Starcraft Terran Strategy – Beating Banshees
These units are a quick air-to-ground attack vehicle.  The Banshee are the Starcraft 2 Terran answer to all things that can’t fly.  In addition to being able to deal a lot of damage to anything on the ground, they are also capable of cloaking.  The researched Cloaking Field enables the Banshee to provide unbeatable harass against opponents that haven’t prepared for them. The first time you’ll see a Banshee in a game is when they go after your mineral line for some early harass.  This may signal a shift to an Air build or may just be a means of providing harass to limit your army size against a ground force.  This is dependant on how many Starports the player produces.  In cases where the game continues for quite a while after Banshee harass, it is likely that the player will produce Battlecruisers from those same Starports.
GSL News: Starcraft 2 Season 2 Registration Update
For those of you that are interested, we have some updated dates for the GSL season 2 registration.  Last week, it was announced that the GomTV Starcraft 2 League would be entering a second season.  We also gave you an idea of
Starcraft 2 Diamond League Tournament 32-player Invitational Tonight
The once huge 128-player bracket has now been reduced to 32 players invited to compete tonight.  This Starcraft 2 Diamond tournament is set for tonight at 7pm EST (GMT -5).  Be sure to tune in live on the Starcrafting live stream.  Hosted
Starcraft Zerg Strategy – Beating Phoenixes
This unit is the Protoss quick attack ship.  It moves in quick and hits light, but its biggest advantage is being able to run and shoot at the same time.  This can quickly pick off retreating units, or allow the Phoenix to retreat while still causing damage. Of course, the Phoenix is only capable of shooting down aerial units.  So, ground forces are mostly immune to its attacks.  However, the Phoenix does have one more ability of use, the Graviton Beam.  This ability lifts ground forces off of the ground and places them in the attack area of anti-air units.  While this ability is channeling, the lifted unit is left unable to attack.  So, how does the zerg deal with these units?
Starcraft 2 SEA/ANZ Regional Invitiational Results
Last week, a regional invitational was ran for the South-East Asia, Australia, and New Zealand areas.  Yesterday, the results of the international competition were posted on the Blizzard community blog. Congratulations to all the participants for being invited. The compeition ran from September 10th till September 12th. It was organized into a 16-player double elimination bracket. The grand champion ended up being a player the placed in the lower bracket after 2 rounds of play. That just shows you that you should never give up.
Saturday Night Starcrafting: 64-player Starcraft 2 Tournament September 18
Presented By http://www.starcrafting.com 64 Person Tournament US Servers Semi Finals BO3 Finals BO5 WHEN September 18th/2010 Check in 5:00pm CST via bnet (Psylence.773) NOTE: If you do not check in you will be replaced! Tournament start 5:30pm CST
Kotick Hints at Using the Starcraft 2 Engine for Movies
There is always a bit of buzz around the internet concerning films based on video game franchises.  A lot of times it devolves into nonsensical arguing with one side thinking Hollywood is too withdrawl from the mindset of gamers and the other being so faithful to their favorite games that anything produced tied to them would be nothing less than awesome.  Needless to say, films based on video games don’t have such a great track record in history.  Very few receive critical praise or any sort of real commercial success. Bobby Kotick, of Activision-Blizzard fame, has speculated on a plan where development studios could possibly produce their own films based on their own franchises.  The speech comes from Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference in Newport Beach, CA.  Where Kotick outlined how it could be done and even that it would be quite popular with gamers all around.
Death by Proxy: Is the Risk Worth the Reward?
In lower-level play of the Blizzard ladder, the rush is king. Most Starcraft 2 games feature some type of highly agressive play. Sometimes it sending those first few units out before your opponent has the means to kill them. Sometimes its teching to the top for that one dominant unit at the expensive of a viable defense. And sometimes, its setting up a forward base deep on your opponents side of the map to serve as a striking point. This is the proxy. There’s a great risk in committing so many resources so far away from the defenses of your main base in a Starcraft 2 Ladder game. For a short time, you may be tying up resources to build that barracks or that gateway. This leaves less resources from which to build an army. On the other hand, if you’re able to get an army ready that is able to beat the early frailty of your opponent’s defenses, you may fine their mineral line to be an easy target for you, crippling the very back bone of their build.
More MLG Passes for SC2 in Washington DC Tonight
If you missed the first round of pass sales, then you’re in luck.  Another batch of player passes will go on sale tonight at 7pm EST.  The passes are for the Starcraft 2 event at MLG Washington DC.  The Washington competition is the MLG National Championship event.  Hosting the best players from around the country. MLG’s Washington D.C. competition runs from October 15th-17th.  So, if you’re in the nation’s capital that weekend, be sure to get your passes and participate.  You can expect the compeition to be a little heavier than most tournaments since this is the Nation Championship event for Major League Gaming.  As such, theres a hefty cash prize and even a nice title for those that earn it.
GSL News: TLO has the Chicken Pox, Match rescheduled
Its always bad when you get sick, its even worse when its during a huge tournament. GSL is reporting that TLO has come down with the Chicken Pox and won’t be able to play his game as scheduled. Not to
GSL Enters RO32 Play Tomorrow
The GomTV Starcrafting League has finished up its week of RO64 play and is moving on to the next round.  Being a South Korean tournament the majority of the players are natives of the country.  However, there are some international players still holding their own against some of the best players from the most hardcore Starcraft country in the world. Particularly of note is IdRa, who is still going strong.  His match is first up and is being played September 15th at 6pm KST (+9 GMT).  That’s 5am EST if you’re watching live. We’re still waiting on the final schedule to be set.  As of now there are only 24 players scheduled to play for the RO32 games.  We’ll keep you posted on how this progresses for the rest of the tournament.
Starcraft Protoss Strategy – Beating Corruptors
These units are the core of an advanced Zerg anti-air army.  Their acid causes a significant debuff making their targets take addition damage.  They’ll lay waste to Void Rays, Phoenixes, Carriers, and even Motherships if not handled.  Luckily, they do have a few disadvantages you can use in order to beat them. The biggest disadvantage is that the Zerg Corruptor is only capable of dealing air-to-air damage.  This makes the unit particularly vulnerable to ground based units that are capable of dealing damage to air units.  Let’s take a look at what the Protoss can dish out to counter a group of Corruptors.
Blizzard Open to Making a Starcraft Movie
Even though the Warcraft movie is still in the story phase of production, Blizzard isn’t afraid of continuing to look at opportunities within Hollywood.  They have even made the point of saying that they would say yes to James Cameron (of Avatar, Terminator, and even Titanic fame) if he showed interest in producing a film adaptation of the Starcraft universe.  Following the highly successful sci-fi epic “Avatar”, it makes sense that Blizzard would show interest in leveraging some of that cinema love. If you’re looking for a top end sci-fi director for your big project, then James Cameron is going to be one of the top names on that list.  In addition to making excellent films for over 25 years, he is currently has a few of the top grossing movies of all time.  Namely, Avatar and Titanic.
Starcraft Terran Strategy – Beating Dark Templar
If you’ve ever faced a Protoss player into the mid to late game, you may had a time where your harvesting SCVs are suddenly exploding.  Despite the urge to blame poor design standards at the command center, they may actually be falling victim to Dark Templar.  These units are the Protoss nearest comparable unit to the Ghost.  While lacking the ability to call a nuclear strike, they will do just as well in wrecking havoc with your economy. The Dark Templar is a small 3rd tier melee unit deployed via Gateways (or Warpgates).  In addition to a devastating melee attack, they’re equipped with a permanent cloak.  In their non-upgraded form, they are capable of killing a harvester of any race in a single hit.  The downside to this high-end damage is lower health and shielding.  This makes the unit very fragile when their cloak is nullified.
GSL Season Preliminary Registration Opens Next Week
For those of you that have been catching the games live this past week or so, it looks like the GSL was a pretty good success so far. Enough so that registration for the next season of the GomTV Starcraft 2 League is set to start registration late next week. So, starting September 25, 2010 and until October 3, 2010 you can try to get your foot in the door over at GSL. If you are interested in signing up, GomTV posted up some useful information in a news release earlier in the weekend. The registration is set to run from September 25th till October 3rd, with the preliminaries being played on October 9th and 10. For those of you that get in or want to keep an eye on the outcomes, the Starcraft 2 open season runs form October 18th till November 13th.
Blizzard Announces their Blizzcon 2010 Contests
Blizzard is rolling out one of their cornerstones of Blizzcon, the community contests.  This year, we have some rather nice prizes for the winners of the Music, Movie, and Fan Art contests.  In all, there are over $25,000 in prizes this year.  Quite the haul for any aspiring artist.  Let’s have a look at some of the prizes for the coming contests for Blizzcon 2010. First the prize list for the Fan Art contest: First Place: Wacom Cintiq 21UX and one BlizzCon Virtual Ticket to watch the event live online Second Place: NVIDIA video card, one copy of Adobe Photoshop CS5, and one BlizzCon Virtual Ticket to watch the event live online Third Place: One copy of Adobe Photoshop CS5 and one BlizzCon Virtual Ticket to watch the event live online First Place:  Wacom Cintiq 21UX and one BlizzCon Virtual Ticket to watch the event live online Second Place:  NVIDIA video card, one copy of Adobe Photoshop CS5, and one BlizzCon Virtual Ticket to watch the event live online Third Place:  One copy of Adobe Photoshop CS5 and one BlizzCon Virtual Ticket to watch the event live online
Blizzard Takes a Look Forward To Starcraft 2 Patch 1.1
There are certainly some big changes coming in short-term from Blizzard.  They recently went over some of the balance changes they are looking to implement into their latest Starcraft 2 Patch.  The main goal as always is to make the game more fair for all players and these changes are designed to do just that.  Now, lets take a look at whats coming up in Patch 1.1. First, a change that will affect how players of all races deal with combat across ledges.  Blizzard is looking to implement a change in how vision is handled when a unit is destroyed.  Coming in the next Starcraft 2 Patch, unit will no longer provide vision a few seconds after they are destroyed.  Most notably, this will prevent players from having vision on an area when they have no units alive that would be able to provide it.  Such as, having vision on the high ground when all of your air units are destroyed.  This will effectively shorten the window that vision is provided to units on the low ground.
Starcraft Zerg Strategy – Beating Marines
They are the swarm of the Terran forces and one-third of one of the deadly “MMM ball”.  These are the marines, and boy are they nasty.  They hit everything no matter if its in the air, on the land, or even below the surface (assuming they had some sort of detector nearby).  They good at everything and the top players know it.  So, how do you take them out when you’re rolling out with the Zerg horde?  Well, there are a few options that we’re going to take a look at. First, the roaches.  These are your version of their Marauder.  They’re simple, easy to build, armored, and ranged.  If you want to put a few extra resourced into the research they’ll even burrow for you.  However, their greatest advantage over the marine is their armor.  The carapace on a roach is thick enough to take quite a bit of punishment from the bullet storm coming their way.  They may not be invincible, but head-to-head, the roach will be able to take much more of a punishment.  Just remember that they do have a shorter range than the marine, so you may have to work a bit hard at microing.
Free Name Change in Starcraft 2
Blizzard has been fairly good about this type of change in the past.  Specifically, in an instance where a player is receiving a less than stellar gameplay experience.  This has been seen in the form of free server/faction transfers in World of Warcraft.  This time, they’re setting up to offer the same type of service into Starcraft 2.  It can probably be expected that the system will function in much the same way. In their Starcraft 2 Community blog,  Blizzard announced that they are about to offer a one-time free name change to players.  This has come about with a plethora of customers ending up with character names they may not have intended on using.  Mostly due to the semi-confusing nature of the profile creation wizard.  Blizzard even went so far as to make note that players were becoming confused when entering their information and ended up with their own name being used as their character name.  Of course, this has prompted the coming services to Battle.net.
Starcraft 2 Tournament Tonight (64 player)
Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen quite an increase in activity with our series of Starcraft 2 tournaments.  The most major of these is Psylence’s Saturday Night Starcrafting series.  This began as a simple 16-player tournament to just have some fun with members of the Starcrafting community.  Since then, it has exploded.  Not only has the size of the bracket increased, the overall skill of the players has increase.  Now, Psylence is pulling in some of the top players currently running on the North American servers. Every Saturday Night he broadcasts live on his streaming video channel.  Hundreds of fans and Starcraft 2 enthusiasts tune in every single week.  Be sure to check out his live feed tonight as he brings in 64 of North America’s top rated players in a 1-on-1 challenge to the top.

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