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starcraftgamer

10 karma · joined July 8, 2024

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starcraftgamer··on Brood War Korean Translations
Yes as zerg the lost supply is counted, so you can either go 12 hatch 11 pool 10 gas or 12-12-12 if you want to be a little bit more economically greedy at the expense of making it much harder to hold 8rax in ZvT as an example.

As you get later into the game people who play more seriously also use the in-game clock, or timing a building placement relative to how complete a different building is to determine building timing. This helps with subtleties like whether you lost your scouting worker or not (-1 supply), if the early game got really weird because you had to build more units to hold some aggression, etc.

starcraftgamer··on Brood War Korean Translations
A lot of Korean slang is a little different. Source: not Korean but have been in the English community a long time and picked some stuff up.

"1rax double" is equivalent to "1rax expand" or "1rax CC". They use multi or double to mean expand in the early game. Instead of "cheese" or "all-in" they use "pil-sal-gi" which means ace/joker card or "han-bang" which means an army or attack on few resources.

I am not sure what short-hand they use for barracks, gateway, etc.

starcraftgamer··on Brood War Korean Translations
I've been watching BW out of Korea since 2007. Previously also played but it's been many years. This is really cool, thanks for sharing!

There are two YouTube channels I wanted to take the opportunity to shout out, the first one does English translations of Korean BW content, and the second one provides commentary on recent tournaments like the ASL with a little bit more depth then Tasteless and Artosis (no hate but to me their commentary is too off topic and they miss basic things about build orders).

https://www.youtube.com/@jinjinBW

https://m.youtube.com/@StarCastTVENG

starcraftgamer··on Starcraft (A History in Two Acts)
SC2 was never that popular in Korea to be honest. SC1 pros came over to the game because there was decent money in it, but in PC Bangs people were still playing SC1 and League far more often. Blizzard tried to spend a lot to market the game in Korea but it didn't really take off with the general public.

Even today the GSL (the most competitive individual league for SC2) just had its last championship and is cancelled while the ASL (the most competitive individual league for SC1) is still going strong. However it was much bigger before SC2's release.

Not to take anything away from Serral, he's a fantastic player, but Korea was never as invested in SC2 as they were in SC1. Players were getting by on extremely strong mechanics and there wasn't the kind of professional team infrastructure that existed around SC1.

starcraftgamer··on Starcraft (A History in Two Acts)
Long time HN lurker, decided to make an account because I have some knowledge about this.

I think there are two interesting things the article misses around PC bangs:

1. StarCraft could run on a potato. The PCs in these cafes were not always the most modern, and the lack of system requirements was a big boon to StarCraft taking off. This is also why League of Legends became very popular in South Korea.

2. Ironically, piracy. The article mentions that cafes bought copies of StarCraft to install on their PCs. This isn't quite correct, in practice a single CD key would be used to install StarCraft on all PCs in the cafe.

StarCraft Brood War in Korea is alive and well. It's had a recent resurgence and is currently the most watched game on their popular local streaming service Afreeca (essentially Korean Twitch.tv).