Bobbbbyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!

Peter Tomarken: And Dustin is out of the game, and that means Mary Lowell from Wichita, Kansas is our winner!  Congratulations to all of our contestants, who will be going home with a wonderful prize package, and tune in next week for another exciting round of terrible terrible action on Press Your Luck!

If you’re interested in Starcraft II, learn who Dustin Browder is.  If Starcraft II averages less than a 115 out of 100 on Metacritic, he will be crucified.  He will be known as that dude who took the gritty world of Starcraft (with its dying Dragoons exploding into blue, glow-in-the-dark semen) and created a sequel that wasn’t a carbon copy of Brood War.

Pictured left: A realistic game where a cluster of Zerglings takes up more space than a Battlecruiser.
Pictured right: Starcraft II

He’s also taken a prominent role in shilling the product, most notably as the narrator of the world premiere gameplay trailer.  The reality of marketing to the masses involves dumbing it down.  Barack Obama trademarked hope and John McCain was a maverick because the American electorate is in wedlock with profound stupidity.  Actions Per Minute isn’t exactly popular culture, but we’ve all watched sports on television and yelled at the commentator for his impersonation of Captain Obvious.  Dustin Browder’s participation in the first Starcraft II “battle report” makes it clear: He is a fat, jolly version of the beginner guide for real-time-strategy basics.

The only man capable of honoring his commitment to “terrible, terrible damage” would be…Dustin_Browder.

I used focus fire as an example for two reasons:
1) It’s the first thing any RTS player learns.  There’s no rocket science in learning that the quicker you put bullets into something, the faster it dies.  The problem is low-level players who do their best impression of Everquest’s A.I. and focus-fire the most durable and mobile unit on the battlefield.
2) Dustin Browder couldn’t possibly need to explain focus fire.  Unbeknown to me, and six days prior to Dustin_Browder’s post, Dustin Browder explained it to 1UP.

Addressing the needs of both the hardcore and the casual players falls into one of Blizzard’s core design philosophies, which is: “easy to learn, hard to master.” It’s something that’s right at the forefront of our minds as we develop all of our games. As an example, most of the units in StarCraft 2 can be controlled effectively just by pointing and clicking, which is easy enough for a casual player to grasp; “if I move all my stalkers over here, they’re going to shoot at the bad guys.” As the casual players get more skilled at the game, they start to learn more advanced concepts — like focus-fire – and using abilities such as the stalker’s Blink, in order to teleport up and down cliffs for maximum effectiveness.

Thanks to Lolod for the link.  Guess there’s a lot of truth in fiction.