah. Going all the way back to Warcraft too, the way that I always played these real-time strategy games, these Blizzard games, was to just build a huge army and to just overwhelm the enemy with sheer numbers rather than spending too much time fine-tuning and, you know, optimizing my strategy, where I probably didn't need half of the units that I built.

But I like to just have a million zealots, and there's just a ton of zealots, and then they just run in, and there are just so many of them. There's whirlwinding around. That they destroy the enemy. It's funny you say that, because I feel like a lot of the missions in Legacy of Void are designed to prevent that because there's some sort of time limit. Yeah. Like, I was thinking about this.

I was thinking about this when I was doing that one mission where, like, you have to, like escort these things and like I forget what they're called. It's all just nonsense terminology. Like the purifiers or something like yeah, they come out of the ground on short trips and you have to escort them and kills her along the way. And I was thinking about how like if you try to just like turtle, which is what it's called when you just kind of like sit in your base and build up an army and just like defend your place defenses. So you can just build up a massive army and then stomp them up. You wouldn't be able to do that mission because there's a timer and once the things start to move, you have to go defend them. So I feel like, yeah, I feel like these missions specifically

force you to play the game a little bit more the way it was intended to be played. Although, it could be different on casual. I'm actually not sure. No, no, it is. You're correct. And I think that that's true. It pushes you outside of doing that just because that's not really a strategy that'll win a lot of these missions. It's just not what's required. I was mostly talking about how I used to play Warcraft too. Right. And did this change it? Well, that's what I was getting at. Like, did this force you to think differently about the game? So it did, though on the lower difficulties, even on normal, you still kind of can win with sheer numbers. A lot of these missions, your production can outstrip

the casualties that you're taking just because you have a lot of really powerful units. By the end of the game, you've just unlocked a lot of stuff on your unit tree. And so there's just like huge colossi roaming around, just destroying stuff at range. And, you know, I have so many towers that are doing such a good job of defense that I'm kind of just making dudes to make dudes past a certain point on some of the missions. Making dudes to make dudes. The sarcasticity store. Just making dudes to make dudes.

That's the way to play. An RTS. So I found that I wasn't needing to super optimize my army, but at the same time, I had a much better sense of the build rhythm and of just where you want to be placing your resources, which, you know, basically that meta that you're doing, the way that you have to think about your resources, what you're building, and making sure that everything is working at the same time. There are just rhythms to this game that I'm sure when you start playing competitively, or even on really high difficulties in single player, you have to be very attuned, not just to the

rhythms, but to the sort of the amount of energy, the amount of attention that you need to give to any one thing. So you're both like feeling the way that, okay, I know I've got this cooking. It'll be done in a second. I've got to go back and assign those. This is about to be done producing this unit, so I have to assign that again. And you're also aware on a bigger level of, and I'm going to need more of these and I'm going to need not many more of those. So I don't need to worry about that after this last time. You know, you're kind of always thinking of those different rhythms, I suppose, different subdivisions of the bar. Yeah, well, so the thing, it's interesting. Not to get too granular here, but one thing I'll point out is that

if you're just going by location, then what you can't do is you can't have your buildings be training units while you're controlling your army, which is right, which wasn't something I was ever really doing. Right, which is the best way. When you get into harder difficulties, you pretty much have to do that because you're out, your army is doing something. And at the same time, you want to be training probes back in base or you want to be training units back in base. And so, yeah, there is an interesting, an interesting rhythm that you have to pick up on if you're going to get better at the game, which it's totally fine if you want to play casually and you don't. Like I think it's interesting that you guys both had a good time and lower difficulty settings because I actually think it's really cool that the game allows for that and it isn't forcing you

to be this expert level RTS player to have a fun time playing StarCraft. I think that's always been, that approachability has always been one of Blizzard's strong suits as a designer and it's always cool to see. Yeah, the game is really fun on normal and that's pretty much all I did with some exceptions just if I was like, this is pretty easy. And I think that just the fact that that's possible is so great. And even the fact that there are YouTube videos that are still like, here's how to beat the game on normal without that being something that people are making

fun of in the comments, at least not that I saw, is also really cool. Like, there's still people out there who care about that. Also, not to change the topic, but I was kind of curious if you guys had any favorites of the special power-ups that you designate your solarite towards, because I personally, like, any of the, the Airstrike ones. I was like, can I just pick these every time? All I ever want to do is destroy the guys from the air.

There's like that solar one that's like just a huge beam of light that just freaking destroys stuff for a billion years. But it was also very hard for me to get away from using any of the passives because I love having one fewer thing to think about. Like passively collecting the Vespine gas. Yes. The best ability in the world. How could anyone not choose that one?

That's a good one and an interesting type of difficulty modifier because it just removes one thing that you have to think about otherwise. It doesn't really make the game easier in any kind of difficulty damage kind of a way. But it does make the game easier in that there's just less to think about. And I definitely had that turn. Well, it makes the game easier in that you have to like train six fewer probes. Okay, so there's resources and something else. That's true as well. And also it gives you more Vespian from the start so you can train units faster.

So there were times that I found myself short on Vespine and being like, oh, my God, I shouldn't have taken this option. I should have just refined it myself and it would have been better. I do really like the orbital strikes. And I really like the mission. I think it's toward the end where you start to lose functionality on this, the Spear of a Dune. That's what it's called, right? This weapon that you've been coming, I had been coming to rely on and they're like, oh, no. We're losing functionality.

That's classic. Classic. It's classic game design. I have to make do with just my army. the ground. My favorite was always reinforcements that I relied on quite a bit. Classic. You got a pylon and four units with it, which is nice, because then you can also warp in units at the pylon, so very helpful. Yes, which is amazing. It is kind of too bad that you don't get any of those special abilities in multiplayer. I understand it would never work, but

wouldn't be cool if you could just stop balance for you. Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, in a different type of game it could work. It just needed to be, it would need to be balanced. And in multiplayer, I mean, you already have enough to think about in multiplayer. It's true. Like, you don't need another variable on top of that. One of the reasons that MoBas have overtaken RTS games is because you don't have to multitask as much in a Mova. And so there's still like a barrier for entry and a skill level that you have to hit to be good at Mova, but it's not quite the same. You don't have to have the APM of hundreds the way actions per minute, hundreds of actions per minute, way that the best StarCraft two players have.

Yeah. And I also think something like a MoBA or even Overwatch or team shooters like Overwatch are part of what's tapping into that sensation of, oh, my special ability, cool down is ready or even picking out your special abilities. I mean, it becomes picking your characters based on what special abilities they have. But I think that that's naturally so attractive to most people, not just me, to be like, oh, great, now I get to choose my special abilities between each member. mission. I get to think about what they're going to be. And sometimes I would even go back to my

ship again and be like, I'm going to need different special abilities for this mission based on the layout of it now that I've played it and seen what I need. And that's just a very different way to play Starcraft as compared to classic multiplayer missions where everybody has identical everything and you know what everybody has. I mean, maybe you're playing as different races, but you know what they have. You guys should definitely check out. There's this mode called co-op commanders in StarCraft 2. And it's super cool because it's kind of a hybrid between multiplayer and single player in that.

It is multiplayer, but it's PVE. So you and another player are playing against the computer in some sort of mission. And there are a bunch of different types of missions you can do. One is like defend a train or destroy a train or whatever. Another is go kill some waves of enemies or whatever. They're all very similar. But the way it works is you pick a hero,

and it's all the different heroes from the game from Martanis to Phoenix to Alarac, and each of them has a different suite of units and abilities, and you can play around with each of them as you're going through this kind of RTS campaign, this kind of weird custom campaign to complete your objectives, and some of them are bonkers. Like, they experimented with abilities in a way that even the single-player campaign doesn't do. And so those are really fun, and if you want more of Maddie, what you were looking for with that kind of ultimate power experience.

You should check that out a little bit because there's some really fun ones to play around with. The only annoying thing is that to unlock, well, some of them you have to buy, some of the characters you have to buy. And then to unlock all of the powers for each character, you have to level them up by continuing to play mission. So you don't start with all of the abilities right away. But still, it's pretty fun. Like one of them is, man, I haven't played this in a while, but like one of them is just, Like, Zerg robots and this guy creates like only Zerg robot units or something like that. There's some wild ones.

Weird. You should check them out. Yeah, we should just get really into StarCraft extended universe stuff. Like, let's forget modern games. Let's just play a bunch of old Blizzard games. Yeah, why not? Let's make this a StarCraft. Let's make this a StarCraft podcast.

One thing that I think that I would get really into would be a real-time strategy game that's just as complex as this, but that allows you to pause. and assign actions. I've been playing through Shadow Gambit, or I just started playing it, which is the latest game from Mimi, who made Desperados 3, and they made Shadow Tactics. They make these real-time stealth games

that actually function a little bit like StarCraft, for the most part. It's an isometric view, and you're moving in real-time around this battlefield you have to multitask, but they allow you to pause the game and cue up these amazing, sort of synchronized attacks,

so you can have, you know, one character throws a, cloud of gas and the other character sneaks in through the gas and stabs the guy and then they both move back and you've kind of queued up a sequence of events. And it's really satisfying and it allows, at least it allows me a level of mastery over very complex systems that I find really satisfying. And it makes the game feel accessible without feeling simplified. Like there are a ton of different systems going on, but because I'm able to pause and take a little bit of time with them, I'm able to really get my head around them. I would really love that for something like Starcraft, where you can just

stop time. I mean, it would have to be a single player game, I guess. But then you can just go through and look at what everyone's doing in this moment and then assign them different tasks and then start time. Again, I guess something like FTL is another good comparison. It's the one thought I've kind of had while playing this while also playing Shadow Gambit and Baldersgate 3 and these different sort of hybrid and like fully turn base like Baldur's Gate 3, hybrid like Shadow Gambit, and just how being able to pause and being able to look at all of these complex systems actually makes those systems more accessible without needing to simplify them. Like they can still be really complicated.

I have a capacity to understand that level of complexity. I just, it's a little bit of a stretch for me sometimes to do it all in real time all the time while, you know, dealing with a changing battlefield. field. So just a thought I've had. Yeah, I think what you're describing would need fewer units and more, like, it would be a different game, essentially. But yeah, that's, that would be an interesting approach to the genre. Maybe. I think you could just play a single player version of StarCraft too where you can pause the game in any time. And other than that, it's the exact same game. That'd probably be

pretty fun. Pause and give out commands. No, no, no, no, because war doesn't pause. War. You said that. War doesn't pause. You yourself told us. It's true. That's true. I'm eating my own words now. I wish. It's just war paused, but it just doesn't. It simply doesn't pause. And StarCraft do knows that. And it's completely accurate. It's a historical document.

All this stuff really happened, I think. That's true. This is just the legacy. All right. We're actually going to put a pause on our war right now. And take a break, and then we'll be back with one more thing. Hi, I'm Emily Heller. And I'm Lisa Hannawalt.

And we're the hosts of Baby Geniuses. We've been doing our podcast for over 10 years. When we started, it was about trying to learn something new every episode. Now it's about us trying to actively get stupider. And it's working. Hang out with us and you'll hear us chat about. Gardening. Horses. Various problems with our butts. And all the weird stuff that makes us horny. That's so weird. All that stuff. Baby geniuses, a show for adult idiots. Every other week on maximum fun. The following pro wrestling contest is scheduled for one fall.

Making their way to the ring from the tights and fights podcast are the baddest trio of audio. The hair to beware, Danielle Radford. It really is. Great hair! The Brit with a permit to hit, Lindsay Kell! The Queen is dead. Long live, the Queen! And the fast-talking, Fiskewoblin! See, I can wrestle and be an announcer.

Get ready for tight and fight. Listen every Saturday or face the pain. Find us on maximum fun. No ring the bell. And we are back. War has been unpaused. Let's talk about our one more things. Maddie, what's your one more thing?

My One More Thing is a movie called Asteroid City. It's streaming on Peacock and that's where we watched it. This was a really weird movie. It's a Wes Anderson movie. So, sure, it's Tweed, it's cute, it's got vibrant colors, everything looks like a set in the classic Wes Anderson style. But it's also really strange and surrealist in a way that Wes Anderson isn't always, like reminds me of French surrealist plays that I was really into when I was a pretentious high schooler. It's a movie that is also purports to be about a play. Like you start the movie and it's like, this is about a play called Asteroid City.

And it's divided up into acts accordingly. And there's sort of a host of the play and like the curtains part at the outset. And the wall drops periodically. And Edward Norton plays this character who's directing the play that you're watching. And you sometimes get to see the actors break character and talk to each other as the actors offstage. And I really like that as a concept, but it's also very confusing to watch because, I mean, the movie just keeps switching around on you. And you got to kind of keep up with that. And it's very heady stuff.

And just in terms of how much you have to keep track of. Like, you have to kind of remember, like, okay, this is the actor's feeling about the character he's playing. and then okay now I'm back in the play again and he's playing his character you guys are following what I'm saying it's confusing and for the first 45 minutes or so I was like I don't know if I like this this might be too much and it might be dumb and annoying and then somewhere around the hour mark I was like this is awesome I love this I'm totally on board I love this I don't know something happened it kind of clicked together for me the play is a science fiction play. There's an alien in it. I mean, I don't know. I don't know how to describe it, but it was really cool. And it was the kind of really strange thing that eventually hung together into a statement that I thought was really cool. You just have to give it a bit. You have to kind of be willing to watch something that you probably would have liked as a college student. It gets good after 10 hours.

Do you know what I'm saying? It's a little. No, like so much interesting movies, they come together in the end and you realize what they were building towards. Exactly. Like it, I kind of started getting on board an hour in, and by the time the credits rolled, I was like, I understand what this was about. And I really liked it actually. But it's real weird at the beginning. So yeah, it's called Asteroid City. It's about an alien. It's a play within a movie. Edward Norton's in it. Jason Schwartzman's in it. A bunch of other old standbys from West Anderson things are in. West Anderson players. Yes, except also Tom Hanks is in it. And he's not usually in Wes Anderson things. He likes to introduce a new face every now. Yeah. I really liked him in it.

So yeah, I recommend it, I guess. But just be a little patient with it. Be patient with it. Kirk, what's your one more thing? My one more thing has a bit of a West Anderson connection as well. It's the after party season two. This is a show on Apple TV plus the second season. Yeah, me too.

We all like to the first season. Yeah. It's first season. So this is a show where someone is murder. and then the cast of characters try to solve the murder by reliving the night of the murder over and over again, Roshamon style, and each reliving of the night is told by a different person and then shot and recreated

in a different cinematic style. That's the best I can come up with for the sort of general hook of the show. It's a comedy, it stars Tiffany Haddish, Sam Richardson, and Zoe Chow are kind of the three main characters. and they're the three characters who return for season two from season one. They are back in the midst of another murder that they have to solve. It's really the Tiffany Haddish and Sam Richardson show, and really it's the Tiffany Haddish show.

She's so funny. She's so good. She gets to be the star of the funniest episode, at least so far in season two. Is it all out yet? So it's not all out yet, and I actually wasn't totally sold on it at first. The first episode, which is Sam Richardson's character, Anique, telling his version of this wedding. So he is now dating Zoe Chow,

his ex-girlfriend from the first season. They're now together, and her sister is getting married. And at the wedding, her to be husband or now husband, who is played by Zach Woods, who we're just talking about, the hilarious Zach Woods is this...

Steels every scene in Silicon Valley. He's playing a weirdo tech billionaire kind of guy. He is murdered, and, um, No one knows who did it. And so now they're back stuck in another murder, and they call in Tiffany Haddish, who has since left the police force and become an author because she wrote a book all about the murder from season one. And she kind of comes back in before the police come because no one wants to call the police yet because they're worried. They don't really know who it's going to be. So they bring her in as a kind of consultant.

And she begins interviewing everyone again, just like in season one. So at the beginning, Anik's episode, the opening episode, I wasn't totally sold. It's like a rom-com. everything goes wrong at the wedding, like meet the parents kind of a thing. And it was okay, but I was like, I don't know, is this show going to really have juice in season two? But it's gotten really, really good as it's gone on. It's had a couple of really standout episodes. There's a very funny West Anderson set up, send up, starring Anna Conkel, who, Maddie you'll know from Penn 15.

She's one of the stars of Penn 15. I love her. She's so good on that show. She's extremely funny, and it's cool to see her getting work. But Kenjiang is also in this. And John Cho, his show, his show. his episode actually just aired. He's their uncle or their funcle. He's their fun uncle. And his story is told in the style of a kind of sweeping melodramatic epic. And it's really good. It's just the mystery has been really fun. It's constantly surprising. Each character has

revealed sides to themselves that, you know, you don't see when you first meet them in the first episode. And the other standout episode is Tiffany Haddish is the episode that focuses on her, which is basically in the style of a basic instinct, like sexy. thriller from the 90s, like adult thriller. Absolutely hilarious. She's so funny. The way that she's just like totally the star of the show and that episode, we were dying laughing.

It was one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time. So yeah, it's been really great. I don't know who did it. I have my theories, but they're constantly surprising us every episode. So I'm not sure who it's going to be. It could be that it's kind of a letdown, but in the end the show isn't really about being satisfied with who did the murder. It's more just about the comedy and the job.

journey. So I've been really enjoying it. It's on Apple TV plus. It's the after party season two. Cool. First season is great. I'll probably wait until. So when is the entire episode? It's almost done. I think there's one or two episodes left. Yeah. I'll probably wait for the whole season. But yeah, that's exciting. Cool. My one more thing is a book called Traffic by Ben Smith, which was also my one more thing. Yeah. Last week. But I actually, I finished the book. So I figured I would talk about it again because last week I just scratched the surface and so I figured I'd discuss it a little bit. This is an interesting book. As I mentioned last week, it's kind of a strange

experience to be reading a book where you know some of the characters involved, especially one of the two main characters. And the book is really interested in telling this story of like the rise of BuzzFeed and the rise of Gawker and their respective creators, Jonah Peretti with BuzzFeed and Nick Denton Mook-Ocker and how they may or may not have changed the internet. And by the end of the book, it's kind of like it's really, he, Vince Smith writes that, like, perhaps they were the Rosencratzen-Gildenstern and the real characters were these kind of, like, host of villains that are on the periphery. I was going to say, did they change the internet or did the internet change that?

People like, well, really, I mean, the real story here is that, like, characters like Andrew Breitbart and baked Alaska. a bunch of other kind of right-wing troll-type personalities. There's a name I haven't heard in a little while. Right. Or like Benny Johnson, this plagiarist, conservative dude. All these characters were kind of like on the periphery here, learning about traffic and kind of using it for their own gains and their own gulls.

The book is weird. I don't know if I would recommend it to anyone unless they're like super media junkies. Because it doesn't really, I don't know, it doesn't have the sort of details and anecdotes that I was looking for. And in fact, having lived through a lot of the Gawker stuff, I was actually expecting more. For example, there's one section where it's like a couple of paragraphs where he talks about the kind of infamous 2015 Gawker story that outed a C-suite executive at Condé Nast and really kind of breezes past it when internally at Gawker Media, that was like one of the most dramatic moments of the company's history.

We, like, had, it was the first time a post was ever removed, the editorial director, and the editor-in-chief resigned over it. It was pretty wild. It was a huge thing. Do you get the sense that because Ben Smith's background is really at BuzzFeed, that it's just a little bit more of a BuzzFeed-focused story? No, it's more that because it's trying to cram in so much, it just really does a cursory job of hitting,

a lot of the scenes, which is kind of inevitable with a book like this, but there just isn't enough, like, really good behind the scenes, like media gossip for you to be like, oh, man, this is fascinating. There's some juicy stuff in here because there isn't. And I didn't feel like I came away learning that much from it the way I was hoping to. You have to wonder what Nick Denton's book would be like. It's interesting. So get this.

You know, it's fascinating. So both Jonah and Nick and a host of other characters. participated in this book and were willing to do interviews, except Nick, in true Nick Denton fashion, would only do interviews by either text message or in a Google document. Or, like, he would respond the questions in a Google Doc. And he could make them in suggesting mode. Or he could accept and reject paragraphs in the book. No, no, no, it wasn't the book. It was like, no, it was like Ben would write questions to him in a Google Doc, and he would write responses. So only written responses in other words.

Completely bizarre way to conduct an interview. Very strange. There were a couple of good scenes. There's one scene that was like Disney executives trying to buy BuzzFeed. And afterwards, they all like get high on a roof and start arguing over whether they should accept the deal. And that sort of stuff was fun to read about. But yeah, I don't know. I guess I was expecting a little bit more. Also, unsurprisingly, the word Kataku has mentioned zero times in the entire. Well, that's what's really missing. a footnote to history. Not even a footnote. Yeah, they should have had a part that was like, Kotaku staffers were not present during like all the scenes where people were drugs and drinking

and stuff. Just like in parentheses. They're like, by the way, no one from Kataku was there for that wild party either. Yeah. They should put that in. But yeah, I mean, it does, it feels like it's an interesting kind of snapshot in time in terms of the media world. And it's interesting, I guess if you're a media junkie, but it's not like you'll, and also it's very well written. It's very easy to get through. It's a very breezy read. He's a good writer. He's a good writer, yes, for sure. But it's not like you're going to read this and, like, come away with some big revelations about the world of media. And if anything, I kind of came away with the, this kind of, like, nihilistic message, not intentional from the book, but my own interpretation was like, man, this whole

snapshot in time, like, did not matter at all. Like, this is this ephemeral, like, moment, this period just, like, amounted to very little, didn't change anything. over the course. And that's not to say that like there were good scoops along the way that led to some change, I suppose. But like in terms of the media world, very little was accomplished from this whole saga. Some people got some job experience. Well, no, that, yeah. That's about it, I guess. In the fact, the most interesting part I thought was there's a chapter about the New York Times and their kind of internal politics overgoing digital and have, how they, like Jonah Paredi came and like did a, did a speech for them and stuff.

And Jonah Paredi and like other people thought like, look at this dinosaur. Like, we're going to eat its lunch. And then the New York Times turned around and just destroyed everybody by like making this incredible digital, digital adaptation and turn around and really reinvented itself in a way that just blew the buzzfeeds and gawkers of the world out of the water. So yeah, it was really, it's, I guess there's some interesting stuff, I should say. It's not all cursory and boring, but I do think it's more of a book for journalists and media junkies than like your average, your average connoisseur of news in the world. But yeah, no, that's the book. I just wanted to talk about it now that it's finished. All right, that is my one more thing.

It is time to say goodbye. Kirk, Manny, I'll see you both next week. Yeah, see you next week. Bye. Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddie Myers, and me. Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes.

Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network, and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at Maximumfund.org slash join. Find us on Twitter at triple clickpodd, send email the triple click at maximum fun.org and find a link to our Discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network. Of artists-owned shows.

Supported directly by you.