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General13 years agoCraig "Creegz" Bray

Blizzard Adds Public Beta Content

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Blizzard has added 3 new maps to the custom map roster for the public to enjoy and test out.

On January 25th, Blizzard announced that they had released some custom maps for all users to enjoy. These maps are small spoofs on some popular things in todays culture. They present us with 3 as of now which are Aiur Chef, a spinoff of Iron Chef, Starjeweled, which is basic tower defense with Bejeweled, and Left 2 Die, a wave defense based game, also parody of Valve's hit, Left 4 Dead. You can play these by going into custom game and then searching for either map, or just join a custom game, and it will download the map for you.

Starjeweled, a favorite with myself and a couple of friends is a very simple game, essentially the goal is to assault the other teams tower and destroy it. The catch here being that you need to play the popular PopCap game, Bejeweled, in order to gain "energy" and therein bring stronger units into the field to push the base. Each side has 1 to 2 team members and depending on that, 1 or 2 lanes of marines running forwards towards the enemy base. There is 3 points with 2 pylons on each side to slow this force down. Pushing with units earned by energy while using special abilities like Psionic Storm to diminish or benefit your small army in pushing for a shot at their tower.

Aiur Chef, another one of my personally more enjoyed game modes is basically just a locked camera game where you, a Zealot, equipped with cooking tools on your hands instead of knives, must run across a small map collecting ingredients, making recipes, faster than up to 10 others, that are worth points and some have benefit items that give you an advantage, like forcing all players to dance, or blinding them for a short time. You must get the secret ingredient, announced before each round, and make as many recipes as possible to get more points than the others, and become the next Aiur Chef.

The last, but definitely not least is Left 2 Die, an interesting little game where the goal is to survive against waves of special Zerg units. There is reference to Left 4 Dead in some of these special units, such as a Boomer like unit, a Hunter like unit, and I never made it far enough to see a tank or anything. The days burn the infected up, and during the days you need to build up and make your defense stronger, during the nights, you fight with traditional Terran units like Marines, Marauders and Medics, as well as Vultures added to the mix for fun. This is 2 players and there is a harder mode called Night 2 Die, where there is no daybreak, just wave after wave of Zerg infected all the time, so macro and micro come heavily into play here.

The long and short of it is, that in spite of the game being an RTS, it shows what is possible with the map editor, and how much fun people can have with the game. Custom maps like Raynor Party show this to be true, but the fun to be had with these new maps is pretty endless, and will give you a break from the traditional ladder up while playing with your friends or even just random players of the community. All in all, I think everyone should at least give these a shot and see what they're all about. There's a lot of fun little jokes in each of them if you do the right things, but even without that, they're still a lot of fun.

Links
Starcraft 2 Blog - Read more from Starcraft2.com's Blog
Raynor Party Information - Raynor party can be found here

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