Starcraft II, game seven: grand [sic] finale

The game is Starcraft II played in a series of 1v1 matches, with the winner being the first to four victories. The map is Metalopolis, which features four starting positions behind narrow ramps, and two gold mineral expansions in the center. The races are randomly determined, just like real life generals. The players are Tom Chick, ranked 5th in his division in the silver league, and Kelly Wand, who has one of those dragon icons in Warcraft III but hasn’t even played the stupid campaign in Starcraft II.

The score so far: Tom: 3, Kelly: 3

Game seven after the jump

Kelly: Game 7s sound dramatic but most of the sports ones I can recall seeing were one-sided blow-outs. Tom arbitrarily decides that since this game is so “important,” we won’t be torturing each other over Skype since my gibberish is more distracting than his. Instead, he’s going to play loud music to get himself “pumped” as he plays. When he ponders what audio selections would be optimal, I suggest Rush. Instead, he puts on something by the Turtles. This is what’s known in the writing biz as foreshadowing. Forechecking’s the one you do before sex to get your partner worked into an erotic frenzy, which also applies here.

Tom: Since things have gotten real, I’ve decided that I’m not going to be multitasking while I play. And trying to keep up with what Kellywand is saying is multitasking. Playing an RTS is already multitasking. I can’t multitask while I mutlitask.

Kelly: One of the allegedly most famous game 7’s in sports history occurred on May 8, 1970, when New York Knicks captain Willis Reed, barely able to walk from a torn thigh muscle that had left him benched during game 6 of the NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers, limped onto the court at the outset and scored two field goals on his first two shots, which rallied the Knicks into defeating the Lakers and “netting” New York City its first ever NBA title. According to the sports website Wikipedia, “the moment Reed walked onto the court was voted the greatest moment in the history of Madison Square Garden.” [citation needed] I suspect the Lakers, on hostile turf and coming off a win, were probably taking it easy on an obviously gimped opponent and weren’t going out of their way to foul Reed out, but okay. I guess you can’t have a Best Moment Ever in sports unless it’s committed by someone too injured to legally play. For Christmas, some chick gave me a Celtics T-shirt that says “Fuckobe” on it. I’m not scared to wear it to Staples Center but I am leery about wearing it to restaurants where my food can be tampered with. I suspect Tom’s never been to Staples Center unless it was for a Casey Affleck festival.

Tom: Awesome, I get the Zerg. I scout with my overlord and find Kelly immediately south of me. He’s the Terrans, so he’ll be walling in expecting me to attack, probably with mutalisks. So there’s one thing I won’t be doing. Time to boom a little. Drones, drones, and more drones.

Kelly: My favorite game 7 ever was the movie Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood. This is the one after the one where the guy who played Horshack on Welcome Back, Kotter dumbly brings Jason Voorhees back to life by digging his body up and letting it get struck by lightning. Jason pays Horshack back by comically punching his heart out through his ribcage just like Mr. Woodman always dreamed of doing to Kotter but could never work up the energy because he was like 74 years old on a good day. In The New Blood, Jason has an unusually well-matched opponent in the form of a teenage girl with telekinesis like Carrie, only she’s hotter than Carrie. The girl uses her psi powers to not only injure Jason by skewering him with pipes and knocking him downstairs and setting him on fire but to bring her father back from the dead to hug Jason to death and pull him down into Crystal Lake, a repository that hasn’t been statistically impressive as a means of confinement throughout the series but whatever. This girl survives and Jason never comes after her again in subsequent installments, instead focusing his attentions on the city of Manhattan after electricity once again brings him back to annoying life. In Weekend at Bernie’s 2, Bernie dances after some voodoo turns him into a zombie. Maybe if Jason kept stabbing Bernie’s dancing body with stuff and Jason, like everyone else, thought Bernie was still alive, Jason would see the childish folly inherent in his whole agenda and find something more productive to use his own powers for, like rotating valves on deepsea oil pipelines or planting flags on other planets graced with the emblem of Crystal Lake. I’d feel shy making out with a telekinetic girl; it’s not like she needs me at all.

Tom: I’ve got a few zerglings out when Kelly comes scouting with an SCV. I chase it away and park my units along the road between our bases. I’ll amass here until I’m ready to attack. I think I’ll tech up to burrowed roaches. No one ever expects early stealth units.

Kelly: The least good seventh anything is probably Diamonds Are Forever.

Tom: Actually, before I attack, I figure I’ll boom a little more. I start up a second hatchery and go heavy on the drones. In the games I won, I tended to have twice as many workers as Kelly. The economic advantage has served me well in the past.

Kelly: The Seventh is also maybe my favorite book in the Parker series by Richard Stark, the pseudonym for crime fiction novelist Donald Westlake. Parker is a grouchy misanthropic thief played by Mel Gibson in the movie Payback, although for some reason they changed his name to Porter, and for some reason a lot of people including Westlake prefer the 1967 John Boorman movie Point Blank to Payback, although I admit Lee Marvin looks more like the Parker from the books than wee Gibson. The Seventh opens with Parker, laying low after a successful heist at a college football game, returning to his temporary digs to find the girl he’s been staying with pinned to the headboard in their bedroom with a sword, all the loot gone from the closet where he stahsed it, and the cops showing up two minutes later, tipped by the guy who killed her and framed Parker for her murder. It’s the seventh book in the series but the title also refers to Parker’s share of the money he stole with six other dudes. One of these guys is a midget who’s always talking shit to Parker until Parker gets fed up and throws him across the room. Tom’s not a midget but you get the idea.

Tom: Oops, I’m being attacked on the road between our bases. What the…? Where did he get so many units? Marauders and marines? I need to pull back while I make some more units. Later, the replay will show that he has 14 marines and 5 marauders. I have 6 roaches and 5 zerglings. I ask you: How is that fair?

Kelly: The movie Seven ends with a body part in a box, as does a song written and performed by Justin Timberlake and Andy Samberg on SNL that became a viral Internet sensation in the year 2007. Lucky Number Slevin featured Lucy Liu, who’s also in Payback (see above), as well as Morgan Freeman and Bruce Willis, both of whom appeared in Bonfire of the Vanities, although only Freeman appeared in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, starring Kevin Costner, who also starred in JFK with Kevin Bacon. Coincidence? On a personal note, I watched the Costner movie Mr. Brooks only because I’d heard Dane Cook dies in it.

Tom: Kelly actually follows me all the way to my expansion, and then up the ramp to my main base, where I don’t have nearly enough units to contend with the onslaught. How did he do this? Yeah, yeah, the classic explanation is that I was booming, and he was rushing. That’s just how it works. But more to the point, how did he do this?

Kelly: I hope for the sake of the children that the film Seven Brides for Seven Brothers wasn’t based on a real event. I always thought it was cool that both the main dude and his longtime buddy in The Seven Samurai survive at the end. All that shit was just another day in their lives. It was epic to everyone else but for them, it was just another Thursday. The seventh least interesting day they probably had that week.

Tom: That was just horrible. I apologize that you had to see that. I think I need a cider.

Kelly: If you pair off each cast member of Gilligan’s Island with one of the seven deadly sins, the Professor, by the process of elimination, has to be Wrath.

Score: Kelly: 4 Tom: 3
Winner: Kelly

Previously: Game one, game two, game three, game four, game five, game six