“Jimmy gets it done” – HOTS Raynor Guide
November 18th, 2017 by

Are you struggling to be effective as a damage-dealer in Heroes of the Storm? Can’t engage without dying as a Melee? Getting dived and blown-up as a Mage? You’re not asking for much, you just want to kill some folks in a video game. But it just isn’t working out.

You need someone strong, but not too complicated. Someone who looks at your positioning mistakes and says, “Hey man, that’s okay, here’s a little pick-me-up.” Someone who never met a problem he couldn’t solve without shooting at it repeatedly. Someone who is an All-American Space-Cowboy. You need Jim Raynor.

He’s not technical. He’s not flashy. But damn it, Jimmy gets it done.

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“Burn in the Light!” – HOTS Johanna Guide
November 15th, 2017 by

If you’re only going to learn how to play one tank in Heroes of the Storm, make it Johanna. There’s really never a bad time to pick her, she’s good at everything a tank wants to be good at and she works well with any team composition. She has great displacement, crowd control, peeling, and she’s incredibly hard to kill thanks to her trait, Iron Skin. She’s easily the most generally effective tank in the game — other tanks might be more effective in certain situations, but no one fits into every team composition like our girl Jo does.

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Tanks and Active Mitigation in World of Warcraft: Legion
January 6th, 2017 by

Someone recently made a post on MMO-Champion asking whether a specific ability counted as “Active Mitigation” and he received a lot of misinformation. Apparently, many players have an outdated understanding of the term, and to make things worse, the most recently updated Wikis on the topic are 3-4 years old. Yikes! Since I’m so annoying such a helpful guy, I will clear things up.

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The SFV Guidebook
February 20th, 2016 by

With Street Fighter V’s release, there are going to be a lot of new players looking to pick up the game. There’s a plethora of tutorials available out there, but most of them are far too long and difficult for new players to digest. This guide aims to explain the game’s basic and intermediate mechanics as clearly and concisely as possible, in hopes to get more players in on the action.

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Competitive Gaming and the Spectator

The 2015 League of Legends World Championship
November 4th, 2015 by

Over 11 million people concurrently watched the League of Legends World Championship last year, and LoL is only one game among many. DotA 2, StarCraft 2, Heroes of the Storm, and Counter-Strike all garner consistently high viewership, and fighting games like Street Fighter and Super Smash Bros. are steadily growing thanks to their strong grassroots communities.

But what about engagement? Looking further into the viewership statistics for LoL Worlds 2014, the average time watched per-viewer was only 67 minutes. Considering that the broadcast was over five hours long, it seems that most people aren’t paying very close attention to what’s happening. But this relative lack of engagement isn’t surprising, because League of Legends is a terrible spectator game.

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Thoughts on Diablo, Botting, Trading, and Competitive Viability
October 26th, 2015 by

Diablo 3, for all its terribleness on release in 2012, has actually developed into a pretty good game over the last year or two. I give a lot of credit to the dev team for pushing through and making something good out of a project that could have easily been abandoned. Since the 2014 release of “Reaper of Souls” and the introduction of Seasons, I’ve logged in each Season had a blast creating a new character, finding the best items, and slaying demons with a few of my buddies. It’s pretty impressive that Diablo 3 can call me back at all, considering how it initially violated the franchise that I loved so much.

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Crush Counters in SF5

October 25th, 2015 by

My favorite part of the Street Fighter 5 beta so far has been Crush Counters. They’re specific normal attacks that cause severe hitstun to the opponent on counter hit. SF5 is more simplified overall and has a greater focus on neutral, and Crush Counters fit perfectly with that design. Each character has 2 or 3 of them. Check out the video below for a demonstration.

As you can see from the video, you can potentially get huge damage off of this mechanic. Each character’s ability to land Crush Counters depends on their normals and spacing, and the follow up combos are just as unique to each character.

Crush Counters put a huge emphasis on proper spacing and knowing when to hit buttons (and when not to!) during the footsie game. The more I play SF5, the more I wish it was released now and not just in a weekend beta test!

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