StarCraft
With the releaes of the new StarCraft looming, I came to the relization that I hadn’t actually played all the single player stuff in the first version. In fact, I think I’ve only completed the Terran portion. So I don’t know a lot of the story going into the StarCraft 2. Not that it’s necessary to enjoy the game, but it would be nice. That, and it fires up the nostalga engine a little 😉
We all bought StarCraft very soon after it was released. It was from Blizzard, and Blizzard made WarCraft 2, something we were already hooked on. So it made sense. I can’t remember which box art version I bought, I’m thinking Zerg, but it’s possible it was Protos. I was still in college and it was able to run on my nice new Pentium 100, with 16megs(yes, megs) of RAM on my 1gig hard drive. BTW, that set me back $2000 at the time.
I started to play the single player missions, starting with Terran, just to get the feel of it. The new units and environments were really cool, and I feel right into the game. But let’s be honest, you don’t buy this for single player, it’s a multi-player game with a decent single player campaign.
Because of Shayne, I was getting pretty good at Warcraft 2, enough so that when Doug and I played, it was pretty painful for Doug. Shayne would kick your ass three ways until Sunday, but, and this is important, would tell you what you did wrong and tell you how to correct it for the next time. I got better. So much so that when Doug and I played our first SC game, I was cocky. I assumed that my mad skills at Warcraft would allow me to mop the floor with him in StarCraft. Boy howdy was I wrong. And apologies to Doug, I was a really sore looser.
Anyway, while I was printing the Thank You cards(yes, they are coming) I fired up SC and started on the Zerg campaign. Boy did this bring back a rush of excitement. Hearing that I needed more overlords just reminded me of the days in college. Playing this game for all hours; winning some, loosing some, and generally just seeing how badly you could stomp the other person. It got my heart racing, and then I remembered, this game *really* used to get my heart racing. As in heart attack like. I would twitch click, eyes moving rapidly between various parts of the screen, knowing that at any time a wave of Terrans could be knocking at my door. I would break out into a physical sweat, adrenalin pumping and just wishing that my brain would move a little faster. In my experience, if you didn’t play fast, you kinda died. And it did get to the point where as soon as the game started, my heart rate would jump up and never let up until it was over(or until it was obvious that I was going to loose, and then I would kinda mellow and take it all in).
Granted, at the time, I was also smoking and drinking a lot more, so that could have been it too.
So I’m looking forward to SC2. I suspect I’ll play the single player more than the multi-player, only because I’m going to be a father soon and don’t want to die of a heart attack when “Nuclear Launch Detected” sounds over my speakers.
Filed under: Blog - @ July 26, 2010 8:47 am
Maybe I’m a reclusive loner, but I clocked up far more time with the single player campaign than multiplayer. Multiplayer’s catching up, mind you, over a decade of infrequent LAN parties, but I think single player’s still winning.
Mostly, I like to build shit. So I find multiplayer kind of frustrating. The computer is kind enough to let you build an unstoppable army. Actual players feel the need to rush you in the first five minutes. I’ve never been able to keep up.
It looks like the story in SCII follows closely from the Brood Wars expansion. But we’ll see. I think I’m probably going to pick it up and see if I can get it running in Wine. Because I can’t bring myself to boot up into Windows these days.
Don’t get me wrong, I actually prefer single-player for the same reasons you just mentioned. It’s just that, for some reason on SC, I never played much of the single player.
That being said, I don’t think I played much of the single player in Warcraft either.
For multi, I mostly played with friends. Shayne and I would take on people on battlenet together, but I don’t think I ever played people I didn’t physically know.
Again, for the same reasons you mentioned….real people annoy me… 😉