Ahh, StarCraft. \u00a0The original holds a nostalgic place in my heart. \u00a0Needless to say I was looking forward to cracking open the newest StarCraft offering from Blizzard, \u00a0STARCRAFT II: WINGS OF LIBERTY. \u00a0Upon opening it, installing it (on Mac OS X for my version), getting myself set up on Battle.net, and firing up the first mission I realized a surprising (to me) fact: this game is basically StarCraft HD. \u00a0I don’t mean that in a bad way. \u00a0In creating their sequel, Blizzard managed to keep it feeling just like the original. \u00a0There are, of course, changes — new units, balance changes, a new more fleshed out campaign mode, and a fancy 3D engine — but it still plays, sounds, and feels like STARCRAFT.<\/p>\n
The mechanics of both the old and the new STARCRAFT are the same. \u00a0The “genre” is real-time strategy (RTS), meaning that players make their strategic and tactical choices whenever they feel it appropriate without having to wait for the other player’s turn to end as they would in a game like Chess or Risk. \u00a0The major choices a player faces are what to build (and in what order), what to train, and where to send units (soldiers, ships, and the like). \u00a0Though it is a war game, players may not realize that what every match boils down to is resource management (though, this is probably true of real world wars, too). \u00a0The major resources are minerals (act as money), gas (a secondary cost to add game variation), and supply (the player’s current limit on units). \u00a0One quickly finds that without control of several sources of minerals and gas, and a steady increase in supply, their army is destined to be overrun by an opponent’s who does have control over those resources.<\/p>\n
The game is very well balanced across its three different races. \u00a0Though I personally found the Zerg to be less beginner-friendly and therefore harder to win with, after some study I found that the successful Zerg player’s whole mentality is different, which I think shows the strength of the design team that they can manage to make three different army styles that actually play differently. \u00a0The lazy way would be to simply have different units balanced by moving stats around from unit to unit, but functionally don’t play any differently. \u00a0I suppose that’s why Blizzard is considered the Pixar of game developers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ahh, StarCraft. \u00a0The original holds a nostalgic place in my heart. \u00a0Needless to say I was looking forward to cracking open the newest StarCraft offering from Blizzard, \u00a0STARCRAFT II: WINGS OF LIBERTY. \u00a0Upon opening it, installing it (on Mac OS X for my version), getting myself set up on Battle.net, and firing up the first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[131,9],"tags":[165,170,42,181,100,80,169,171,168,166,167],"class_list":["post-113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-initial-impressions","category-reviews","tag-blizzard","tag-chess","tag-game-design","tag-initial-impressions","tag-mac-os-x","tag-pixar","tag-real-time-strategy","tag-risk","tag-rts","tag-starcraft","tag-starcraft-ii-wings-of-liberty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/basketqase.com\/roblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/basketqase.com\/roblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/basketqase.com\/roblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/basketqase.com\/roblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/basketqase.com\/roblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=113"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/basketqase.com\/roblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":115,"href":"https:\/\/basketqase.com\/roblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions\/115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/basketqase.com\/roblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/basketqase.com\/roblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/basketqase.com\/roblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}