Hello all. NASL has finally started up and had been the centre of attention for the foreign Starcraft scene all week, generally overshadowing even high profile events like Dreamhack. I'll make a disclaimer here, I didn't catch all the games, but I got most of them, probably 22 of 25 matches, and well over 44 games of SCII. In a single week. It ended up going for about three, three and a half hours each night. And most of the games were pretty good. Despite many predictions there really weren't any walkovers, Stalife dde and ViBe all put up solid games, and took some wins.
Now there is a ton of bitching and whining about just about every aspect of NASL. I bought an HD pass after watching the first couple days, and I loved it. The quality was very good, no lag or choppiness, and only a couple technical glitches. It wasn't perfectly done, one match got spoiled ahead of time (I'm assuming the games were played in a different order than they were broadcasted), and in Painuser/Cloud this weekend they accidentally showed game three first, then went on to the next match, before showing the whole series again later. But it was worth the 25$, given the overall high quality matches.
In addition their is much bitching about the caster and observers. While I agree that they should probably get a professional observer, the casters are just fine. Not on par with DJwheat/Day9, but they are going to get a looooooot of practise. By the end of season 1, InControl/Gretorp will be up there with Tastosis with familiarity.
Warning: Spoilers ahead! You have been warned!
And the match quality was very good too. It's true that many games fade into the background, but I can clearly remember a good twenty individual games out of 49 games (Despite three matches being cancelled, I'm pretty sure there was more than that. Either my Math is off or NASL still needs to update their race stats page). And some of those games really stand out in my mind, and I'll tell you about one of my favourites:
Kiwikaki vs Fenix, game 1:
Game 1: Kiwikaki opens up with three gate pressure, and gets a ton of SCV kills while remaining about equal in army. At one point it was something like 36 probes to 18 SCVs. Finally Kiwikaki lets up, and Fenix knows he needs to counter. About two minutes later, the supply is a good twenty in Kiwikaki's favour, and Fenix does a two pronged attack, landing two medivacs full of infanty in the back of the main, and running about four marauders and a couple marines into the front. Kiwikaki's army is about in the middle of his base. He sends most of his army to deal with the drop, and so the battle in the front begins to go Fenix's way. At the same time, the drop starts killing probes before Kiwi's army runs in. but it gets squeezed between the Nexus and some nearby buildings, and gets fed into a meatgrinder of an army. The zealots got stuck behind the Stalkers, and Kiwikaki's front line melted surprisingly fast over and over to 4 marauders, 8 marines and two medivacs. And suddenly Kiwikaki didn't have an army. He eventually help off the attack on his natural, and brought that army back to deal with the drop, which mostly escaped. And then he was down 30 harvesters and a smaller army, and that was pretty much game.
Other Favourite Games:
Kiwikaki vs Fenix Game 2
TLO vs Vibe Game 1
Morrow vs Rainbow if you like seeing Koreans obliterated
dde vs Nada (Game 3 was particularly epic)
Squitle vs Axslav Game 1
Players who impressed me most:
Fenix
dde
Nada
Cloud
Grubby
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