Reader Reviews
More of your thoughts on games both great and small. (And crap.) Highlights include Metroid: Zero Mission, Sonic Advance 2, StarCraft, Crimson Skies and, um, Dragontorc.
StarCraft (PC)
by Peej
The humble RTS (Real-time strategy) game. As familiar as that pair of antique Nikes you daren't throw out, even though they smell like a Bavarian smoked cheese factory. [So that's what that smell is! -Ed] Soon after the Command and Conquer series popularised the genre, the gaming scene literally exploded with a multitude of C&C clones, some good, some frankly about as entertaining as jabbing yourself in the eye with a lit match. Though I'd dabbled with the strategy thing with the C&C series it took one game to really open my eyes to how excellent an RTS game can be. That game was StarCraft, by Blizzard.
It treads a well-worn path. You play one of three chosen races (Terran, Zerg and Protoss) each with their own strengths and weaknesses, and each held in a state of conflict intertwined and more complicated than anything you'll see on CNN. You start off with a handful of units, and a bunch of resources which can be mined / gathered to build new units. With me so far? Of course you are, as this is pretty much the staple element of any RTS. What StarCraft does so well is to balance each of the three races so that there's something different to the way in which you use each, but all StarCraft players will have their particular favourites (I use the Zerg because they're just so damned yucky!).
For the single player, there is a rich storyline crammed with some fantastic cut scenes to punctuate the excellent game play against computer AI, which is as unforgiving as a cuckolded girlfriend. Graphically even after nearly 7 years the game looks great (no fancy 3D here, no sirree) and will run on practically anything PC-wise. It's a mark of its cool design that it still runs on my bang up to the minute PC as well as my creaky old P1 166MHz laptop.
Multiplayer the game really does come up trumps (100 zillion Koreans can't be wrong, right?) and in LAN sessions I've seen whole days eaten up by one match against 3 other players on a tricky map, for StarCraft is one of those games where you can pull yourself back from the brink of destruction with a handful of units, and pretty much start from scratch until you are back in business. Still on the subject of multiplayer, StarCraft features one of the most user-friendly map editors you could hope to come across which extends the life of the game infinitely.
Add to this rather attractive package an official add-on pack ("Brood War") which gives you more terrain types, another arm to the storyline and a hell of a bunch of impressive extra units, and for its current asking price (I've seen this game on sale with its add-on for £4.99, it's a CRIME I tell ya!) and you're talking fantastic value for money.
Of course the chances are that I'm preaching to the already converted, because if you've owned a PC for more than a few years you must've encountered this game. If not, and you think that Command and Conquer is the be all and end all of real-time strategy, you really need to get hold of StarCraft and prepare to be humbled. Sadly in this age of endless sequels to successful franchises, StarCraft has only managed to spawn a rather lacklustre third-person platformer-style game rather than a proper balls-out sequel but I live for the day when Blizzard see sense and do a sequel and wrap it up in a lovely engine like the one they bestowed upon WarCraft III. I think I could quite happily retire and just play StarCraft II for the rest of my days and as a mark of how well regarded it is, it would be the one game I would take onto a desert island if I had to choose only one.