Starcraft, Part 1

Starcraft gets a BESTGAMEEVER Award, right away.

Ok, now for my quick (not so quick in this one) review.

Starcraft is my favorite PC game. It's a RTS (Real Time Strategy), to put it simple, you control your race in real time and try to beat another player (or AI) before they beat you. You have 3 races to choose from: Zerg, Protoss and Terran, each one has it's own advantages and disadvantages.

The game is about a war between those three species, wich are equally balanced but with different units and technologies. The Protoss have expensive but powerful units, the zerg have cheaper but weaker ones, and the Terran are in the middle (wich gives them versatility and makes them the best choice for novice players).

Random screenshot from the game.

I'll make separated entries for each species. So, stay tuned.

After the click.






StarCraft was the best selling computer game in 1998 and won the Origins Award for Best Strategy Computer Game of 1998. In November of the same year, Blizzard released an expansion pack called StarCraft: Brood War.

StarCraft makes significant improvements over Warcraft II. WC II, while advanced for its time, featured what many gamers believed to be a weakness in that, apart from a few minor (but significant for balance, especially at higher skill levels) differences in available spells and the cost of upgrades, the game's two races were exactly the same mechanically, with only graphical differences. StarCraft improved upon this by adopting the technique introduced by Strategic Simulations' game War Wind of having sides with obvious asymmetries. The asymmetry was inspired, in part, by Magic: The Gathering. Though the game's three races (Protoss, Terrans, and Zerg) were slightly imbalanced when the game was first released, the expansion pack and fifteen patches (of which four significantly affected the game play mechanics) have balanced the three races.
The StarCraft: Brood War expansion provides several new units for each race (which dramatically modified the game play) and a new campaign for each race, continuing the story begun in StarCraft. Most people who still play use this expansion and agree that it changed the game significantly for the better, although some still prefer the original game.

The game also includes multiplayer gaming on Blizzard's own Internet gaming service Battle.net. One can play against opponents free of any charge beyond the original purchase of the game and local Internet access fees. Many fans enjoy playing in groups against the computer in skirmish games. While the AI is considered to be weak compared to a good player, decent early game performance can make it an enjoyable opponent for more casual players. Fans are also able to create unfair maps that are advantageous to the computer and can be extremely hard to beat. A few years after the release of the game, Blizzard also released several free maps of a higher difficulty. Over time, the patches have also improved the AI.

StarCraft has achieved a cult-like status in the computer gaming world. Due to the complexity and depth of the strategic possibilities, StarCraft, especially in its online multiplayer form, remains very popular, even years after its original release. The game's popularity in South Korea has been unexpectedly high, with nationally recognized tournaments, and intense training groups sprouting up across the country. There are even a couple of cable-access channels that often televise tournaments live with the top players competing against each other, cheered on by enthusiastic spectators and fans. The top StarCraft players enjoy mild celebrity status.
Blizzard was working on a third person shooter, StarCraft: Ghost, which has been "indefinitely postponed".
Fans impatiently awaited the release of StarCraft II, which was announced on May 19th, 2007 at the World Wide Invitational in Seoul, South Korea and released on July 27, 2010.


info via starcraft.wikia.com