Sunday, December 13, 2015

StarCraft (1998)

A long time ago... okay, like a couple years ago... I played StarCraft with one of my best friends when he suggested that I play it. I think the last time I played it regularly was in 2010 before the sequel, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty came out.

StarCraft  is a Real Time Strategy game which is very difficult to master. I never played it for competition because of that fact. The graphics were rather good, but they were sprites for the characters because back when it was released, computer graphics basically utilized sprites for 2D games, which StarCraft was. I think that they did this to save on the resources that the computers had so that people could play them on their machines without having to go out and buy a new graphics card or other new hardware to allow them to play newer titles.

In a nutshell, StarCraft has three different races which the player selects one from and uses for the duration of the match. The player has to build harvesting units to collect resources, either minerals or gas, and then has to build structures which unlock combat units and combat unit upgrades. The object of the match is to destroy all of your opponents buildings. Once they have no buildings left, they are forcibly ejected from the game, and they lose.

The things that made StarCraft great were that the three races all had different units, and they also had different ways that they created their combative units. So each race played completely different from the other. That made it unique to select one race versus another. The ways that each combative units attacked was unique to each race, and they were all balanced against each other so that no one race was superior to another in sheer terms of units or upgrades. The only thing that made a race superior, was, in a sense, the ability of their commander to command them the best.

It is for that reason alone that I continued to play StarCraft all the way until StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, came out in 2010. I still play the series to this day. I love strategy games, and I will probably continue to play it until StarCraft III comes out in 20...20. (It was over ten years before StarCraft II came out, so naturally, it will be another ten years before another sequel to it arrives.)

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