StarCraft

I wasn’t an RTS guy. I’d played through the turn-based greats, X-COM, Civilization, and I’d shot my way through countless FPS campaigns, but real-time strategy had never grabbed me. Then a friend shoved a StarCraft CD into my hand and said, “Just try the Terran campaign.” I did, and it honestly changed my mind about the whole genre. Blizzard didn’t just make another Command & Conquer clone; they built something that makes every other RTS before it look like a rough draft.

Visually, StarCraft is a masterpiece of choosing substance over hype. While other studios were chasing clunky 3D engines that would age like milk, Blizzard stuck with beautifully animated 2D sprites, and the result is a game that still looks crisp and full of character. The isometric view gives you exactly the information you need without ever feeling cramped, though I’ve got one big gripe. Why, why is the resolution locked at 640×480? Blizzard mumbles something about fairness in multiplayer, but that’s nonsense for solo play, and even online, a simple server-side cap would solve it. Being stuck at VGA resolution when I’ve got a perfectly good 1024×768 desktop is annoying. The second annoyance: no camera rotation. You get one fixed angle, and while the sprites are gorgeous, I sometimes wish I could spin the view to check what’s behind a big structure. It’s a small thing, but it nags.

Audio is where StarCraft truly sings. The soundtrack is a dark, sweeping orchestral affair that I copied to my hard drive and turned into MP3s almost immediately. The Protoss themes in particular, especially the Brood War additions, are haunting. And that siege tank *throom* when it deploys? Pure joy. Voice acting is top-shelf, with every unit delivering lines with personality and grit, and the sound effects sell every explosion, every psi blade crackle. This is the standard for RTS audio, period.

The interface is mostly smooth, with unique flavor for each race, but Blizzard made a couple of baffling decisions. You cannot customize any hotkeys. In 1999! So if your fingers don’t match Blizzard’s layout, too bad. Their excuse about fairness in multiplayer is laughable, some players will always be faster or macro-savvy; denying everyone basic ergonomic control is not the answer. Worse, unit grouping is capped at 12 units per control group, and you only get 10 groups. In a game that pushes you to mass large armies, this is a constant, teeth-grinding limitation. Special units like High Templar practically demand their own group, eating into your slots and leaving your main force clunky to maneuver. Removing the 12-unit-per-group cap would have fixed most of it.

Game mechanics are the real star. StarCraft doesn’t reinvent the RTS wheel, mine minerals, refine vespene gas, build structures, research upgrades, amass forces. But the balance, the sheer interplay of three completely different races, is astonishing. Terran, Protoss, Zerg: they play nothing alike, yet no faction feels overpowered. Every attack has a defense, every cheese has a counter. This is the best-balanced RTS I’ve ever touched.

The story is another area where Blizzard slammed the competition. The three campaigns, intersecting, overlapping, told through gorgeous prerendered cutscenes, create a real science fiction epic. There are no stupid plot holes forced in to justify game mechanics; the narrative actually makes you care about why you’re harvesting resources and building battlecruisers. They could write novels set in this universe, and they’d be good.

Content is staggering. Three fully distinct single-player campaigns, each 10+ missions, plus the Brood War expansion that adds three more. I’ve played through the original game five times and Brood War twice, and I’m still finding new strategies. The variety of units, each with strengths and weaknesses, keeps the tactical puzzle fresh. It’s not perfect, the Protoss could use a true long-range siege unit, for example, but the game always gives you a tool to succeed if you’re clever.

Now, the AI. I have to talk about the AI, because for all the greatness, this is where StarCraft can be genuinely infuriating. Four huge problems: First, unit survival instincts are broken. One splash of siege tank fire and your marines march stupidly toward their deaths while SCVs flee from buildings they were ordered to repair. A lone mutalisk will hover into a nest of missile turrets while his wingmates ignore him. Second, units attack at their maximum range and won’t close to avoid minimum range blind spots, so marines will stand still and die to a siege tank they could have killed by moving closer. Third, pathfinding is so bad it’s tragic. Goliaths and dragoons, when blocked, will wander clear across the map rather than wait or let the blocker move. This can completely paralyze reaver scarabs and famously murders entire marine squads ordered up a ramp, as the first few stop on the lip and block the rest, who then take the scenic route to their deaths. Fourth, target selection is often idiotic. Reavers will shoot a command center over the harvesters I dropped them next to, or fire at a photon cannon while a bunker tears them apart. It’s as if the AI actively wants you to lose sometimes.

Multiplayer, though, is where the magic lives. Battle.net matchmaking, LAN, direct modem, the game was built to be played against people, and the near-perfect balance makes every match feel like a new puzzle. I’ve sunk hundreds of hours online, and at the $35 I paid, that’s pennies per hour of entertainment. No singleplayer campaign, for all its brilliance, can match the depth and longevity of fighting a human opponent who thinks creatively.

StarCraft is not just the best RTS I’ve ever played; it’s the game that made me love the genre. If you have even a flicker of interest in strategy games, you owe it to yourself to experience this. The AI will frustrate you, the resolution lock will annoy you, the unit caps will sometimes strangle you, but you will keep playing anyway, because underneath those cracks is a masterpiece.