Listening to beta testers is .... "Elemental"

Stardock did a wonderful job with Galactic Civilizations, and those of you who follow my blog know that I've been very eager for their new game "Elemental: War of Magic" for a long time. That is until it showed during beta that their egos were getting in the way of listening to customers and beta testers. I won't rehash the old parts, but the behavior continued and despite people like me posting game crashing bugs... the game went gold before it should have and the game you buy in the box is completely unstable. Tonight as I write this I think I'm downloading the 6th post-release patch already adding stabilization and making other basic mechanics work.

So if you're not buying a game and expecting to connect to the internet and patch it right off... don't buy this game. In fact, sadly as someone who already sunk their money into it you are probably better off waiting several months before the game is to the state where it should have been at release. Luckily, with Stardock one can still trust that they will do that and not just drop the title so I do feel that Elemental will eventually be a market ready game.

I painted something

and just recently go around to finishing a video of the pictures so others can see it.

The Starcraft 2 dilemma

So should I get Starcraft 2? I was a major fan of the original Starcraft and played it a lot in college when it originally came out as all my old college roommates can attest.

But this doesn't mean that Starcraft 2 will live up to that. Already I can tell that it seems they're with all the money they're raking in they're trying to be even more greedy by giving fans less for more. No editor like the original game, no LAN play which was and is a ton of fun with original starcraft, and most annoyingly of all you have to log online to "authenticate" your game to start playing it and then once a month there after. Furthermore despite buying the game in a store, once you start playing they'll inform you through an EULA that you don't own the game and owe them royalties for using videos of playing the game. Furthermore the new Battlenet is going to have a store for "premium" content.

But I've not actually played it, is the actual game going to be worth buying it 3 times for the full campaign game?