Black Friday sales are starting to come in and Blizzard wrote us with a huge deal for people that have always wanted to try StarCraft II. StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is going to be $29.99 which is 50% off the retail price. This is also a good opportunity for StarCraft II fans to purchase the game to give to a friend. The details are at the Blizzard Store. You only have until November 28th to cash in on this Black Friday deal!

Get hooked before StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm

“We’re pretty sure that in the future, music historians will look back at BlizzCon 2011 as the unquestionable pinnacle of Foo Fighters’ long and illustrious career,” said Dave Grohl, Foo Fighters founder and frontman. “We look forward to living up to that prediction by bringing the Horde and Alliance together to rock the hell out of Anaheim next month.”

Grohl & Co. aren’t the only performers at the event — The concert will open with a performance from The Artist Formerly Known as Level 80 Elite Tauren Chieftain, followed by Blizzard’s own in-house metal band. (Wait, Blizzard has an in-house band? Why is that ridiculous, awesome and not at all surprising?)

“There’s no better way to cap off two days of gaming entertainment than by blowing the roof off the convention center with an awesome rock concert,” said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. “Everyone attending BlizzCon and watching from home can look forward to ending the show with a bang when Foo Fighters bring the house down.”

Of course, you don’t have to be at the sold-out event to see the show — DirecTv will be broadcasting the convention as they usually do, for a price. (That price being $39.99.)

“Gamers interested in attending should keep an eye on the BlizzCon ticket sales page

(http://us.blizzard.com/store/blizzcon-tickets.xml) at that time for a chance to get theirs.”

If you don’t get tickets, or you can’t get enough from Blizzard, they are also releasing approximately 200 tickets to an exclusive pre-BlizzCon dinner to benefit Children’s Hospital of Orange County. This will take place on Saturday, May 28, at 10 a.m. PT for $500 USD each (BlizzCon admission included).

“In-depth coverage of BlizzCon will also be available through the BlizzCon Virtual Ticket, which is offered as a multichannel Internet stream and also via DIRECTV in the United States. BlizzCon 2011 will take place October 21 and 22 at the Anaheim Convention Center.”

TIME IS MONEY FRIEND!!

I’m actually surprised they’ve announced it so early as I was expecting the announcement closer to late spring/summer. There’s no other details yet, but they said that new information will be announced on Blizzcon.com. Here’s hoping they have some good announcements for us this year!

And after that, you got ten hours of playtime and not a second more. Which is fine, since it’s not like you bought the game or anything. But what if you wanted to go back and play the beginning all over again? You were pretty much out of luck unless you bought the game.

Well, you were until today, anyway. Now, Blizzard have made a true demo version of the game available for download, which includes three missions and a Terran-on-Terran skirmish. It only took about five months to get here.

You might not get as far as you could in the original, Guest Pass mode (I know I played quite a bit more during my ten-hour trial), but it’s a good, free way to figure out how your computer will run the game, and there’s no time limit, not to mention no required Battle.net signup. So if you’ve been on the fence, it’s a good time to go ahead and give the game a shot (the demo is downloadable at this link).

The schedule of events was released a couple of weeks back, and now we also know that Tenacious-D will be the big performers this year. I’ve been working on figuring out which panels I want to see and I think I have a rough schedule down. I’ll be doing a lot of hopping between the main stage and the development stage almost back to back. Some of the panels I’m looking forward to are the cinematics panels for Starcraft and WoW, the WoW raiding panel and the live raid. I’ll also hit up the WoW class and open Q&A sessions since those can be interesting and amusing at the same time. Plus I hope to check out the Starcraft II tournament when I can as I love watching the pros play.

But what I’m probably most excited for is hanging out with old and new friends. I’ll be meeting my GM for the first time along with several WoW people from Twitter. A lot of this will be going down at an after party being put on by Twisted Nether at Bubba Gumps down the street from the convention center. It’ll be Friday night after the costume contest at 9pm and is shaping up to be one heck of a night. There’s going to be many online personalities that you may recognize from various blogs, podcasts and sites. And I’ve been told there’s some epic loot that people who attend could win! All of the details are listed up on the Twisted Nether site, and I hope to see more people there. If I can scrounge up some more I’ll be handing out cute GamingAngels buttons too!

So what are you looking forward to with Blizzcon 2010?

It looks to be a pretty standard Blizzcon with a few noteworthy panels. I’m interested to see what is covered in the opening ceremonies and if we’ll have any big announcements (Diablo III release date?). It will also be nice to attend the Cataclysm Cinematics panel as I’m hoping we see the opening cinematic as well as if there are any more in-game cinematics like the ending to the Goblin island of Kezan. I’ll also enjoy checking out the StarCraft II tournament.

I’m still wondering if there will be any special closing band or if it will be L80ETC. Hopefully we find out if there are any more surprises soon!

Raynor does not approve.

Oh dear, it looks like we’ve got a bunch of cheaters on our hands. Of course, cheating in games is nothing new, but some companies are taking it a lot more seriously than others. Blizzard appears to fall, very firmly, into the Very Serious Camp.

They issued a special reminder today to note that any player found to be cheating, or even utilizing hacks or mods, will be permanently banned from the game. To put it in slightly different terms, you’ll no longer be able to log in to Battle.net – not to play StarCraft, probably not to play anything else, either.

You might have to start completely over. Brand-new account, brand-new game install, all of that. And don’t mess with the client this time.

Suspensions and the throwing of the banhammer will start very, very soon. In the meantime…stop cheating, you cheater.

But, just in case you want it straight from the hydralisk’s mouth…

Cheating in StarCraft II

Blizzard Entertainment has always taken cheating in any form in Blizzard games very seriously, and that’s no different for StarCraft II. If a StarCraft II player is found to be cheating or using hacks or modifications in any form, then as outlined in our end user license agreement, that player can be permanently banned from the game. This means that the player will be permanently unable to log in to Battle.net to play StarCraft II with his or her account.

Playing StarCraft II legitimately means playing with an unaltered game client. Doing otherwise violates our policies for Battle.net, and it goes against the spirit of fair play that all of our games are based on. We strongly recommend that you avoid using any hacks, cheats, or exploits. Suspensions and bans of players that have used or start using cheats and hacks will begin in the near future.

Rating: T for Teen
Genre: Real-time Strategy
Number of Players: Single and Multiplayer
Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment
Release Date: July 27, 2010

BUY

StarCraft II has been years in the making, and the series itself has stayed strong since it’s initial release in 1998. Now the series makes it’s triumphant return and in three seperate parts which will focus on each of the three playable races: Terran, Protoss and Zerg. The first of these to be released is Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty which focuses on the Terran. Starting up after the events in Brood War, the single player campaign picks up with Jim Raynor who has been ostracised as a criminal by media campaigns by Arcturus Mengsk. the leader of the Dominion.

Raynor is on the far outlying planet Mar Sara where he is working on helping to free the people from the Dominion. He is soon approached by his old friend Tychus Findlay who proposes that Raynor joins up with him to collect Xel’Naga artifacts for the Moebius Foundation. After securing an artifact from a site on Mar Sara the Zerg, who had been silent, launch an attack. After escaping, Raynor finds out that the Zerg have lauched attacks upon Terran systems and that the Dominion have retreated to only defend core worlds.

From there the plot gets pretty good. I enjoyed the fact that there were some missions where I had to make a choice on what to do which then affected the plot for the rest of the game. I also liked the missions with Zeratul as it gave a break from the strict Terran play. Some of the missions did feel a bit repetitive, but then something came along that broke up some of the gathering monotony. I’d say more about the plot, but I’d rather keep it spoiler free. I will say that I did enjoy the ending and can’t wait to see what happens next.

Graphics are highly improved, and the fully rendered cut scenes are amazing, but I was a bit unimpressed with the game rendered scenes. I honestly was disappointed that not all of the scenes were fully rendered. Not that the graphics looked bad, but it just didn’t feel the same. Maybe I’m just spoiled with other games I guess.

Now multiplayer, this was an aspect I was both looking forward to and dreading at the same time. Even back when I was playing the original game, I wasn’t amazing at multiplayer, but after years of not playing the game at all, I’m back to n00b status. Thankfully I can just choose to play with my friends against computers and not feel too ashamed while practicing and trying to get better. There are also some great challenge modes which were designed to help you improve your decision making and skill at the game. It is sad that you can’t do traditional LAN parties with SC2, but in the end I do enjoy the Battle.net functionality. And connecting that with Facebook was fun as I found out which of my friends play (there were a couple of surprises).

As for the overall review of the collector’s edition, I have to say that if you did snag one it was a good decision. The art book is fantastic and I’ve flipped through it several times for myself and to show others. The behind the scenes DVD has some fun features to it, and it’s great to have all of the fully rendered cut scenes in one place to watch whenever I want. And I imported the soundtrack day one since I fell in love with the music from the get go. Plus if I had a full size replica of Raynor’s gun I’d have his dog tag hanging off of it in my office (next to my Lancer and cog tags).

Now I know that there are more hardcore fans than I who were disappointed with the game. I’ve read and listened to what they’ve had to say, and I can understand their feelings. However I still say that if you’ve enjoyed the original StarCraft games, you will enjoy SC2: Wings of Liberty. Not to mention, this is just part one of three for SC2. Something tells me that the other two with different storyline views will expand upon what we have in Wings of Liberty. So I say go out and buy SC2! I’ll be anxiously awaiting to play Heart of the Swarm while working on my PvP skills.

Review copy provided by Blizzard and does not affect the outcome of this review