Gaming
IEM season IX in Katowice, RO16 Predictions
I am very excited that Intel Extreme Masters season IX – World Championship will start in one week in Katowice, Poland. IEM is one of the biggest Global tournaments sponsored by Intel, HyperX, Benq, GIGABYTE and Roccat, where professional gamers compete against each other to win more than 110.000$ in Starcraft 2, and over 180.000$ in League of Legends. While the played games are changed each year, we’ve seen in past seasons games like Warcraft 3, Counter-Strike, DOTA, but for the last 3 seasons only Starcraft 2 and League of Legends were the games featured. Well, I’m here to tell you my predictions about Starcraft 2, the game we all love and hate at the same time.
The tournament format is based on choosing 16 different players, 8 from previous past IEM events like IEM Shenzhen, Toronto, San Jose and Taipei from where the winners and the runners-up had qualified. The remaining 8 spots were decided through 3 single-elimination qualifiers: Asian, American and European qualifier, each region having 2 spots, but Asia got a bonus spot for being the world champion and Europe received one for being the home region.
As I mentioned before, players compete to win the huge prize-pool but also up to 1.500 World Championship Series (WCS) points. The 16 players, 5 Protosses, 7 Terrans and 4 Zergs will face each other on maps like: Catallena, Deadwing, Expedition Lost, Overgrowth, Inferno Pools, Secret Spring and Vaani Research Station in a single-elimination tournament. All the matches will be played as best of 5 except the Grand Finals which will be played in a best of 7 game.
Predictions.
herO vs Cure
*herO needs to find a Cure*. As long as herO keeps his PvT at a high level, I’ll just say that this will be a 3-1 for herO having his 3 previous Gold Medals back up my prediction. As a Terran player myself, I root for Cure but let’s face it, Cure is some kind of a new player on the Starcraft 2 scene without Major Championship wins.
Bbyong vs Solar
*Bbyong makes the Solar system* or in this case the other way around. Congratulations to Bbyong for reaching his first IEM World Championship Final but the odds are not in his favor, having to play against Solar makes it pretty hard for him to win. Although he reached this far I’ll say it’s gonna be a 3-2 for Solar, just to give him some credit because let’s face it Terran is OP right now, having 7 Terrans in the round of 16.
Zest vs Hydra
*Zest didn’t hail Hydra*. Hydra lost against San last IEM season, so his ZvP is not that strong and he’ll need to have a perfect ZvP to be able to beat Zest, who is currently in the top 3 Protosses in the world. So, I’ll just say it. 3-1 for Zest.
Innovation vs Life
*Innovation needs a Life*. Well, everybody is waiting for this match, it’s probably the most difficult match to predict. Both players are consistent and very well known so if both of them are in good shape, it will be an epic match. With impressive achievements and years of experience I can’t wait to see this match-up but it’s too bad that these 2 guys are facing each other now instead of the Grand Finals. 3-2 for Life.. maybe, I can’t tell for sure. Sorry.
Flash vs Trap
*Flash, it’s a Trap*. God is Flash, Flash is God. Flash, the “God” of Starcraft will indeed need a trap to lose this game but let’s not forget about Trap, whose latest matches were pretty awesome but of course as a Terran player and a fan of “God” this will be a 3-1 for Flash if he doesn’t have a bad day.
FanTaSy vs Rain
*FanTaSy singing in the Rain*. Another PvT which for me is easy to predict. 3-0 for Rain, Rain has a lot of experience with IEM and also Major Tournaments and in this match it will be a matter of experience. Don’t forget that every player in this tournament is a top player in Korea, but not everybody has an international experience like Rain does.
Maru vs Patience
*Maru is not very “Patience”*. This is the match in which I expect to see a lot of cheeses, both players have some good cheeses up their sleeves and maybe Patience will take one game away from Maru just because he will make a good cheese against him and Maru will not pay attention. 3-1 for Maru, the prodigy kid.
Dark vs Taeja
*Welcome to the Dark side, Taeja*. Even though Taeja’s last year games were perfect in many ways, winning a lot of tournaments with mostly 3-0 matches, he even had the perfect tournament with a 1st place win, with the over-all score of 18-0, but ever since he went back to Korea his results were not that conclusive. He’ll have to face Dark who is in the top 3 Zergs at the moment and even if Taeja showed a great TvZ, he might just get rolled over by Dark with a 3-2 for Dark.
This is a bracket full of Koreans and Terrans, too bad we won’t see any European or American players, although Snute almost made it into the bracket this year. He will be at IEM in Katowice as a game analyzer.
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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