Friday Laziness: Outer Space Edition

Let's not lie to each other here: there's no way I'm going to be able to think about much today besides tonight's Battlestar Galactica series finale. I. Cannot. Wait.

At least there is a development at least tangentially related to a story about a gritty, ragtag group of humans fighting an intergalactic war.

The new Battle.net is slowly being introduced to the internet's bloodstream. Step by step, Actiblizzard will leverage the WoW audience to ensure the success of their overarchingl online anti-piracy/content distribution platform (think Steam). Battle.net originated as the awesomely free service that helped launch Starcraft into the legendary competitive online game it is (and allowed Diablo 2 to take those first tentative steps toward MMO). Now it's being expanded and improved upon, with more to come. Do not be surprised if, 2-3 years from now, you're paying for a Battle.net subscription that gives you access to WoW and SC2 online and Diablo 3 online, etc, and connects all of those games through chat and social networking. There are a lot of great opportunities here, and I hope Blizzard siezes on them.

But best of all, the introduction of the Battle.net accounts means that we'll likely be seeing SC2 this year. I. Cannot. Wait. Maybe we'll get a release date announced at Blizzcon in August? I was kind of puzzling over why there was even going to be a Blizzcon this year.


This thought inspired me fire up Brood War again, only to find it nearly unplayable on my 24-inch monitor. The game is hard-coded to run at a tiny resolution (640x480?) in full screen mode, and playing it on a widescreen just stretches it out sideways and warps the whole thing. So I found this thread:

http://www.bwhacks.com/forums/starcraft-hacking-related/29147-starcraft-windowed-mode.html

Get scloader2b wmode, and at least you can play the game in a window. Be warned it may be quite tiny. It worked pretty well for me, though I wish I could resize it to my liking.

So until next time, Bowie's in Space!