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As the gaming world expected, StarCraft 2 was announced on May 19th. Here is the press release, official site, and the GameTrailers.com page. There doesn’t appear to be a release date yet. It seems SC2 will continue the story as it was left by Brood War. This time the game will be in 3D. At this time there are only the three races, but there will be a “number of distinct new units to the Protoss, Terran, and Zerg, and even some of the familiar units that return in StarCraft II will have new tricks up their sleeves.” Battle.net will also receive an overhauling so it can handle the multiplayer features of SC2.

Let me start off with Blizzard. Tomorrow is the 19th. The significance? Well, as seen in my last post, it is the date that many believe to be the announcement of Starcraft 2. Blizzard is quoted as saying the announcement will be a “massive surprise.” This quote makes me wonder if Starcraft 2 is truly going to be announced or not – if it is the surprise is lost. I doubt the announcement will involve a new MMO, because Blizzard wouldn’t want to hinder World of Warcraft, Blizzard has already said the announcement won’t involve the Warcraft series, and the Diablo 3 web domain isn’t owned by Blizzard (they would buy it if they were releasing D3). This leaves Starcraft, or a new game.

“…we have a very strong connection with the characters and settings of StarCraft, and we do plan to revisit that universe at some point in the future…” -Blizzard

Also, Blizzard put a teaser page up on their site on Monday. It is a timeline detailing their history of games.

Now, I’d also like to mention the recent Engadget post about the iPhone and Leopard being “pushed back.” I didn’t catch the post until after the email had been dubbed false, but the effect Engadget’s announcement had on Apple’s stock was incredible. The post led to over $4 billion dollars of Apple stock being dumped in six minutes. The stock has recovered by now, but the amount of money lost and gained must have been massive. The power of the media in any form is astounding.

EDIT: Figured I’d note that I am hoping for the release of Starcraft 2. As I said last time, Starcraft was the first game to hook me to PC games and is only rivaled by Unreal Tournament and maybe Counter-Strike.

“A new South Korean source claims that, according to a leak, Blizzard will be announcing StarCraft 2 at the World Wide Invitational, on the 19th of May 2007.”

I am very excited about this. The original StarCraft was the first game to really get me hooked on PC gaming.

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“You read that right: Guild Wars Campaign 4 is canceled – and so are all future Guild Wars campaigns. Finished. Done. Gone for good.” After the “rousing success” that was Nightfall (the third campaign) and over 3 million in sales, you start to wonder why. But don’t start to panic, I haven’t finished the story, welcome the first Guild Wars expansion – Eye of the North – and the first sequel – Guild Wars 2. Why you ask? According to PC Gamer magazine, it is because the developers aren’t able to make the games as great as they want too while trying to stick to the six month schedule. It is also mentioned that because the campaigns need to be a standalone game and an addition, they have been getting harder to just pick-up and play. ArenaNet Co-Founder Jeff Stain says that they are “battling against complexity. [They] don’t want to make complicated games. [They] want to make fun, easy-to-grasp games that are easy to get into and not frontloaded with complexity.”

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So I was browsing Wonderland today and saw Alice’s post “Goggles: the Google Maps flight sim” and I just had to share. As Alice said, calling it a “Flight sim is a bit of an exaggeration … but it’s just GREAT.” Mark Caswell-Daniels over at Isoma.net has created a fun little tool that uses Google maps and a little 3D airplane to let you fly around (called Goggles). The controls are simple: space=fire gun, a=faster, z=slower, and the arrow keys to control the plane. There are 19 different starting points ranging from the US, Netherlands, Germany, and Japan to the Moon and Mars. Overall it is fun, pointless, but worth checking out.