Blizzard isn't in the habit of handing out game release dates until they're good and ready, so when they say StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty will be hitting store shelves worldwide in late July, they damn well mean it.

StarCraft II is possibly the most eagerly anticipated real-time strategy game in the history of the genre, and now that anticipation has a white-hot target - July 27, 2010. That's when the game will start hitting retail stores around the world, including the United States, Canada, Europe, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Mexico, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and the regions of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.

Is that a wide enough release for you?

"We've been looking forward to revisiting the StarCraft universe for many years, and we're excited that the time for that is almost here," said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. "Thanks to our beta testers, we're making great progress on the final stages of development, and we'll be ready to welcome players all over the world to StarCraft II and the new Battle.net in just a few months."

You might want to start lining up outside your nearest retailer now.

Now beta only maahhh

After 4-5 years of development, things like this are unforgivable.

I hope i dont have to go through another "shit game at first few months,then, awesome game later" situation again.

No doubt it looks great now,but some of the fundamental stuff isnt there.

For these who played WoW before, is it using the same Blizzard Downloader tool for getting patches and co?

I never managed to get a "green" connection with that thing, even when able to run other torrent stuff perfectly fine on the side.

Sucks if they use this for the full game, that thing is good for US/EU but pretty crap for the rest of us 

there was some connection issues due to another earthquake so that affected the patching a lot...
actually u dun have to restart the game for each patch...
i patched up from a clean install up to patch 10 at 1 go (no doubt it'll install 1 by 1)...
and the patching is cached so u dun really have to patch all 1 shot...

it would be a lot more hassle to get it else where.
if buy online on battle.net it would probably be cheaper (usd59.99) but it will probably take ages to download.
collectors edition buyers must buy physical copy and cannot resort to this option.

anyways, i wonder how will the 100+ collectors edition buyer in my pre-order list react if the local pricing for collectors edition is outrageously high.
with SMM, it is possible that they may jack the price up to RM400 - RM500

eh, it only took me 2+ hours to patch version 9 and 10 with a 2meg connection, how could it take so long? 

did u download ur installer from bnet itself or other sources?
cause i'm downloading directly from bnet and its fine for me...

I was thinking of buying a mouse for gaming, esspecially for SC2 online play. Was thinking fo getting Logitech MX518. Any suggestions?

Blizzard's Galaxy Editor for StarCraft II does more than custom maps and Mario Kart-style mods, it does screen-filling bullet hell shooters too! Want proof? See how hellish this Touhou-style shoot 'em up mod performs. [via GameSetWatch]

[FIX] StarCraft 2 freeze/lag fix
by sultanaf on Apr.17, 2010, under Windows 7, starcraft 2

The Problem:

I’ve been playing the long-awaited StarCraft 2 (Beta) recently and it doesn’t disappoint. I am running Windows 7 (64 bit) with an ATI Radeon HD 3400 video card. I ran into some complications while playing the game. Specifically, it would freeze in-game for a while and sometimes long enough for me to be dropped from the game.

The Internet?

At first I though it was my internet connection which was causing the lag. After some investigation, it turns out it wasn’t the internet connection (the game was also freezing during replays as well).

The Video Card?

Next I suspected the video card was over heating. I ran a temperature monitor with a CPU monitor while playing the game. It seems that under normal game play, the temperature was around 70 C. Once the game froze, the GPU temperature dropped and the CPU usage spiked to 100%.

The CPU?

After digging around a little bit, I came across a few threads on people having the same problem. They seemed to have fixed this problem by running the game on a single CPU core instead of the default multi-core setup. Specifically CPU 1 seems to be the magic core. I tried that but with no success. It was time to dig a little deeper.

The Solution:

The problem lies with Physx. StarCraft 2 comes with a version of Physx but with certain drivers, the latest version is required to run the game smoothly. Physx basically allows the game physics to be CPU powered rather than being powered by the graphics card. it is also referred by some as Software Physics. Make sure you have the latest version of Physx installed. it is required regardless of whether the you have an ATI or nVidia card. This should do it!

If you are still having this problem, add -skipopenal -nocpubinding to the Target field of the StarCraft 2 shortcut and try again.

Enjoy

[FIX] Another StarCraft 2 lag fix
by sultanaf on Apr.22, 2010, under starcraft 2

Aside from the previous fix I posted, I have another fix for the in-game lag in StarCraft 2. The lag could be caused by the GPU rendering the frames at max speed which might cause the video card to overheat and slow down the game.

The following will help by telling StarCraft 2 to limit the behavior:

  1. Open My Documents\StarCraft II Beta\variables.txt using Notepad (or any other text editor)
  2. Add the following two lines to the file:
      Frameratecapglue=30
      Frameratecap=60
  3. Save the txt file and you’re done.

The frameratecapglue variable controls menu screens framerates. The frameratecap controls the in-game framerate. I have chosen 60 as I am running this game on a laptop (60 is the max refresh rate for my monitor) but you can choose any number that fits your configuration.

Ass thee famous quote goes how do you kill some 1 with no life. LoL