“They’re going to tell the players’ stories, make us care who wins and who loses and have us see the matches as more than just an entertaining explosion of pixels.”
“that’s like if I took a sudden interest in finding out who Justin Bieber’s currently dating. Normally I couldn’t care less, but under the right circumstances - maybe a scandalous picture on TMZ or an alleged hookup with one of the Olsen twins - something could spark my curiosity”
Jinro's Na'vi reinforcements with upgraded infantry weapons.
So instead, I’m going to ignore the fact that LiquidHuk looked worthy of Code S when he spanked ST_Curious 2-0 in GSL Code A round of 32. And I’m going to resist the urge to discuss Tuesday’s start of Code S featuring Mvp, MC, July, and Hyperdub in a group of death that sent one of the favorites reeling to the up/down matches. I’m not going to talk about the IEM World Championships that start in a week with some of the biggest names in SC2, including IdrA, Squirtle, White-Ra, and MorroW. I won’t even make any “announcement jokes” because honestly, the only thing more tiresome than the announcements themselves have been the unoriginal jokes that have followed them around in every news post response and forum thread on the planet. No, I’m going to skip all of this and jump straight to the show match between Jinro and IdrA and the North American Star League announcement.
At 5:00pm on Monday I tuned into iNcontrol’s stream along with tens of thousands of other viewers around the world. It wasn’t perfect, there were plenty of things to improve upon, but they kept with a theme that I’ve tried to emphasize in the past: we need to know the players and care about how they do in order to truly get into the game. To quote the founders’ message on NASL.TV, “First we focus on the players. That means telling a story so that every match means something. We want you to connect on a personal level with the players, so that their victory lifts you up, and you feel the crush of their defeat.” Exactly!
My wife tried to watch some of the series with me and even though she ultimately got bored and watched The Amazing Race instead, she at least asked “who’s that?” when Artosis was interviewing Jinro and she asked who the commentators were and whether or not they were famous too. It might not sound like much, but that’s like if I took a sudden interest in finding out who Justin Bieber’s currently dating. Normally I couldn’t care less, but under the right circumstances - maybe a scandalous picture on TMZ or an alleged hookup with one of the Olsen twins - something could spark my curiosity. For my wife, it was partially the fact that our apartment is too small for her to avoid watching whatever I have on the TV but also a tribute to what a great job iNcontrol, Gretorp, Artosis and others did in really trying to make this a show and not just a collection of StarCraft II matches.
The series itself was good but not jaw droppingly awesome. The most impressive thing to me was how calm Jinro remained under the pressure from IdrA’s mutalisk flock. Despite losing countless turrets, refineries and helpless SVCs, he always managed to find a way to have a crap-load more “stuff” than any normal Terran would’ve had in his position. Time after time it seemed like Jinro should be behind, he had lost a few vulnerable siege tanks or a couple medivacs with marines. Yet he always managed to have a big enough army to put pressure back on IdrA. To reference to Avatar again, it was like after the humans had leveled the Great Tree and decimated what appeared to be all of the Na'vi’s forces. It looked like they were way ahead, but then suddenly millions of Na'vi that we didn’t even know existed showed up and pushed back the assault. And in Jinro’s case, his Na’vi reinforcements even learned how to pilot thors and remembered to research their infantry upgrades.
IdrA had plenty of impressive moves of his own. His Muta harass was nearly flawless, always finding ways to poke in and disrupt Jinro’s economy. I had watched the Code A games earlier where Zerg players were trading half a dozen mutas for a couple SVCs and a turret; IdrA was much more cost effective, making calculated decisions about when to attack and when to fly away. It wasn’t quite enough to deal with the platoon of Na’vi piloted thors that kept showing up out of nowhere, but he almost forced a game seven: on Crevass he was up by a couple bases, Jinro was minutes away from mining out completely but had just enough of an army left to force the “gg” from IdrA and secure the victory. Even Jinro admitted that the games he won could have easily gone either way, graciously giving IdrA 60-40 odds on some of the maps. All in all, it was an entertaining series and a good jumping off point for the North American Star League.
I don’t want to get into the specifics of how the the NASL will work since you can read about it elsewhere and I’m already approaching Avatar-esque length with this column, but suffice to say it’s potentially the biggest thing to happen for Western eSports ever. It will give many players an opportunity to make a name for themselves without needing to fly halfway around the world and miss out on a lot of other tournaments in an attempt to eventually make it to Code S where the real money and prestige lies. Creating a new league of this magnitude is a very ambitious endeavor but I like where their heads are at, I applaud the effort and I think they’ll do a phenomenal job. They’re going to tell the players’ stories, make us care who wins and who loses and have us see the matches as more than just an entertaining explosion of pixels. I can’t wait!
