StarCraft

Herzog Zwei is not an RTS.
Dune 2 is the first RTS.

When it was released we played it in LAN cafes and i think i also played a bit at home. In late 2007 i’ve decided to beat the campaigns. I’ve finished the terran one, and reached the final level in the zerg one. No matter what i did, i was annihilated very fast, so i just gave up.

So when i was writing up my thoughts on Tiberian Sun, i remembered StarCraft. With human memory being extremely faulty i needed to re-check everything i am writing. So i watched more videos from other people, looked up sales figures and needed to actually play the game, instead of memembering it. Looking up what my options are, i thought about playing the remaster or the cartooned versions, which are unavailable to purchase here. But then i saw that the original is free if you register on battle.net So the vanilla version that is.

I didn’t want to bother trying to remember the password to my account with WarCraft 3, Diablo 1–2, which was semi-locked after their moronic idea to tie it to your government passport, to leak all your info to everyone on-line and to directly tell KGB of all your thought-crimes. Even harmless private gayness is illegal in this craphole, picture being seen playing a game where you depose the government? Diablos were first ever released here decades later. Imagine paying full-price for the grandpa’s games out of your benevolence, and then getting your account locked for not giving them your literal passport. With a photo of your passport anyone can take a loan on your name and disappear. Meanwhile your 40m^2 flat will be repossessed and your arms and legs would be broken by enforcers every month right when you come out of the hospital. They will torture all your near and distant relatives and KGB will track all your movements for them for a small fee.

So the StarCraft version i’ve played is 11.23.10.11643 i don’t know if it’s because they changed the game so much, or if it’s because i became so good against RTS AI, despite being elderly, but this time i’ve finally finished the game.
It’s kinda hard to find how to actually install it. Because the button that offers it to you for free leads somewhere where it is absent. Because i live in the capital of a garbage failed state, i often get internet and electricity outages. I thought that battle.net makes this old game always on-line, but i somehow managed to find the way to play it even off-line. They could’ve made it as clear as it is in Steam.

Damn, this Warhammer 40.000 knock-off is way more knock-off than i remembered. I experienced way more pop-culture since 2007 and i’ve recognised a ton of stuff this time. The very opening cutscene is stealing from multiple movies. Since it stole from WH40K so much, i really don’t believe that adjutants (creepy face lady of terrans) were originally supposed to be robots, or non-sapient.

I misremembered it to be an absolutely modern RTS game. And while it actually is way more modern than the market at the time (flooded with C&C clones) it’s still a dated game. Starting with the button [Esc]. It’s not the menu button, it’s a cancel button. Imagine waiting, like, ten minutes for an upgrade or a unit to almost finish and then accidentally cancelling it on a reflex. Can you imagine how many times i’ve killed three mutating zerg maggots by accident and had to wait for them to slowly spawn back, while my base was being eaten alive? Just like in the AoE2 the menu button is on [F10]. To make that funnier, LMB doesn’t deselect the selection. So even when i kinda learned not to press [Esc] for the gameplay, i still was pressing it for the menu on a reflex after failing to deselect the thing.

When WarCraft 2 came out to be an improvement over Dune 2, it had already been made obsolete by the technical superiority of C&C. When Tiberian Sun came out it had already been made obsolete by StarCraft‘s controls and interface. Like, yes, Tiberian Sun is newer and is way superior with its tech, again. It’s future-proof, beautifully running in 1600×1200 resolution with very pleasant FoV, while StarCraft can barely show anything with its ancient pixelated sprites.
But StarCraft is designed for two-button mice. Players make way fewer mistakes because of the improved controls. Double click selects the type. You can queue pathing with [Shift], you can put a rally point. Not into the resources, tho. The game has parallel production. There’s the mission select screen. You can change the speed with hotkeys. The maximum speed is still kinda slow, tho. There are several units or upgrades that take an insane amount of time to progress. In AoE in that amount of time you can go to the next age and already have a very strong economy. It’s so bad that you better build several such buildings to run them in parallel. All the stasis spells outright remove your units from the control groups. The AI wouldn’t care but you are screwed. Your max selection is 12 units, so if you have 24 — good luck doing anything with them without the control groups.

The unit AI is about the same as everywhere at that time. It does not work like in the modern games. Instead of extension of your will, it’s extension of your suck. So babysitting the moronic AI is what sportsballsmen call “micro”? I get it. You are an winner at popping glass jars. It’s a slight improvement over WarCraft 2, but your packs still spread around. They try to find other bridges instead of queueing. Your peasants can sometimes decide to go through the enemy camp to your first base, instead of to the base that is one metre away from the resources. Which is weird since they didn’t do that in WarCraft 2 and their life was only made easier here. There was gold in gold mines and wood in the forests. The mines were stationary but the forests were slowly cut down so the trip for the workers was getting longer and longer. Unlike the AoE games the economy was small so dropping down another resource-gathering spot was not cost-effective. In StarCraft gold was remade into gas, which you can still squeeze little by little into infinity even after it ran-out. And the forests were condensed into high-value small nodes that are always put into tight clusters. Instead of hauling logs from shrinking big blobs of woods, it’s always cost-effective to just plop a new base. They’ve even restricted the minimal distance for no diegetic reason. Damn. No wonder AoE survived the war between the MP behemoth of StarCraft and the SP shakespeare franchise of C&C. In the age where StarCraft turned forests into nodes, and C&C turned wild map-spanning fields of resources into nodes, AoE actually offered the players a meaningful big economy. Economy that forced them to expand on big maps and to claim the resources far away from the main base earlier than the ones that are basically gifted from the start. Losing ten peasants was not a death sentence and you could easily re-build your empire even if you barely survived the first attack.

Most of the aspects making up StarCraft are frankly mediocre, and even outdated by today’s standards. But to this day StarCraft‘s overall artistry is what makes it a great game. The sprites and animations look good and have really cool designs. The small doomguy animated portraits are great.
It has a beautiful GUI, that changes to fit the played race. On selected units it displays iconic line-arts with random separate parts changing their colour to represent the HP-loss. In StarCraft 2 they replaced it with generic monochromes.
Though, the unit panel is less informative than the last time. It’s not as verbose and the things are not explained in general. Like, what’s the point of firebats? Or how do stimpacks work, outside of damaging your own units? Is it a temporary buff? A forever buff? Why can you use them again? I don’t think they stack.
WarCraft 2 actually did change the art of the GUI to reflect your upgrades. This time the icon stays the same only the tier-number changes. But with buildings and many other things having a zero forever it’s kinda a negative-possibility-space.

The voice-acting and the sound-design are as iconic as in WarCraft 2, but this time they’ve recorded everything with professional equipment instead of in a restroom. Jason Hayes as firebat and arbiter is insanely good.

StarCraft is one of the rare early games where all the campaigns are canon, instead of one side being declared a loser in the sequel. The story is a horror space opera, where the horror is other people. The opening cutscene outright quotes several nam movies. But besides the good cutscenes there are also some boring slides with texts. Or the stupid slides that say the name of the place you are supposedly at. But you aren’t, all the briefings are self-isolated skype videocalls where the higher-ups are speaking at you, or even declare themselves your new higher ups. It was fun at the time. But this is not exactly brilliant storytelling. Thankfully all the dialogues on the actual maps put the action on pause and they are fully voiced.

The game doesn’t exactly explain the setting properly. You start the first episode with terrans. It’s some backwater planet, but also it has hive-city technologies where as far as you can see everything is made of metal. Or weird floating in space megastructures. Which even have rock formations and sources of natural gas?

It’s a fun story about the horrors of the terran government and just how grimdark life is in the 41st millennium. Your cushy new bureaucratic appointment turned out to be a ticket to a zerg-carnival government experiment. The local sheriff takes control of your life and forces you to join a terrorist group. You help them fight against the government, and you lead several no russian missions so the terrorists can declare the formation of imperium of men. The village sheriff now demands of you to go against another government and to save his arse.

This is fine writing. The terran confederacy doesn’t just fly the confederate flag, the whole faction is actual space rednecks, instead of the pathos of WH40K. Your story is not about you being a good guy but about you being used by everyone, especially your friend sheriff.

Interesting how when you take over bot’s units they still keep their colours. (Well, heroes specifically belong to the teal player to make them recognizable). It could be confusing, but since there’s no conversion in this game all these events happen when you can clearly distinguish between yours and the enemy’s forces.

Terrans are a very fun sci-fi faction. They are a good starting point, since the peasants operate like in WarCraft 2. But also they have pointless gimmicks, like flying buildings. It probably is useful in MP, or maybe you can move your base when you are out of crystals. But mostly it’s just for fun. First of all, even depleted gas mines give gas. So it’s better to just add a new one, than to outright abandon your old one. Second, most buildings create add-ons that can’t fly. And if they are disconnected you lose the access to the related units until you reconnect. Some buildings even have alternative add-ons, so you have to build two of them to have everything.

Instead of defencive towers you can make bunkers for soldiers to sit in. It’s possible that AoE2 added garrisoning because of terrans. You have universal soldiers, universal walkers, stealth planes, ghosts who are like ogres. Not because they have layers, but because they are both a combat unit and a mage. But the true stars of the faction are siege tanks with their giant range and iconic animations, and battlecruisers. That are operational. Six tanks with six anti-air units can disassemble anything. Just keep a couple of peasants with a stealth detection unit in the second control group while you leapfrog your siege mode placements. In 2007 i used battlecruisers as the anti-air, but this time i was less patient. Battlecruisers are universal, they can attack everything, and they can spit fire out of range of anti-air turrets. So i wanted to level everything with them in the last missions. Well, the last missions are terran vs terran so i’ve lost a ton of the expensive and very slow to build battlecruisers to the stupid ghosts. They couldn’t get near my siege tank bombardment of 2007, but they were constantly ganking entire chunks of my space-fleet.

The terran campaign is fun and properly balanced. Some would say it’s kinda easy, but Blizzard did the same thing the last time, making the entire campaign a tutorial.

The zerg are an obvious WH40K rip-off. But not an absolute one. Instead of consuming all the biomass on the planet, leaving only dust desserts, these immigrants gift a persian carpet to every planet they come to. Zerg campaign is not very zerg. You are promised a hivemind and aliens, instead it’s the same self-isolation skype calls between bickering independent beings. A generic Westwood-style videophone talking at the screen (you, the player). Could have been better if all the briefings were inhuman screaming at the screen of concrete commands, with weird flashes and effects, as you are part of an organism, not a separate person-thing.

And then Kerrigan is introduced and she talks too much for an appendage of a hive-mind. She’s even chatting with her boyfriend instead of consuming him, and with the protoss. Could’ve at least been voiced like Mortis‘ ghosts (with conflicting voice-lines simultaneously).

Zerg are probably unique in the genre. Your main base spawns maggots until there are three. You can click them and personally mutate them into peasants. And then mutate the peasants into buildings. New buildings open new mutation options for the maggots and some buildings can mutate themselves. The universal fliers can mutate into long-range air-to-ground fliers.

Hunting for maggots, waiting for them to spawn, losing peasants to buildings and waiting for the persian carpet to grow for every new base is a bit annoying. But also it’s what makes it cool.

The stock doggies are nearly useless. But if you waste an hour or two upgrading them they become a cheap and good way to flood the enemy base. They don’t cost thespian gas and they spawn in pairs so if you have several spawners you can send a lot of them. Hydros are kinda strong universal ranged units. Unlike WarCraft 2 the wizards don’t attack at all. Their spells are not explained either and barely work. You have to slow the game to a crawl to maybe do something a little unpleasant to one enemy, or questionably good to your units. For that cost in research you can just win the map with basic units. Even in WC2 i stopped using wizards in favour of anything else, and these are worse. They are for sportsballsmen and for AI to pester you. Elephanties are kinda useless. They are tanky but they struggle to 1v1 even one basic protoss dude. With no way to repair them they can be better replaced with a pile of cheap doggies for no cost in gas.
The zerg air force is very strong. Even the basic fliers are tankies then the alternatives and can deal quasi-AoE damage. But the crabs outright outrange the ground defences. Though, you still need some anti-air cover.

It’s fun to pwn the enemy from the air, but the campaign gets hairy once protoss get their mages. The FoV is so tiny that a protoss wizard can destroy your whole flying army without you even noticing. And then the other one puts you in stasis en masse, breaking your DPS and control groups. In the last three missions it’s better to just flood the map with doggies and hydros.

Last time i got stuck on the final zerg mission because with my preferable style of play i had no time to do anything, and tongues are not that strong of a tower, especially against the caterpillars. You can’t repair them, they regenerate super slow, they take a lot of effort to replace. So this time i tried to play the map like sportsballsmen — i’ve just built a giant economy for economy’s sake, cleared the left ramp with hydros and sent in the doggos. With both sides cleared and more bases built i thought about upgrading and building high-end forces for another hour. But instead i just finished the map by sending doggos and hydros from every base. I didn’t waste time or money on anything else but these two units and their upgrades, i’ve played on the slow speed and finally won this map.

Terrans have some space-banjo future rock for their OST. But zerg music doesn’t sound very fitting for the race.

Because i’ve never finished the zerg campaign before, i’ve never properly played protoss. No open skirmish can teach you a faction in an RTS game like a properly-paced campaign.

So turns out protoss are actually idiots, despite all their high-tech stuff. I saw thousands of people using protoss names as nicknames so i didn’t expect the characters to be this dumb. Zeratul is basically Mengsk, who’s sent zerg to the protoss homeworld  for his petty needs. Or, you know, by hanlon’s razor maybe he is just an imbecile, who doomed the aiur for nothing.

So now the old government talks at you on skype ordering you to go and clean up the zerg. Then Tassadar comes and talks about how much he loves heresy. Despite him already being a full heretic, he somehow forgot to mention the exact recipe for heresy, so the government thought that he lied to them. Because Tassadar is an idiot.

You are sent to arrest him, and еhen you discover that besides his heretic training, he is also somehow, off-screen, decided to french kiss with Raynor. So when you saw it, for no reason you decided to side with the heretic and xeno-bonker Tassadar against your government. There were no positive contacts between the races before this point, and humies only helped to create more zerg.

Escort missions were a bit annoying in WarCraft 2, but they are totally alright and fun for zerg and terran campaigns. These two protoss escort missions are slow and bothersome. Protoss are so weak you have to wait for them to regenerate the shields every time they take a hit. The AI-controlled protoss wizards could destroy your entire army in one second of the lightning spell, your spell does nothing because AI instantly reacts to it. You have to adjust it with save / load many times to not get eaten. And you have to wait for mana to regenerate before every encounter. Meanwhile zerg wizards somehow turn your dragoon robots into meatballs.

Then you all have decided to return to aiur and save it by force if you have to. Your army wins the homeland map, but you lose the homeland map in a cutscene. Because Tassadar is a retard. If terrans are space rednecks, protoss are moron morons. Tassadar didn’t want more people to die, so he surrendered, so we broke him out of jail, making way more people die. When they are killed.

Finally, you start to actually fight zerg(s) instead of each other. And the last map is an epic double-faction battle, that is so cool, they let you play WarCraft 3’s finale with three races. Finally, you can use the battleships against zerg, instead of being stunned and destroyed by ghosts. And a full pack of battleships feels even better than a full pack of bananas, clearing the giant swarms of hydros protecting the base, without even falling below yellow HP.

I clearly remember how we were repairing protoss stuff with terrans when we were playing LAN games. But that didn’t work in this version of the game.

It’s a good campaign with good pacing. Every mission you get a new unit to play with. The story is okay, despite the zerg and especially the protoss parts.

Protoss units are weird. It’s an interesting faction to think off, but it’s just weaker and slower zerg. Protoss look cool when they are controlled by the same AI that makes your units dumb and erratic. But in your hands they are running around and die in bottlenecks. Protoss can’t repair and they don’t regenerate. Their stupid shields can be fun to play with in early stages of PvP, where you manually control only a couple of units. But in giant end-game campaign battles their stupid shields can take barely a hit and then take forever to regenerate. You can build soup pots to replenish the shields during hit and run attacks, but the pots have barely any capacity, even three of them can’t re-fill a decent pack two times. They are useful only for weird defence.

You just send your disposable dorks to fight like zerg doggos. But the dorks are super slow to produce even with 3-4 buildings working in parallel. AI’s caterpillars were levelling your base while you were focused on fighting at another place. But you discover that they literally shoot your money, require manual reload and don’t deal much damage. You have to spend, like, 100 resources to take down one enemy tower. Dragoons are alright. During the mid-game you can spend two wizards to create one archon. A universal unit that has a lot of shield and barely any HP. They are alright but with low range and high cost they can be easily overwhelmed. Now, bananas are exactly as cool as you expect them to be. They are super slow to make and to fully upgrade, but you might as well just ignore all other research. One banana can serve as a defender. A pack of fully upgraded bananas is extremely fun. On protoss vs protoss maps they are constantly getting stunned by the stupid arbiter. But on the protoss vs zerg maps you fill the skies with angry bees meeting almost no resistance.

Protoss has some kind of ballet music and it doesn’t fit their jihad briefings.

So this version runs perfectly on Windows 10 and with modern hardware. The classic renderer gives you a very tiny FoV and Blizzard were backwater and retrograde in many of their other projects. Like, Diablo 2 was running at an ancient resolution for its release date. You can’t change any options during the game, only in the main menu. There’s a limit of 101 slots for the savegames for some reason.

— / • / —

I didn’t expect to think that the gameplay is mediocre. I didn’t expect that zergs are generic, and that protoss are idiots who forgot how to breathe. I forgot that the unit AI and pathfinding are as bad as in most games at that time.

But damn, whoever did the art are geniuses. This collage pastiche work of other properties, combined with their own things is absolutely amazing. The sprites, the audio, the animations, the GUI. Siege tanks, battlecruisers, bananas, dragoons, doggos. Sportsballsmen have their reasons to consider this game to be great. I think it’s still great for its artistry, not for its mildly outdated gameplay and ancient technical side.