Waiting on Starcraft 2
In many places, Starcraft isn’t accounted as merely the greatest Real-Time-Strategy game of all time; in South Korea, Starcraft is a way of life. Entire television channels are devoted to displaying matches between professional gamers, and even to this day, some 10 years after the initial release of Starcraft, the game is still extremely popular. One might be surprised that Blizzard (the game’s creator) didn’t quickly rehash the game and ship out a sequel to earn an exorbitant profit. I knew for certain that Starcraft 2 wouldn’t be released until Blizzard had polished the game to a mirror-shine. But even I never would have guessed it would take this long…
Regardless, it is 2008, a full decade after the initial release of Starcraft. And next year, Starcraft 2 will be released after a full 11 year gap between titles. That is, of course, assuming that Blizzard doesn’t delay the release as they are so very fond of doing.
Starcraft is widely accepted as one of the most balanced games of all time. In case you don’t quite follow me, I’ll explain. A game of Starcraft is started when you choose one of three races: the Terran (humans, essentially), the Zerg (swarm-like hive mind aliens), or the Protoss (technologically advanced aliens with telekinetic powers).
In any case, this blog post was supposed to be longer, but it accidentally got published early, so I’ll dive right in. The greatest strength of Starcraft is the fact that every game will be played out differently. Like any game with strategical depth, Starcraft possesses a fierce metagame. “Tech’ing” will give you the benefit of advanced and powerful units much quicker than your opponents, but leaves you vulnerable to “rushing” strategies of large numbers of relatively weak units. An expensive ‘victory fleet’ of Carriers and Arbiters can be destroyed by very cheap anti-air units like Scourge. All in all, Starcraft is an extremely well-balanced game with nuances in every strategy. Starcraft 2 looks to be much of the same. Rather than rehash some of the impressions already posted about the upcoming game, please check it out on IGN.com.
gg no re
all images copyright 2008 Blizzard Entertainment.
ryan.senese
Wow. I was a big fan of that game. I still have that game installed somewhere on my computer. Playing Starcraft - is like playing chess but really fast. The funny thing - I think I still remember the cheat codes - “show me the money”, “something for nothing”.
Looking forward to see what took Blizard 11 years to come up with a new version. I’m afraid it is going to be something 3D. I think that may take away some of the beauty of the game.