I met Jeannie over at the Strifeshadow forums. For those of you who don't know, Strifeshadow is an RTS game being developed over at Ethermoon.com. The game looks really great. Jeannie and myself both agreed that we would be buying it the day of its release.

One day, Jeannie and I were doing a little bit of chatting over ICQ and we started talking about Strifeshadow. Suddenly, Jeannie had an idea. Her exact comment was:

---

I've heard that Blizzard has been keeping a close eye on Strifeshadow. I bet Blizzard has already started incorporating Strifeshadow features into Starcraft in order to stay competitive with their rival.

---

---

Summoning a Chaos Djinn is a ritual spell. It takes 3 Cabalists, arranging themselves into a small triangle, a while to perform this ritual.

---

SUMMONING THE DJINN: ATTEMPT 1

Now the key to summoning the djinn was going to be to get the drones into the triangular formation and begin the summoning as soon as possible. YourRoleModel had said that it takes "a while to perform the ritual" but he didn't say how long. So Jeannie took three of her first four drones and arranged them making sure that the drones all faced towards the center of the triangle. She set the fourth drone to patrol the isle, looking for trouble. Then the waiting begain.

Now Jeannie wasn't trying to be sneaky about her intentions. She immediately informed ronin of her intentions.

Ronin definitely seemed to be intimidated by Jeannie's strat.

Well, the drones continued to work on the ritual. They didn't seem to be making any progress in my opinion. Suddenly, two corsairs flew over Jeannie's main. This seemed ominous to me but Jeannie was confident that the spell would be completed and the djinn would soon arise.

Ronin saw the drones in their ritual stance and he realized that a Chaos Djinn would soon be appearing. Not wanting to be unprepared, he gathered 6 corsairs over the spell casting drones. Suddenly Jeannie saw something, although I missed it.

The ritual was almost complete and Jeannie was convinced that one Chaos Djinn would be enough to take on the Protoss minions. Suddenly, a shuttle appeared over Jeannie's hatchery. Out of the shuttle popped two dragoons. They focused their energy bolts on the hatchery. Jeannie was perplexed by this, why didn't the dragoons focus on the drones? They were the real threat.

I watched the hitpoints on the hatchery drop and I began to wonder if the Djinn would be summoned in time. Apparently not...

The final scores...

We were a little bit disappointed by our failure. However, there were two other races. Perhaps the terran would be able to summon the djinn faster.

SUMMONING THE DJINN: ATTEMPT 2

Jeannie quickly took her first 3 SCVs and put them into formation on the north side of her command center. As we learned in the first game, summoning a Djinn takes a lot of time and the sooner the SCVs got into formation, the better.

It wasn't long before an enemy overlord floated over the command center. Brian threw out a snide remark.

He obviously didn't recognize the power of the Djinn and Jeannie let him know about it.

Unfortunately for Jeannie, the SCVs did not prove to be any more effective in summoning a Chaos Djinn then the drones in the previous game. Mutas began flying into the base and the mutas were smart. They went after the ritual casting SCVs first, driving them apart. Without the Djinn, the SCVs were powerless and were quickly destroyed. Jeannie realized that she was about to lose her second consecutive game. Obviously she wasn't a big fan of losing, though I don't necessarily approve of her solution to the dilemma.

Unfortunately for Jeannie, it was only 11 o'clock in the morning, and this isn't the horniest time of the day for most guys. His answer was abrupt.

But then, as the Command center exploded to muta fire, he suddenly seemed to realize what he had turned down.

Obviously, Jeannie did not comply with this request.

SUMMONING THE DJINN: ATTEMPT 3

Once again, Jeannie took her first 3 probes and had them assume the formation.

Jeannie had learned an important lesson from the first two games. She understood now that YourRoleModel had been very serious when he had said that it takes a while to perform this spell. What Jeannie realized was that she would need to keep her opponent distracted as long as possible in order to provide time for the ritual to be completed. In order to do this, she started a dialogue with her opponent. The more time his fingers spent on the keyboard chatting with her, the less time he would have to manage his base and his troops.

Jeannie's tactical chatting was brilliant. It bought us a lot of time and suddenly a static noise sounded. I quickly centered my screen over the ritual casting probes. Excitedly I realized that between the probes was the energy from which the Chaos Djinn would be spawned!

With newfound confidence, Jeannie informed Endz of the problem he was about to be facing.

And just as suddenly as victory seemed assured, defeat reared its ugly head. The Chaos Djinn couldn't have been more than seconds away from completion when a group of mutas flew into Jeannie's base. They immediately focused fire on the probes. The probes scattered and the warp ended. Jeannie expressed her frustration. You could tell she was pissed because she very rarely utters swear words.

The game ends with the mutas destroying Jeannie's Nexus. Endz obviously wasn't able to realize how close to losing the game he had been (perhaps due to his magenta penis).

Of course, Jeannie tries to explain her strategy to his dense mind.

And with that exchange, the game ended.

ENDING A ROUGH DAY

Cheers,