StarCraft 2

I’ve been playing StarCraft the last couple nights, mostly the single player campaign because I’m definitely not a competent player in the versus arena (I didn’t play the beta, and I didn’t play that much of the original SC, pretty much through the campaign and some vs with friends) so the amount of time I spend in there will definitely be limited, but I did try a couple 1v1 against the AI, learning that hard is too hard for me at the moment… my ‘newbness’ aside…

The Campaign has been excellent so far, and I was pleasantly surprised by the depth. I don’t think I’ve played a mission yet that was a simple beat the opponent yet. There is some of that, but they always seem to add a bit of flare with things like lava overflows of low altitude areas of that map, so you have to make sure that you have your units on high ground, it’s never overwhelming because they give you a timer telling you when it’s coming, as well as notification as the cycle approaches. They also used a day/night cycle in which you switched from offense to defense, but they always included optional objectives that encouraged you to explore past those simple boundaries, and they are always tied to some sort of reward, be it points to go towards your research trees, credits to upgrade your units, or collection of mercs available, and always some kind of ‘achievement’. All of this really encourages you to go the extra mile, and explore the maps, and gives a strong sense of variety that I honestly wasn’t expecting. There is also hero based missions that start you out against the odds, and you have to use the abilities of the hero to strategically get through the enemies lines.

You get some choice in which missions you do, and each has unlocked a new unit so far, each mission catering to that unit’s strengths, it makes it sort of obvious what you have to do to win, but to be fair I’ve been playing on ‘normal’ difficulty, so I expect that it wouldn’t be so simple if you had the cahones to play like a man… I think there has been a cut scene after each mission so far, and they have definitely been up to Blizzard’s standards.

I’ve spent some time with the challenges and they’re pretty fun, more or less have been like rock paper scissors in the ones that I’ve tried but that will likely change too.

Megalodon

They need more profile pictures unlocked at the start though… pretty limited customization up front and everyone looks the same on the forums which falls into blizzard’s model, it sort of sucks now though.

I’ve also had some issues with my megalodon headset however, it took some tinkering to get output working at all which is annoying because the beauty of the USB headset is that it’s just plug’em in and go. It’s also annoying that I had to set it to be prologic output instead of 7.1 which is supported by the headset, and works outside of StarCraft, and then I couldn’t get the mic to work… it’s all working now but it was troublesome, and annoying, and when I switch from desktop speakers to headset I have to go back into the settings to re-optimize, or continue to play with “lesser” settings.

[Update: 2010-07-31]

Just got back from a mini road trip, overnighter, and was getting ready to fire up starcraft. Looks like a patch went out while I was gone… notably!

Fixed an issue with sound not playing on some 7.1 systems.

If Blizz fixed my only complaint about the game already I am going to be thoroughly impressed. haven’t got to try it yet, but I’m pretty excited