'Star' Starcraft! (StarCraft (PC))

Member Name: manic_man

Product:	StarCraft (PC)
Date:	11/07/01 (231 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great Story, East to play, Fantastci online games

Disadvantages: dated graphics

Having played through Starcraft about four times I think im now becoming an expert. I bought it when it came out, a good few years ago now and have not looked back. Now, ill be the first to admit that my main love for games falls squarly on FPS style games. This game however had so much hype at the time I thought i might as well buy it.

You start off with a very well made intro movie, which although its animated is of very high quality and introduces the characters nicely. The game is unique in that it has three completely different races to choose from. The game recommends you play the three campaigns in the correct order, moving from Terran (the humans) to the Zerg (stereotypical slimy space creatures) and then finally finish with the protoss (strange guys who use alot of blue mist to make them look mystical). Each race has their own fortay, whereas the Zerg is good at quickly building up loads of units and swarming a base the terrans are good at building up lots of one type of unit over a long time until eventually they are unstoppable and the protoss are good at using a mixture of all its available units. The campaigns are extremely well scripted and allow the story to develop in a way that even I could understand! The intro movies quality is matched throughout with smaller feeder movies which keep you up to date eith the storie in style. YOu are introduced to many unique characters throughout the game, each of which you get to use at some time or another. THey generally have very upgraded stats to the unit that they are a variant of.

In case you didnt know, this game is by Blizzard, the makers of Warcraft, and more recently Diablo 2. Due to this Starcraft has an amazing online section, running thtough Blizzards Battle.net you can get fully acceotable online games going through your 56k modem with no lag at all. This is another area that has really suprised me about this game, it just refuses to die! Since it was released 3 odd years ago it ha
s simply got stronger and stronger and its online following has got bigger and bigger in fact its probably the biggest it has ever been right now! This game just does not seem to get boring, I genuinely cant understand it. I played through and completed the game for the third time about a year ago and then suddenly last week I got the urge to play it again, which i am now doing and enjoying it just as much as the first time.

Another aspect of this game worth looking at is its incredible stability. Never before have I ever seen a game, heck a piece of software (bar Linux) that is so un-crashable! You can alt-tab all you want it'll just keep going. I was playing it the other day (I have Windows 2000 on my machine) and explorer crashed in the background, Starcraft alt-tabbed me back to the desktop, Explorer restarted itself and then back in I went with a still fully working game of Starcraft ready and paused. THe amazing thing is, its always been like thism right from the word go, all they have done is develop and improve the game (especially muti player) with the many patches they have released for it. In fact only last week (June 2001) they actually released a brand new patch for this three year old game that made massive cnahges to all of the races, addressing some balance problems which some people had been moaning about. Think back, can you honestly remeber a game which has lived that long with full support from its creators? I cant!

So, all in all this game is amazing thats the only way to describe it. If I havent convinced you yet, how about taking into consideration the fact that it has just hit budget, and can be bought for £8.99 along with its add-on pack broodwar! Think about it, you get this amazing game PLUS its add-on pack which is nearly of the same calibre of the original game!! In fact its the Broodwar variant of Starcraft that is mainly played online so this is very usefull. Oh yes, one last thing, if you have a Macintosh but are
struggling to find a game to play on it (I know the feeling, I have relatives with iMacs) then the newly released versions (the budget ones) of these two dics actually have both the Windows and Macintosh version on the same CD, now thats what i call value for money to the extreme.

Summary: