Saturday 9 February, 2008

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.

This is perfectly acceptable. You do a good job in your gameplay sections, though the analysis feels a bit shallow. Perhaps it would be good to talk about how the races balance each other with their similarities and differences, and what that means in gameplay. Still, this is all right.

Amy Leek (grader)