It is always difficult to keep personal prejudice out of any intelligent discussion.

After all, if we didn't think that our opinion was the right one... well, it wouldn't be our opinion, we should have a different one.

I also am siding with the pro-Blizzard posters. The company is singulary the best there is in terms of polished gameplay and performance. After all, 8 million subscribers paying $9.99 p/month to play World of Warcraft is astonishing. That could never have been achieved with poor quality output.

Starcraft, Diablo II LoD (after the upgrade to 1027x768 from 800x600 gfx were, and still are, very very playable games and strangely addictive.

Masters of Orion? OK, not by Blizzard, but it was quite simply the best game (in gameplay terms) that I ever played. The ability to field your army stacks in the mini-battle and, control them in a turn based battle was ground breaking at the time. In addition, the ability to move to another 'plane' (map) the very tough AI... lol, it was simply outstanding. I am at a loss as to why it, or something like it has never been remade.

Starcraft is a cool game, but it did not stand the test of time with me. A few months ago I tried to play it again, but could not get interested in it.

I would not say its Over-rated as the people that give it high praise and having fun playing it and that is what counts.I can pop in C&C Tiberium Sun and still have a blast have a blast with it.

I think its all in the mind of the beholder, as long as you enjoy the game thats what counts. But if you play the game just cause its popular and you are NOT having fun, then you need get a new hobby.

I have never played much online, so Starcraft was pretty much over for me once I finished the single player campaigns, but just for those it's a great game. The three races are extremely unique and while playing them you really get to understand them and why they act as they do. I never got the feeling that I was betraying all I had done with the humans when I started playing the zerg campaign, specially since most of the human campaign dealt with beating up OTHER HUMANS. And the Zerg campaign started with you getting the hell out of the planet where the humans had beat the zerg on the previous campaign. It was never like the humans lost, but that another battle began somewhere else. What really stood for it is that incredible story that you see take place before your eyes. I mean, many RPGs have less engaging stories that Starcraft had in its day.

I really support Blizzard's way of making games. By aiming at the mid-range PC instead of top of the line only, they get a game that can be enjoyed by several times more people, and the gameplay and stories are always great. Since they don't force themselves to meet release deadlines like Christmas, they also spend all the time they need to carefully balance all sides and get rid of the worst bugs. There are little things that I like less than getting my brand new game home on release day and having to wait a couple days to play because the company didn't take the time to correct the bugs in the game, or having to download an enormous patch just after the installing that takes even longer to apply.

For space combat, I don't really see it working at long distances unless it relied extensively on stealth. A ship armed with a beam weapon could easily destroy any missile shot at it if it sees it coming, since it just needs to pinpoint it and shot as the beam travels at lightspeed. Missiles can be useful if shot at blind angles of a ship, but to be able to do that you need to be close and outmaneuver the enemy ship or have numeric superiority. Also, missiles would always be in a more limited supply than beam weapons who could rely on the same source of energy that moves that ship, and beam weapons wouldn't have any effect on the movement of the ship since they are immaterial. Little can be said about the rate of fire since depending on the technology beam weapons may need a cooldown time after being fired, just as the launch pads for missiles would.

Personaly im sick and tired of graphics being #1 in a make for a game. I play for the gameplay not pretty backgrounds that make my computer, xbox, ps lag to shit while I play. I like the challenges that some games bring but far to many the past years have been nothing but fancy graphics showing off how pretty they can make backgrounds, character seem more real life. KUF:COD for the Xbox360 is a perfect point. Starcraft was and still is a smooth game made for competive gameplay and they made sure the story would be fun to play through. Starcraft2 could be a disapointment like halo3 but im hoping for more of that great competive and good story from it once again.

Starcraft wasn't balanced until over 3 years of patches later. It's amazing how short some people's memories are.

3 years +

Any damn game eventually reaches a modicum of balance after that long.

Starcraft is overrated. Just because it's popular doesn't mean it's good - World of Warcraft? Oblivion? Counter-Strike? All of these are popular for less-than-popular reasons.

The campaign wasn't really that great - the story was uninspired, contrived, poorly-presented, and felt very rushed. I actually just played through Starcraft again recently, and I found half the missions weren't even FUN. They were constant "YOU VS. LARGE ENEMY BASE AGAIN LOL" missions (or sometimes 3+ enemy bases). Every know and then you get the quintessential 'hold out for X minutes' mission, or the 'capture area Y' mission....

There's many RTS games I've gone back and played time and time again. Starcraft isn't one of them.

Total Annihilation was better than Starcraft and got barely even half as much attention.

The whole 'zomg teh grafix shud be sux' thing is ridiculous. I don't street race in my Hyundai Sonata, and I don't call myself a street racer. Calling yourself a gamer when you own a $400 piece of crap retail computer from 2003 is just about the same thing. I'm not saying that every game should be a system-melting monstrosity like Crysis, but complaining that your GeForce FX (haha if you own one) can't run anything is just embarrassing. Gaming is not a very expensive hobby compared to others - anyone who's put money into a car knows this.

But it's worth saying that anyone who says graphics don't matter is a flipping idiot who evidently has a crap system. Crysis' graphics (and audio quality, if you have the game, turn the volume way up - the audio quality is as good as the visual) sucked you into the game like none-other. I myself don't and won't buy a game on graphics, and yes, they can't and never will compensate for crappy gameplay, but they do have a significant impact on game quality.

Starcraft could be popular because every $4 a day idiot in a third-world country can run it on their 500mhz computers. But as I said before, popularity and quality usually dont' have too much in common. Always remember that Britney Spears was popular too.

RTS games are 'cerebral' and not about 'reflexes'? Have you ever PLAYED an RTS?

1) Just about every RTS game is about build orders, speed, and spam. Not much different from an FPS.

2) Competitive starcraft play isn't about 'strategy', it's about getting to a point of victory faster than your enemy. They don't send Observers to the enemy base to see if they have stealth-detecting units, and then decide to send Dark Templar or not - they just send a shitload of them anyway.

I like C & C 3 just fine, but in terms of uniqueness of forces, fine balance, and enabling strategic play Starcraft beats it and most every other RTS out there hands down. That's why it has such an e-sports following that no other RTS has ever equaled.

Graphicly in terms of sophistication it was unremarkable at the time and of course looks dated 10 years on. But Blizzard di what they do well they produced well defined units with plenty of character which is part of what made the game such fun. Oh and the zerg, one of the more origional RTS foe's, I loved ther Zerg.

From what I've seen of starcraft 2 I'm very much looking forward to it. Again the graphics are not DX10 only or anything silly like that but it looks like a nice 3D engine capable of throwing round a lot of units on screen smoothly, and the units once again have lots of character, can't wait.

It's only the fact I have Vista that's stopped me picking starcraft up again now.

Ok your somewhat odd resentment of Blizzard aside have you actually played Starcraft?

Starcraft runs just fine on Vista. I have had no problems with it.

It seems to me that the majority of posters who comment negatively about Starcraft don't even know how to play it to any average competency. You can't possibly fault other people's perception of a game ("over-rated") if you can't even play with the small boys, let alone the big boys.


Do the graphics suck? For a 10 year old game, no. In fact, the art direction and graphical focus was pretty good for its time. It made the units appear distinct, and the colors were spot-on for spotting (or not spotting) the units. Form follows function. The function of the graphics in this game is to tell you about the game state. Anything other than that is just gravy. This type of game is targeted squarely at people who think that the old Gettysberg is still a great game - the graphics really isn't important beyond game function. If machine-demanding graphics matters to you, you can't understand why this game is hailed as much as it is.

For what it does, it's unrivaled, even today. I've played the C&C games through to completion and MP a lot and it's all quite one dimensional. SC is not the same.




Technically, it wasn't more or less balanced until about 6 months after the release of Brood Wars around version 1.6 or 1.7. Latter game patches were responses to high level players taking advantage of particular game mechanics to destroy the game's strategic viability. If your APS isn't over 60, you needn't bother - they didn't usually apply to you.



SC's merits go beyond mere popularity. It's not good because it's popular. It became popular because it was good.

Last time I looked, Korea wasn't a third world country and they're highly selective about which games they spent time on, since they usually spent a lot of time on them. The fact that many Koreans don't spend as much time on the latter-released Warcraft3 is indicative of this finicky nature.

You can't just make any random game and expect Koreans to wow themselves over it.

I've played SC extensively on MP and even played against some Koreans. Those guys are tough cookies.

It's not about rushing, and it's not about reflexes. APS counts for a big deal, but that's as much power of concentration as it is finger speed. A high APS doesn't matter if you're not doing anything with it.

Rushing gets done a lot to newbies the same way ground cheese gets done a lot to Tekken newbies. It's a cheap shot, and lots of people fall for it, but you can't get good if you keep falling for the cheap shots.

The only way to get through it is to lose and learn. A lot. I rushed and got rushed in my time, and in time, one gets to the point where you learn that rushing is just a cheap shot - you won't win a lot of mid level games with it, and if that's all you know how to do, you're going to have to be prepared to lose a lot - again.

Competitive SC IS about strategy - it's just that the strategies have all been worked out before.

I can tell where on a map my enemy might be based on what time his worker comes along to scout me out. Most mid level players can. When I was better at it, I could tell the neighborhood of your probable tech and army strength just from looking at what you have. I don't need to scout your base - I can predict what's in it just from the time and your army composition!

That's how hard core high level SC play is. It's not about Cannon rushing or Zealot rushing, although those have their place, too. For instance, if you know that your opponent is a better strategic player, you can rush him out with Zealot or Zerglings if you know that you have an APS advantage. If you're on the APS disadvantage, you opt for a defensive strategy to bring you superior tech planning to bear.

Would I bring a "shitload" of DTs to my enemy's base? Depends on what I see with my initial worker and the map size. DT rushing just isn't feasible against certain players and certain maps. Also, you can't do it too soon or it might fizzle, nor too late or you tip your hand to little effect. As a Protoss player, I know that teching to DTs within a particular time frame precludes teching to, say, Reavers.

Of course, DT's aren't really what you would consider a proper "rush" in the first place since getting a sizable number of them requires a good amount of tech. Saying the DT attack is a real "rush" is like saying that GalCiv's Planetary Invasion is a "rush" tactic.

Multiplayer was, and always was, the strength of StarCraft. In fact, the playability of Battlenet (including the ease of setting up games) was key. Other great games that had difficult game set-up for internet multiplayer died because players were too frustrated. The other reason StarCraft was so popular is because of the variety of strategies that could be employed. I was a top player (and I really mean that) that used the Zerg exclusively. I pushed the envelope on creativity in gameplay and often would get the comment "oh my god - I have never seen anything like that before". The game allowed for that type of play. That being said, I really enjoy GalCiv for many of the same reasons I enjoyed StarCraft. The campaigns in StarCraft never appealed to me, and quite frankly, the campaigns in GalCiv don't hold my interest either. It is all in the game play.

To be perfectly fair, there's a certain kind of skill and type-limit to the kind of shenanigans you could pull in SC. Past a certain skill level in the newbie, rushing said newbie with SCVs ceases to be effective.

True, Roxlimn, for common rushing techniques, their usefulness dies at a certain skill level. I was talking more about other types of tactics, such as 1) attacking with units under a massive number of Overlords so your units cannot be targeted, or 2) To kill the maximum carrier stack from a Protoss player: laying spore colonies 8-9 rows deep, using micromanagement to fire with both queens (webs) and defilers (plagues) and also to direct spore shots. Then sending in directed scourge at appropriate moments, along with other units. [The end-game carrier attack is not invincible... Protoss snob experts have cried many a day over a defeat from the Zerg they thought they would never see.], or 3) at any time in the game, using the colony-advance tactic to roll over other bases and characters. I could go on, there are about another dozen or so middle and end-game tactics that you would consider novel and inventive, more if you consider other than straight Melee or Free For All play victory conditions. My favorite memory was a 7vs1 unlimited resource map on Ice Hunters. I unallied, lied about it, and filled my whole base with spore colonies (about 9-10 rows deep), with that many in sunken colonies (with some spores) near the entrance. I then created an enormous number of Overlords. After 8 more hours of gameplay, taking on 6 other players at the same time (of course, after a while they figured out I had unallied), I eventually won. Every game in SC was very different, and many a surprise was in the offing. I repeat that much of the same appeal is in GalCiv. Here is an example for you: An event occurs in which the PeaceKeepers (sentient race of robots) appears in the galaxy to prevent wars. They will attack any warship located outside of a race's influence. If they attack your ship, their race will go to WAR with you. This race has no home planet. When this planetless race was beaten down (I DID AVOID any battles with them), then they asked for my help. I allied with them and gave them a home planet, and then proceeded to supply them with every warship I could produce. The Peacekeepers killed every mining starbase and every warship possible from every other race. No repurcussions for me, since they did the attacking. I poached all the mining starbases they killed, and became a super-race. Fun, huh?

Finally someone agrees with me.

I've played World of Warcraft at my friends house, at it is so gay! The only good thing about Blizzard's games is the hype. Their gameplay and graphics suck.

Also, people, this is a thread where we talk about whether starcraft is over rated; its not a starcraft strategy thread. Thanks

Etrius

Star Craft II = http://lolzergrush.ytmnd.com/ I played it a few weeks ago just for old times sake. Zerg is still unstoppable, even with the wall/carrier fleets.