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Uneducated Opinion

Starcraft 2 launched this month, finally giving you a reason to pry away that vice like grip you have on your lonely, abused penis. My thoughts? Starcraft 2 is a good game. I’m enjoying playing it. It’s not a life changing experience like backing over your neighbors 4 year old but it’s still fun. I’m very satisfied with what they delivered. It’s tight, the graphics are solid, the leveling system that Blizzard has introduced makes the single player feel slightly less linear and the whole interface redesign is slicker than the gallons of used motor oil I pour into my neighbor’s creek. So what’s the catch?

The only thing about Starcraft 2 that I have a beef with is the fact that everyone with a penis that hasn’t touched a vagina seems to be talking about this game like it’s descended from the heavens to show us all what true happiness is. I think the gaming world needs to take a deep puff from the communal inhaler and calm down.

What Starcraft 2 does well, it does really well. In fact, it’s exactly what I would have expected from Blizzard… roughly 10 years ago. Was it worth a 13 year wait? Not really because that’s a long time. The game plays like how I imagine Pamela Andseron would be in the sack, still fun but certain things just aren’t holding up like they used to.

Now I’m not saying Starcraft 2 is going to give you Hep C, it just doesn’t do anything to warrant the long wait for what was delivered. And I say that without any condemnation because I am enjoying the game. I just can’t think of a single thing Starcraft 2 does that other games haven’t done earlier or even better. I could be wrong of course but the fact that I can’t say: “Hey, I’ve never seen INSERT FEATURE before!” is kind of a testament to my point. It feels like the game designers were walking on eggshells and trying to update a game without pissing off a legion of hardcore nerds who are already desperate for reasons to not eat themselves into a coma.

Its graphics are solid. They’re not anywhere close to something like Uncharted 2, but they’re slick. Visually, the game is like putting a slutty outfit on your 45 year old wife, she still looks kind of hot in the right light… if the shadows blur out the huge fist sized bruises you left on her arms and cheeks. But it still feels like a game visually designed ten years ago.

The balancing between units is well done. No one unit is perfect and as a result being effective requires making careful combinations of unit choices and upgrades. I’d say that Company of Heroes (2006) does it better by offering more precise combinations of unit types, based on their individual strengths, but Starcraft 2 still does it well in it’s own way.

The unit upgrades are great. Without spoiling anything they’ve added a few new upgrades and tweaked some others. Bear in mind, they’re nothing like the individual squad upgrades available in Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War (2004) but what Blizzard has given us feels about as customizable as the choice of pills the doctor gives you to deal with gonorrhea.

They’ve also beefed up the unit roster to include more types of units than the number of human lips you used to make that belt. You’ve got almost all of your old favorites and a bevy of new units at your control. Sure, you’re not going to get as many different units as Warzone 2100 (1999), but you’ve still got about as many units to play with as your mom has vibrators tucked into her sock drawer.

You can now control more units than ever, which is especially important if you’re a fan of the Zerg rush (aka spending Friday nights at home alone trying to take your mind off the questionable porn you accidentally stumbled on that weirdly aroused you). Of course, you won’t be battling out with armies consisting of thousands of men like in Empire Total War (2009), but you still get a couple hundred which is a decent enough offering.

And if you’re one of the few Koreans who hasn’t yet been jailed for letting your infant starve, while you feed your compulsive video game addiction, then you’ll enjoy the new Battlenet. You can immediately start working towards various unlockable profile picture images, etc. It’s an achievement point system nearly identical to something like Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (2009). After all, the only person worth impressing in life is your 12 year old internet opponent who’s firing off racist insults and calling you a “GH3y N00B R3tardz!!1″

All in all it is a very good game. Sure, it didn’t make a fantastic crossover from a first person series to a strategy game like Halo Wars, and maybe it didn’t include new technology like the voice recognition system in Tom Clancy’s Endwar (2008). Okay, it didn’t come close to the incredible tactical experience of Rome: Total War (2004). And nor did it take us into an amazing new strategy setting like Homeworld (1999). So what if you can’t take your armies through hundreds of years of evolution like Age of Empires (1997)? These things don’t detract from making Starcraft 2 a good game.

And that’s exactly what it is. A good game. Were all the games I mentioned above amazingly great games? Not all of them, but some of them I’d say ‘hell yeah they were.’ They were great because they made significant changes to the Strategy genre, or because they advanced the evolution of video games, or because they took a risk and just went with it. As Lead developer for Starcraft 2, Dustin Browder, said “We’re not trying to be innovative.”

Look, good games don’t necessarily have to do something unique and stylish and inventive and super creative… but great games do. Starcraft 2 is a good game, with great marketing.

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