A Blizzard of Entertainment (StarCraft (PC))

Member Name: mpeh

Product:	StarCraft (PC)
Date:	29/08/02 (451 review reads)
Rating:

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Starcraft is a relatively old game. Not 'classic' old like Super Bomber Man but old enough to be dated. This said it is only dated in presentation and graphics, the game itself is still as good as ever. The major advantage of it being an older game is that it's now available on the 'Best Seller' series and costs about £10. I bought the Blizzard Entertainment Package which had Starcraft and it's expansion Broodwar, more on that later, Diablo and Warcraft 2 all in one box and it cost me about £20, bargain. If you didn't follow that then it was three old games and one expansion pack for less than the price of one modern game. I only really play Starcraft of the three of them though so maybe I'd have been wiser to save that little bit of money?

Starcraft is a point and click 'God game' in which you control an army of small 'people' on an onscreen map. Set in the far future the game allows you to play Terrans, humans who have an army much like Space Marines of 'Alien' fame, the Zurg, an alien race with a collective hive mind (represented by you) and extensions of that mind, a bit like an ant colony, and the Protoss, another alien race, much more advanced than humanity in said setting. There are ten missions to complete for each of the races in the order I've listed them and although you can jump straight in at the Zurg or Protoss you are advised, by both the game's manufacturers and myself, not to do so. In order to play level two of any particular race you must have completed level one and so on.

So what's it all about? Each level is a mission in an ongoing story, whether you follow the storyline or not is completely up to you and won't affect the way you play the game it simply adds a continuity and binds the whole thing together. The missions will usually be to destroy the other force(s) on the map or to build a certain thing or to get a particular troop to a certain point.


When you start a level you usually have only a few simple troops. The Terrans have robots called SCVs, the Zurg have underlings called Drones and the Protoss have probes. These are the key to building a force. In order to build a unit you must first know how to, then you must have the facility in which to build it and then you must be able to afford to build it. Each mission allows for you to build different things. If you have the necessary knowledge and facilities then the icon for building a unit (or building) will be lit, if you have the knowledge but not the facilities then the icon will be dull and if you cannot build it on that level the icon does not appear at all. So first you must build your facility, this costs.

In the top right corner of the screen are three icons each with a number after them. One represents the number of minerals you have, one represents the amount of gas you have and the other tells you how many units (troops) you have. Each building and each unit costs a certain amount of minerals and gas to build. Some levels you will start with buildings and no resources and some levels you will start with a certain number of resources already 'harvested'. Somewhere on most maps there are outcrops of crystals, select your robots/ drones/ probes and then click on the crystals and away they will go harvesting them for you. To harvest gas you must find a vent on the map and build a refinery over the top of it. The catch is that as you mine minerals and harvest gas they deplete so you can run out and on some levels this is a killer. To support troops you must have the necessary buildings. Terrans need supply depots, Zurg need creatures called Overlords and the Protoss need buildings called Pylons. Each of these costs to build. You can never have more than 200 units. So to have more than eighteen Terran units you need two supply depots; the first ten are free, the first supple depot allows eight more and then to construct more unit
s you need another depot. Some units, tanks and flyers especially, use up more than one 'block' of a support depot (or Overlord or Pylon) thus you can have 200 marines but not 200 tanks as each one counts as two or more people.

Each race has a 'central' building where resources (minerals and gas) are taken to when harvested. This is also where the harvesting units can be built. After that you must build other things in order to achieve different things. To build Terran marines you need a barracks, to build tanks a factory and to build flying machines a building called a star port. Many buildings are in a sequence so that you cannot build one until you have completed a previous one. If the icon is dull then by placing your pointer over it you will be told what you need in order to be allowed to build it, this is true of units also, for example 'requires Hive' where 'Hive' is a type of building. The levels are arranged in such a way that they gradually become more complex and so at first you are given only a few choices of things to build. This is good as it allows a natural progression as you become more comfortable with the format of the game. The processes may seem complicated but it is easy to get a hang of them once you have been stepped through by the hints and instructions that are everywhere for the first couple of levels.

Units can be improved by researching things, for example most Terran units are better if you research their armour and weapons, this needs to be done separately for infantry, tanks and flyers all at separate research facilities. Each type of research can generally be done to three levels and you can only research a level if the previous one is completed. You can also research more unique abilities, a special weapon for a certain type of unit or the ability to change a tank into a siege gun, things like this are also done at research facilities. As with everything else research, when available
, is lit, and when unavailable is dull. Placing your mouse pointer over the dull icon will cause a text box to appear telling you what you need in order to be allowed to do that research. Research is also paid for by minerals and gas.

So for the Terrans we have the following buildings:

Command centre; allows building of SCVs the Terran robots
Barracks; allow the building of Marines and, after research, other infantry units
Supply depots; necessary for supporting troops, each depot allows 8 more units
Factory; requires Barracks, allows building of land bound war machines
Machine shop; attaches to (and hence requires) Barracks, allows research of abilities for things built in factories, also extends the list of units a factory can produce
Starport; requires Factory, allows building of flying units
Control tower; attaches to (and hence requires) Starport, allows...
Armoury; requires Barracks, allows research into tank armour and weapons and flyers armour and weapons

The list goes on.

The map scrolls as you push your mouse pointer to the edges of it but you can only 'see' those parts of the map that your forces have visited. Each unit and building has a circle around it which it can currently 'see' and this appears in colour, outside of all those coloured circles (which amalgamate into one shape) the map is grey and unchanging and over areas you have yet to visit it is black showing no detail at all. This greyness is called the fog of war. Once you cannot see an area anymore anything could be going on there and until you revisit it you cannot be aware of the changes.

The whole game is controlled by pointing and clicking. Units and buildings are selected by clicking on them or dragging a box around them. Their options appear in a box at the bottom right of the screen and then you click on the icons there to control them. To select units and buildings you use the left mouse button and
to get them to perform and action on the map you use the right mouse button. For example if you select a Terran marine with the left button to get him to move to another point on the map you click on that point with the right mouse button. Units will behave in a certain way if left alone. Most will stand completely still. If an enemy unit comes within a certain distance of them or attacks them then they will attack it. If, once attacking a unit, that unit withdraws they will follow it. This is a pain if you have your attention on something else as you can have been building up a huge force gradually only to find that half of it has wandered off and gotten itself killed. When your units are hurt by an attack a voice warns you 'your units are under attack' and a red box appears on the minimap to show you where.

You can select more than one unit at once by clicking on them in sequence whilst holding down the shift key or by dragging a box over a group. You cannot select more than twelve units at any one time. You can group units by holding down control (ctrl) and then pressing a number. When you press that number in future you select that group. Thus you can have ten groups (0-9) of twelve units. The most annoying thing in the game is that you can only have groups of twelve, and then the second most annoying things is that you can only have ten 'hotkeys' if you could press control+a and have a group hot keyed with the a key it'd be great. If you hold down the control key and then left click on a unit all units of that type on screen are selected. This is useful since if you have a lot of different units all in one space, Marines, SCVs, tanks and flyers and want to select only the marines you can simply press control, click on one marine and hey presto. Again only twelve units can be selected in this way at once even if there are fifty of that unit on screen.

There are three ways to play Starcraft:

One player, through the
missions one at a time against the computer, this is the way to start.

One player in what is called a 'custom game' where you can select the map, the number of computer opponents, which race you and they are playing and then play them. This is difficult, the computer follows a formulaic approach to building a force and often can destroy you before you've found your feet simply because there is no delay between something being available and it being used. As soon as the computer has enough minerals it builds the next thing on its list where as you (and I) have to register that we have enough minerals, choose what to build and then click on its icon. This can be very demoralising when you begin playing but you can learn to gradually get better and better. Playing through the missions is a good way to do this.

The third way you can play is against other humans either on a network or over the internet. To play this you need the Battlenet edition of Starcraft but I think that all copies now sold contain this. Also it may be possible, or necessary, to download the most recent patch for Battlenet online, this is free. The people you will meet online tend to be very good players. They talk in a specialised jargon and don't like new people. This is a real shame as it could put you off. There aren't many people who are willing to put up with new people making mistakes in an online game. The hardest thing to do online is play fast (speed is all important) and keep track of the comments people are making, instructions to allies and such, and cut through the technical jargon. tvb means 'top versus bottom' and refers to the allying arrangements on the map, those players who start at the top fight those players who started at the bottom. tvbfdm means 'tvb until first death then melee' which means every man for himself. You get the picture.

Broodwar is the expansion set and continues the story from where Starcraft le
ft off. There are thirty more missions, ten for each race, although this time they are in the order Protoss, Terran, Zurg. Initially they are easier than the last few missions of Starcraft but fast become varied and more difficult. Broodwar provides new terrain, prettier maps basically and a new unit for each of the races. These fit into the storyline and are explained as you play.

One of the strengths of Starcraft is the variety it provides. Each race is significantly different requiring a different style of play and has its own distinctive feel and image but they are all similar enough to allow you to progress from one to the next without too much culture shock. The Terrans allow solid units and relatively quick production, the Zurg have very fast production rates and you can churn out units very quickly but those units aren't as good, one on one with the other races. The Protoss have very slow production rates but their units are very advanced. Some units are very fragile, some units are very tough. Some units can fire only at ground based targets, some units can fire only at airborne targets, some units can target anything. These minor variations between races and units mean that different players adopt different strategies and different favourites. In general the best strategy is to defend yourself from early attacks whilst building the largest force possible and then attacking with that. When playing the computer this always works. The difficulties are running out of resources and finding more as well as simply seeing off those first attacks. When playing other people the tactics become more and more convoluted depending upon the map you are playing on and the races being played.

With Starcraft, on the same CD, came the Campaign Editor. I think this is part of the Battlenet edition. It is a program that allows you to make your own maps to play on or, I think more commonly, edit maps from the game itself. This allows you to test different
things out but it's real use is for playing online, you can design specific missions or just set the map up for a certain type of game. All the games I've come across online have been on maps designed by the person hosting the game. Once you've played on a map online it is saved into your 'downloads' directory and you can then play on it in custom games when offline.

Starcraft is a simple premise with a lot of subtleties. Although, upon rereading my review, I realise the game sounds very complicated all I can do is assure you that it isn't, truly. Each stage can be followed from the next and you never need to be doing more than about three things at once, the action comes in waves depending on how you play and there are times when you want to be doing everything and times when you're sitting around waiting for the resources to pile up or a building to be finished. Because of the nature of the game it has lasting appeal. Even when you've played your way through all 60 missions, at least 40 hours game play I would say, then you have the challenge of playing the computer in all out battles with no holds barred and the possibility of playing online against other people. If you join online I'll see you out there.

Long live the overmind.

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