Thursday, February 12, 2009

You must construct additional blogs!


Anybody remember StarCraft? Well recently Blizzard Entertainment announced StarCraft 2 which has heavily improved graphics and smoother gameplay than the previous StarCraft. In case you haven't herd of either than you might have herd of it's ancestor WarCraft or it's MMORPG version World of WarCraft. If none of these games ring a bell than a quick google search of these games is needed for you. In short both StarCraft and WarCraft were real-time-strategy games for the PC. Both games are by the same company and many gamers consider these to be the fathers of modern real-time-strategies.

The theme of WarCraft was medieval war involving humans, Orcs, Elves, Dwarves, and Zombies. Then after some time Blizzard created StarCraft which takes place in future space. The races in StarCraft are humans, monster aliens called "Zergs", and advanced aliens called "Protoss". The main topic in this blog entry will be on the Protoss. One main theme of the Protoss was that they were very technologically advanced compared to humans and they had psychic powers. One essential structure in the game for the Protoss was the Pylon. Pylons allowed their construction Probes to warp. Anytime a player tried to create a unit but didn't have enough "Psi" an error message would tell you "You must contruct additional Pylons". Since the Protoss are so different from humans they have funny sounding voices which sound like humans but with an echo effect. Eventually the phrase "You must construct additional Pylons!" became a popular catch phrase.

Now hopefully most of you know that in real life a pylon is one of those weird electrical lines you see everywhere when driving. Just like how our pylons give us electricity to power our technology, the Protoss pylons give them "Psi" to power their technology. Maybe if we all had a magic voice telling us to construct additional pylons whenever we needed more power than black outs wouldn't be a problem.