StarCraft 2 Heart of the Swarm

StarCraft 2 Heart of the Swarm drastically differs from the gameplay style of the original StarCraft.  It breaks from a strictly Real Time Strategy style and features elements more akin to an Adventure or Role Playing Game.  The player is given many opportunities to make choices that will alter hero and unit abilities.  Some of which can be changed later on, but some cannot be altered, save starting a new campaign from the beginning.  The non-cimeatic character conversations are tailored to the choices you have made as well.

StarCraft 2 Heart of the Swarm, takes players on a campaign of vengeance against the series' main antagonist, Arcturus Mengsk.  The campaign mode, or story mode, delivers a very emotional journey featuring Sarah Kerrigan, the former Queen of Blades, and James Raynor, the hero from StarCraft 2 Wings of Liberty.  Along this journey, Kerrigan is forced to evolve not only the Zerg Swarm, but also herself.

For a more in-depth article about the campaign mode, see doyleclark.com

Diablo 3

For those that haven't tried Diablo 3 yet, I made a video that gave some details from Beta to Release Patch.


Diablo 3 - From Beta to release - Review from Doyle Clark on Vimeo.

Diablo 3 is Blizzard's fastest selling game of all time.  Also, it broke every sales record for a PC game during it's first few days.  Unfortunately, the honey moon didn't last long.  Many players quickly became dissatisfied with bugs and low drop rates.  In other words, it wasn't as fun to grind to higher levels like Diablo 2.

Blizzard has released new patches to the game very regularly since it's release in an attempt to solve drop-rate issues and balance issues between the classes.  If you haven't picked up a copy yet, why not give it a try now?

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Samsung Galaxy S4

Samsung Galaxy S4

Hardware:

An 8-core processor paired with 2 GB of memory keeps things snappy, while a 13 megapixel front camera is sure to keep you snapping.  Samsung has also beefed up their front facing camera to 5 megapixels which should be more than capable of 720p video capture.  Screen real-estate won't be an issue any longer now that it's been stretched up to 5 inches.  To make things a little clearer, that's not just 5 inches of 1080p, it's actually better than that.  Pixel density on the Samsung Galaxy S4 is 441ppi!  That's 115 more pixels per inch than the Retina Display on the Apple iPhone 5.

Samsung Galaxy S4 versus Apple iPhone 5

SG S4
2GB RAM, Exynos 5 Octa processor (which is a system-on-a-chip setup consisting of the Cortex-A7 (6-9 months old) and Cortex-A15 (15 month old tech)  Nothing particularly fancy here, just a new configuration for previous hardware.

Iphone5
1GB RAM, Apple A6 (another system-on-a-chip setup consisting of two processors, one dual-core and a tri-core)  Anyone familiar with Apples Mac computers knows that Apple continually does a lot more with a lot less.

Where Samsung is pulling ahead is on it's cameras.  13 megapixels on your external (versus the iPhone 5's 8 megapixels) and 5 megapixels on the front camera (versus Apple's 1.2 megapixel camera).  Photo fanatics will love the capabilities of this phone.  Hopefully it will not be plagued with some of the bugs of the S3.

I would like to agree with Samsung that they are taking charge of the cellphone market and leading on innovation, but almost all of their features seem to be reactions to Apple's iPhone 5.

For more on the Galaxy S4 head to TopicTech, where I guest-blog occasionally.

If you're tastes are a little less tech, head to my site doyleclark.com, where I blog about all sorts of Geeky topics including StarCraft 2 Heart of the Swarm.