If you spend any amount of time watching the professional Starcraft 2 scene, then there's a good chance that you've come across the name Total Biscuit. A commenter with an extremely vitriolic persona, he does tons of videos on his YouTube channel for a variety of games – most famously WoW and Starcraft, although he covers a number of indie titles as well during his WTF series.
I first came upon TotalBiscuit from his “I Suck At Starcraft 2” series, in which he chronicled his rise from a terrible player to a slightly less terrible player. Recently, Total has been responsible for a daily stream that attracts a number of viewers. Perhaps more notably, Totalbiscuit has, this past weekend, begun a tournament cast.
It's called the SHOUTcraft 1-day invitational, and contains a number of notable players in an 8-man, best of 5 tournament. It aired over a single day (though he has noted that he plans to hold this tournament on a monthly basis), and contained a number of high-caliber matches. I wanted to write a post about it simply to talk about the production quality of the live cast.
First thing that should be noted is the Hype. Something that is nearly always ignored by B-list tournys is the power of getting people excited about it. Totalbiscuit is notorious for his use of Twitter (@totalbiscuit). He maintained an active thread on TeamLiquid, a hub of Starcraft information for the foreign scene. He made people continue to visit the thread by announcing one of the participants each day leading up to the tournament. Getting that many people invested in the production before it even went live is likely a huge part of the 20k viewers that eventually tuned in. (Numbers taken from justin.tv during the cast.)
Hype, however, is only one part of the equation. I've been subjected to hundreds of tournaments and dozens of hype campaigns that ultimately failed to deliver, and that's where SHOUTcraft differentiated itself. When I turned the tournament on, I was initially shocked because of the quality of the video feed. I was able to full screen the video and read every number on the screen with crystal clarity. 720p makes a huge difference in viewability, and on that count, SHOUTcraft easily dominates even big-name tournaments like MLG (which is painful to watch at times.)
Finally, SHOUTcraft shows it knows where it's bread comes from. The tournament was cast on a Sunday, at 2pm BST, and 9am EST. The cast continued throughout the afternoon and into the evening in Europe, and lasted the duration of the afternoon for Americans. Both groups were easily able to watch without punishing themselves like they would if they wanted to watch the GSL live. Korean airtimes are crushing for a number of viewers, leading them to prefer VOD's of the events. TotalBiscuit placed his tournament on a traditional relaxation day, when people would be home and ready to watch some quality gaming. He did so at a time that people wouldn't mind watching.
For all the good that SHOUTcraft's maiden tourny did, there were still a few things that could be improved. Understandably, for an independent production, they did a phenomenal job, but watching the events unfold, I couldn't help but notice a few things missing.
First, and understand that this sounds nit-picky even to me, but I would have loved for them to either have a second caster, or a dedicated observer to handle the map movements. Biscuit does a great job by himself, but he'll occasionally miss a drop because of other interesting happenings on the map, and other such things. Anyone who watched the TSL probably noticed the absolutely great observing job that Hot_Bid did, and I think that it's within SHOUTcraft's reach to attain such a level of quality.
Second, player profiles. While Biscuit does a good job explaining who the players are, as well as some of their strengths and weaknesses, I would have loved a pre-match Bio on the players involved in the upcoming match. Again, I'll reference the TSL, which gave simple fact sheets on the players during the pre-match time, allowing me to quickly get some background on the players that I may not have heard of. (Us Americans are woefully under-informed with regards to good EU players who aren't Jinro, Thorzain, or White-Ra.)
Aside from those minor complaints, I was impressed overall by both the quality of play, and the quality of the production itself. As for the commenting style of TotalBiscuit himself, it appears that his bombastic, action focused style is either love it or hate it. My personal opinion is that TB generally casts better alongside someone with deep knowledge of game mechanics, such as Idra or Day[9]. Regardless of that, I must give congratulations to TotalBiscuit on a well-run event. Will tune in again next time there's a SHOUTcraft invitational.
VOD's from the event will be posted eventually at TotalBiscuit's Youtube account, which can be found HERE.
TotalBiscuit's website can be found at www.cynicalbrit.com
Have you ever watched professional Starcraft? Do you know TB and his casting style? What do you think about him? As usual, leave em in the comments!
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