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kenister's Starcraft (PC)
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| [February 9, 2008 12:48:20 AM]
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Gameplay:
After playing through the single player campaigns, some friends and I decided to play a multiplayer game to see who would get bragging rights to be a Starcraft champion. It was a three versus three match with, players Doody and Matt on my team. I must admit that I’ve played this game ten years ago and even now when I started playing again it still had its famous appeal that it had so long ago and that’s the multiplayer aspect. Unlike the computer, human players are unpredictable and I found myself constantly changing my attack strategy when I find the units that my opponents are constructing. Throughout the course of the game there was quite a bit of trash talk around the table (we had a small LAN party with our laptops). I really thought it was fun spitting out these random insults because we were all very much into the game. At some points, my opponents would spit insults and in the game I would attack their buildings and at that point they would settle down and concentrate on a counter attack. It was very fun to play multiplayer and even my roommates who weren’t playing had a great time watching us play and battle verbally.
As we played more games that night, I’ve thought it was interesting to see the different strategies of my friends as opponents and those that were on my team. It was definitely fun to try and think of combinations of units that my team could use to attack our opponents. Like I would go for long range ground units and my team members would help support them with air support. This would obviously be in any RTS game but Starcraft is different because of the three different unique races as opposed to just the one human race that Age of Empires has. I know that there are different civilizations for Age of Empires but honestly they all seem the same to me even though they claim they have different bonuses such as attack or resource gathering. Starcraft is unique because of the amount of character design put into this game and these different types of races allow for a different type of play style. Like Zerg should always attack en masse or Terrans must have a healthy combination of ground and air units to succeed. These different play styles accompanied with multiplayer where your teammates can be another race to supplement yours create a unique experience every time a game starts up.
Design:
I give credit where it’s due and the game company Blizzard has a great motto that I believe every game designer should follow and that’s “easy to play, hard to master.” You can see this in virtually every game they made such as Diablo and World of Warcraft, they are masters at attracting the casual gamer yet they also bring hardcore gamers with the specifics of their gameplay mechanics. In Starcraft, it’s easy to build structures and units to attack the enemy, you can win this way but to be a real master at the game you need to learn to build fast and mix and match units that complement each other in a fight. This is especially true in multiplayer where there speed is key to winning the game.
The level design in the game varies very little, most of the time you will get either an earth like open ground or a space station type map to battle on. The game does come with a map editor but the templates seem to suggest that the levels you make can have a mixed type of the maps mentioned earlier. However it’s the content of the map that counts and some levels have a two chunks of land with a huge bridge in the middle and this will allow for some very interesting gameplay if one can’t produce air units. The game is in 2D but it kind of adds another dimension with some terrain raised slightly higher and units on that terrain can see the ones below it but the units not on the mountain can’t see above it unless being attacked which creates some strategic play.
The story in Starcraft is quite well written, and is significantly better than other RTS games that I have played. In Age of Empires, they have a few campaigns where they talk about Atilla the Hun or William Wallace, but if you’ve taken a history class then you already know what happens to these characters and what they’ve done. There are many twists and turns in the game that I won’t spoil for anyone but just know that some friends become enemies and some enemies become friends and the story was good enough to propel me to continue playing the game.
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| [February 8, 2008 11:40:25 PM]
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Summary:
Starcraft is a real-time strategy game about three warring species; the human race called Terrans, the elite alien race called Protoss, and the savage swarms of the animalistic Zerg. The player gathers resources to build structures that produce offensive and defensive units to attack the other race. The game is a classic RTS and unique in the fact that the three different races that the player can control have very different play styles yet still have the basic concept of building and producing units.
Gameplay:
As I started the single player campaign of the Terrans, I was thrust into a tutorial on how to play the game. The tutorial allowed me to learn the tools that I needed to play the game as well as get accustomed to the user interface and the world of Starcraft. For instance I was taught how to select my marines and have them move to a location and attack any enemies they saw on the way. There’s a difference between a move and an attack-move. While the marines were marching, they did see enemies and these were the Zerg, a type of mutated alien bent on killing and eating anything they see. Surviving my first encounter with the Zerg allowed me some insight to the story of Starcraft and what it would eventually lead up to.
These Terran characters resembled the human race in Starcraft. They have people semi integrated with machines and I thought that was kind of cool because I feel like in the future, as we are constantly making new technology that helps us fight our enemies, we will eventually break the line between man and machine and have a nice synthetic mix of both. So I really liked the Terran race. The Protoss were an alien race with advanced technology. Instead of building their structures and units, they would just “warp” them in. Their builder unit, called a probe, would just start a portal that would automatically move in the structure and during this warping time the probe can still gather resources and go about its business. But the warp would have to be in the radius of one structure called a Pylon to be able to transport the building. I particularly liked the design of Protoss characters because they didn’t have any mouths, to talk they would just their natural psychic powers to link their mind with another person or to a group of people. The Zerg were the most interesting to play as. Their builder units would not build or warp in structures, they would mutate into the structure! This also means that all the Zerg buildings were alive and would be able to heal over time. Also, like the Protoss, their buildings must be built on a purple slime called “creep” seeping out of their starting building called a hatchery which expands the more creep colonies and hatcheries are built.
Each race still had the same "build this structure to produce this unit" kind of scheme but each one was completely different to play because of their narrative background in the game world.
This entry has been edited 2 times. It was last edited on Feb 8th, 2008 at 23:44:38.
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kenister's Starcraft (PC)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Thursday 7 February, 2008
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