Life in the Middle 04/03/2012

For a while now Terrans have been starved for a good tuition source, but this week two YouTube series tried to rectify this. DeMusliM has been a great inspiration, and his stream is on of my favourites, but he plays too fast for me to be able to keep up with what he is doing; dedicated videos are more useful. I'm sure that everyone who is interested in seeing Apollo's tutorial has already seen it so I want to talk about Max's series instead, as well as talk about Blizzard's StarCraft Master.

Max goes through a two and a three Rax build that I think I will adopt.

Max goes through by match-up and casts replays from his perspective explaining all of his actions however minor they might seem. This way of doing it is really useful for gaining a greater understanding of Terran as a whole. I have only watched his TvP tutorial so far but I look forwards to watching the rest over the next couple of days. Max manages to keep the commentaries interesting and educational throughout, even in the slower sections, which is the mark of someone who truly knows what they are talking about.

In StarCraft Master some of the challenges are very similar to those in Darglein's.

It seemed like everybody was talking about StarCraft Master so I delayed writing this for a day so I could give it a go. Before playing it I only saw Machine struggling on challenge 30 and hadn't read anything about it, so went in knowing little about it. For those of you that don't know, it is a custom game contains 30 micro intensive challenges that can test anything from your ability to micro a single unit to your control of a small army. It took me about 2.5 hours Blizzard time to complete all the challenges.

Some of the challenges just seemed like you needed to approach them in the right order.

You have to play every race and I like this as I think everyone should have at least a basic understanding of the other races. To some extent the skills you learn are transferable between them anyway. It doesn't extend much further once you have completed the challenges, as there is only one difficulty setting, but then again skill involves being consistently good at something; not just achieving it once, so additional play-throughs may be useful.

My favourite challenge tasked you to snipe Banelings amongst waves of incoming Zerglings.

This week has mostly been a week of learning, so hopefully I will be able to apply what I have learnt next week to get back to the top of Platinum. Thank you for reading and don't forget to check out Max's tutorials and check out my review of Alan Wake. You can follow this blog from the pane to the right and find me on Twitter, I'm @RobinTerran.