After several weeks of waiting, two have been selected to be the first ever compLexity Academy shoutcasters. The competition was vast, but in the end there were only two spots to give and two applications to shine above the rest.
Without further ado, the first commentator who has been selected is Adebisi and this is his story:
Hello everyone! My name is Mike, I use the handle “Adebisi” online and I’m pleased to be joining up with compLexity to cast for the compLexity Academy. To give a brief history of my gaming experience; As a young child I picked up a game called Warcraft 2, I don’t remember too much about it other than that I was awful and the peons said funny things. From there I fell in love with Blizzard games and picked up Starcraft as soon as it was released. I played through the campaign very quickly and started in on the multiplayer, mostly focusing on Money Maps and UMS games, although after playing for quite a while I found out about the joys of turbo newbieing people on Lost Temple and spent a lot of time doing that.
Adebisi
As I grew older and Starcraft got boring, and I got owned nonstop by kids in Clan x17, eventually a game called Warcraft 3 came out, I played it quite a bit, deciding that after being pretty newbie for my entire Starcraft career I wanted to be better. I played the ladder quite a bit, trying to focus on 1v1 but my interest slowly waned, I was always pretty good at he game but mostly just played casually as the RP-RTS style didn’t have the same zing of Starcraft to me, I played tons of team games and would occasionally do some hardcore smurfing on the ladder, before they fixed the match maker and you could go 50-0 pretty easily. Eventually though a friend of mine introduced me to a game called Lineage 2, I spent a LOT of time on this game, for anyone unfamiliar with Lineage 2, it is to Korea what WoW is to the Western World, only the grind is about 10 times as long and far more mindless, but it did have open PvP so the competitive spirit in it was much higher. I was one of the leaders of the top PvP guild on the primary server Bartz. After playing Lineage for a few years, I decided MMORPGs were no longer for me and decided to quit, as I’m sure anyone who’s played MMORPGs knows, they can be very taxing on your real life if you want to be competitive. From here I spent a few years in what I would consider “Gamer Limbo” without a real home, floating meaninglessly between games, playing more DotA than I would like to admit, until finally the Starcraft II beta came out.
Since the beta I have been playing Starcraft II, after my failed pledge to be good at WC3 I feel like I have accomplished my goals with SC2, being a top masters player, by no means on par with the professionals but being good enough to take the odd game off of some here and there, I began casting during the summer in 2010 when I had some spare time, starting up a YouTube channel to help fill the percieved void of the lack of Terran content out there, and since then I have been casting replays on and off, as well as casting live events here and there, I’m eager to work with the compLexity Academy and see some of the rising talent the North American scene has to offer!
The second of the two casters goes by the name of Wombat, and this is what he had to say:
Woah, a self written bio. Lots of pressure. So… I grew up in a small town in the south. We didn’t have dial-up internet until 1999 and broadband until 2001. Still, I loved gaming the entire time. Started out on a CoLeCoVision and an Atari 2600. I was pretty crap at everything in those days. Except Mr. Do. Had the sort of main systems growing up. And NES, then I was a Genesis kid, because hey! Sega does what Nintendon’t, know what I’m sayin’? But yeah, I really loved Mortal Kombat. Like… a lot. Thumb blisters, man. Genesis kids know about the thumb blisters.
Wombat
I guess it naturally leads from there that my first foray into competitive gaming proper was through fighting games. I was really good at Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, got recruited into a junior clan but they never really did anything so I don’t count that. So I moved on to Guilty Gear and I found my first true love. That game really brought out the competitor in me and I loved the speed and acuity required to really be great at it. From there it was on the Third Strike for a bit, but I never really did any major tournaments due to the fact that the places I lived, rural North Carolina and Illinois, weren’t conducive to major competition.
As for SC2, it was the beta Battle Reports that first caught my eye. I had touched RTS games maybe once or twice in my life. A game or two of Warcraft 3, some Command and Conquer: Generals and that was it. The Battle Reports really showed me that there was this deep game there, but I didn’t really go looking any further than that. I knew BroodWar was huge in Korea but I never expected there was such a vibrant scene behind the game. Still, I got the Collector’s Edition of the game expecting to play with friends and they all bailed so the game sat unused until about October of 2010. That was when I found the power and the glory that is Tastosis. The GSL really opened my eyes to just how amazing the game could be, especially when there are entertaining people sitting behind the microphone, augmenting the amazing talents of the players in the game. From there, it was all naivete and roses. I jumped into casting with nothing but a head full of stupid and a wish to be as good as the casting gods that came before me. It was in early January that I started casting proper, and it was bad. But a few thounsand games and a whole bunch of research, reading, and hours upon hours of studying later, I feel like I’m finally starting to make headway. With a few decently sized events under my belt like the UC Davis LAN and the TTeSports Challenge, I’m ready to give it my best for the Complexity Academy in helping shed some light on these amazing new players.
We at the compLexity Academy are thrilled to have both Adebisi and Wombat joining us. In their first debut on June 25th, they will be casting the compLexity Academy Tournament where 10 players will be selected to join. We would be delighted if you tuned in to listen to our two new casting prodigies and wish them the best of luck in their first tournament.
