Starcraft II is Here

The big day is here for millions of fans: Blizzard has released Starcraft II!

Yawn.

Okay, okay…to be fair, there is nothing wrong with Starcraft. I just don’t care for it. I played the original and found it to be a fine RTS (with great cut scenes!), but it never really hooked me in the way it did others, especially those crazy South Koreans. I think part of the reason is that I am a fanatical Warhammer 40K fan and Starcraft comes across as a thinly veiled copycat of that awesome game universe (if I recall correctly, one of the original devs even admitted that they did base Starcraft on 40K after learning they couldn’t afford the GW license…how things have changed over the decades). It does have its own merits, but I just can’t get over the glaring similarities (e.g., Zergs = Tyrannids; Protoss = Eldar; Terrans = Space Marines).

This does not mean, however, that I won’t be giving it a try at some point. I’m a sucker for big budget (estimated dev cost: a record-breaking $100 million!) sci-fi games, and Lord knows that Relic’s 40K-themed Dawn of War II was a dud of boring proportions (how is it even possible to make a boring 40K game?!?). So, I definitely could go for an old school RTS game with all the modern glitz added on top.

Now for the political connection….

There isn’t one. But perhaps one day WikiLeaks will release thousands of pages worth of documents that tell us stuff we already know about the Terran war against the Zerg.

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