StarCraft II - Wings of Liberty

Even though I was a fan of StarCraft, I decided not to purchase SCII. After all Blizzard was trying to screw me out of my easy-earned dollars by chopping the sequel up into 3 parts and selling each at full retail value.

I told myself (and those around me) this for months leading up to it's release. The game came out and I managed to avoid looking it directly in the eyes. Blizzard is a devious lot mind you. They knew that there might be some resistance, so they formulated a counter strategy. Each copy comes with several 'trial' codes. I was given one and since I could justify playing it if it was free, I installed.

You got me Blizzard! A short 7 hours later I was down at my local software flea market shoving my entire wallet into the gullet of an unfortunate clerk who happened to be standing between myself and a small pyramid constructed out of copies of StarCraft.

In short this game is amazing.

In the game you get to play an alien race known as the Zerg. The Zerg are awesome because they are just as technologically advanced as anything in the universe, yet they construct everything out of living tissue. So the core concept is to bang your way up to a small army (you have to breed basically to spawn new units) and then send those things over there to die. Sweet.

I have been told you can play as some other races, but who cares. Also there may be a single player campaign, but once again who cares. The Zerg are where it is at and if you don't believe that, come get your face ripped off on Battle.net, the online system used by the game.

Battle net works alright. I say alright because I had to link up a facebook account to find my friends playing the game... sigh... Anyway it has all the basic features including achievements, leader boards, party system, match making and chat.

The game itself features robust graphics and a decent interface. Also the graphics scale well, so your 5 year old computer will still probably be able to play it fairly well. If you have played any real time strategy games in the last decade, you know what to expect, and it is basically the first game with a shiny new coat (which isn't necessarily bad considering the amount of polish Blizzard puts into their games).

See if you can root out one of those trial codes and give the game a shot, even if you don't like RTS games. You might just find that you have Korean tendencies.