Category: Gaming

Terraria: So Addictive It Turns Minutes Into Hours


Once in a while you come across a game that is so much fun to play that you just can’t put it down. I recently came across the title Terraria which was produced by a small team of programmers a couple of months ago this game has quite often been the reason for some really late nights.

Recently I have been making a return to indy games and moving away from the more serious titles that I usually play like Counter-Strike, Call of Duty and Starcraft and I am glad I found Terraria.

It is the kind of game you sit down to play for 5 minutes but end up playing for hours. A word of warning, if you get addicted to video games easily approach this one with caution because you might end up wasting away glued in front of your computer screen! Continue reading “Terraria: So Addictive It Turns Minutes Into Hours”


Starcraft 2: The Complete Noob’s Guide

A list of resources for Starcraft 2 beginners.

A good list of resources for Starcraft 2 Beginners at the end of the article.

After playing through the (thoroughly impressive) Starcraft 2 campaign lately I decided that I was ready to give multiplayer a go. So I fired it up, logged into my trusty battle.net account and joined the practise league. The addition of an unranked practise league was a pleasant suprise as I had a sneaking suspicion that my Win/Loss ratio would be well in the negative range after a few games.

I decided to stick with the Terran as I was already familiar with their units from the campaign missions. I was paired up with ‘Nathan’. As the timer ticked over and the game began Nathan informed me that this was his first time online and that I should go easy on him. Needless to sayI was wiped off the map in less than 25 minutes by a giant fleet of Motherships. My poor 50 or so strong batallion of Marines didn’t stand a chance.

I think Nathan may have been a bit dishonest or maybe he was just an RTS natural or Korean or something. Feeling a bit disgraced I moved on to another game. In an effort to prevent the same thing from happening again I concentrated a bit more on air defense but the next game only lasted 15 minutes after another so-called ‘first-timer’ sent a column of Siege Tanks through my base.

This brings me to my first piece of advice. Starcraft has a replay feature. Use it! If you get completely annihilated make sure you save the replay and watch it back. This way you can see exactly what your opponent did to get himself in a position to completely trample your inferior efforts. Continue reading “Starcraft 2: The Complete Noob’s Guide”

Starcraft 2: How to increase digital download speed

Throttle your upload speed on the Starcraft 2 downloader to increase download speed.

 

Running NetLimiter on the Starcraft 2 downloader to increase download speed.

As I write this I have just begun downloading Starcraft 2 after purchasing the digital download copy off of battle.net. I don’t know about anyone else but when I buy a game, especially one as long-awaited as Starcraft, I am itching to load it up and start playing it straight away!

Anyway, I started the 6.99gb download about half an hour ago. To begin with, the SC2 downloader gave me an estimated time of about 4 hours, which is ok I guess. But a few minutes later I watched in horror as the estimated time increased, 6 hours, 8 hours and so on. I looked at the connection details and realised that the downloader uses peer-to-peer sharing and that my upload speed was now higher than my download speed!

Fortunately within the downloader there is an option to switch off peer-to-peer sharing and just use direct downloading. I tried that but the speed barely increased. A quick scan of a few forums put me on to a little piece of software called NetLimiter. After installing NetLimiter I was able to re-enable the peer-to-peer method of downloading and limit the upload speed (within NetLimiter) to around 30kbps which saw my download speed eventually increase to around 900kbps.

A few points to be aware of:

  • Limiting your upload speed too drastically seems to also drag your download speed down as well, so don’t go cutting it back too much.
  • Inside the preferences for the Starcraft 2 downloader there is an option to disable background download throttling which I would also suggest you set.
  • NetLimiter runs as a 28-day trial. Should you need to use it past the trial period then it only costs $30USD for a single user license.

I’ll let you know how Starcraft goes!

Also if anyone has their own experiences, suggestions or comments please leave me a comment.

For a detailed and comprehensive guide to the art of Starcraft II be sure to check out the Shokz Starcraft II Strategy guide as well.

Thanks for reading.