Be Excellent To Each Other

Hang on... they made firebats actually useful?

They really have thought of everything. Bless.

Fuck me, welcome to the land of happy.

What? I said the cover is 'surprisingly' bad, and expressed pleasure at their making of previously bad things good. That's unusually positive for me.

You called the music 'dreadfully cheap and dull', man.

It's cheesy I grant you, but in the same kind of way that the Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark music is cheesy, i.e. ace and appropriate when there's lots of kick-ass going on.

I will not stand for it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H11vawG_eJI

Sending out an armada of Battlecruisers and Wraiths (with appropriate support) to this tune never got old.

Or watching dug-in Siege Tanks taking out an entire army of attacking Zerg for that matter.

Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't listen to it in the car, but as videogame music, it rocks.

It remains pretty much ten-a-penny 90s (if not 80s) sci fi twanginess, sorry. Maybe with proper orchestration it would sound good, but then what wouldn't? When starcraft came out, its music was already dated as hell.

I have not played the original game much, but I fear that the music accessible via that link of thou's AE is pretty shonky.

Now Shogun Total War, that was an RTS that had awesome music.

Upon listening to the full track I revise my opinion downwards to unbelievably shonky. Apologies.

Why don't game designers just buy permission to use Gustav Holst's 'Mars', eh?

As I recall, Syndicate's intro featured a quite effectively bastardised version of it.

Music wasn't Syndicate's strong point, mind.

You don't need permission to use it. You just need to get permission to use a recording of it, or even better, just record your own.

Bugger, but the 'Ghost of a Chance' level is good fun.

At least this way the reviews won't be biased by publisher interaction...I understand you have to be online for the initial activation and launch, but thereafter, by all accounts you can at least play without any internet connection as guest at least, and I'd suspect it'll have a local cached copy of the proper account too. Nothing too onerous by all accounts.

The campaign missions so far have been really well designed. Plenty of variety, and a steady learning curve. Why aren't more people buying this?

Because I don't have a pc

Mostly because I sit in front of my PC all day and whilst it seems like a good game I just don't want to spend all day in the same chair. I'll use up the demo hours though and see if I decide that I need it after that.

It runs on Macs too.

Fair enough, I'm only playing one (or two) missions each night, and as it's on my laptop I'm pretty comfy.

It needs a little "must stop playing at this time" think like Civ. Tired today

Too tired to send me your address for that Wavebird?

I might actually buy a game! Might be a bit weak on MacBook Normo, though.

(a) £40

I don't have one of them either

Millions and millions of people bought it.

Yeah, but look at the games it beat.

Jesus.

I'm reluctant to have it do a Spore and refuse to run on my machine despite it fitting the specs. That's what kills the £40 price point for me.

In case anyone wants to get friending, my username is 'Grim', because IT LET ME PUT THE DOTS IN AND THEN TOOK THEM AWAY WITHOUT WARNING ME grr.

I am Zardoz.

Hear me roar.

I AM SPARTACUS AND SO IS MY WIFE!

Of course, people are actually enjoying Starcraft, while Spore was a fucking crock of shit.

Might seem a daft question.. but does it have to be connected to the internet to play?

No. It has to connect to the Internet once when you install it to set up a battle.net account, after that it's all yours.

oh goody.... means I can run it on my works laptop, when I am stuck in hotels!!

Quality is irrelevant if it refuses to install. It's just Spore was the one that made me reluctant to shell out that sort of money again for something that might be useless.

How do refunds work on Steam? Is it possible?

Yes, but Starcraft isn't on Steam.

Who is this /\00ß?

Well no, I was hoping Steam would be better for refunds. If you buy a PC game from a shop and open it, you're fucked on refunds regardless of whether it works or not, because I can't think of anywhere that will do returns on unsealed PC games.

Have a borrow of my copy and grab a friend code. Or download it from the Intermaweb.

Ah, good point - a trial would rather mitigate the install issue.

The fact that it has time-limited codes suggests it does need to connect to Battle.NET every time it starts?

Apparently not.

Christ.

I still don't understand this:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/starc ... hics-cards

How can 'busy inactivity' be more dangerous than 'busy busy'? And besides which, what happened to all graphics cards/CPUs being adequately cooled by default and thermal throttling?

Most odd.

Anyway, as for the game itself, it is truly and completely magnificent, I'm almost reluctant to play through the campaign too fast as I want to savour it all the way through. Although the cheevos may tempt me back, a lot of them are quite interesting.

Because £40.

Why's it called "wings of liberty", incidentally? Does it actually refer to anything significant, or are they selling it with a free sanitary towel?

Dunno, but my cards did indeed get hot until I added that fix (we talked about it earlier in the thread).

I assume they'd have throttled themselves before melting, but I thought it best not to find out

Detailed system requirements - might be handy for you, Cras.

http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/13501357

Oh wow. There's an advert screen you have to click past just to view that. I honestly expected more class from Blizzard. It's not as if anyone clicking on the starcraft 2 forum isn't aware that starcraft 2 exists.

Still, they've done a pretty good job of making it as compatible as is realistically possible. My old tank engine could probably run it with all the fancy shiny things off.

But if you get 40 hours of play out of the single player alone (it'll be plenty more than that I reckon but we'll use that as a starting figure), that's £1 per hour, what else can you do for £1 per hour in the realms of mainstream entertainment? Going to the pictures costs a lot more than that, with a depressingly high chance that the film will be shit.

£40 for a game that's this bloody good is entirely reasonable, this standard of production does not come cheap, it's been years and years in the making, Blizzard have said all along 'It'll be out when it's ready', no rush job, no quick cash-in, and now it's here it's positively amazing.

I agree that £40 is a bit of a 'hnnnngghhh' figure when you're used to snapping up all manner of alleged triple-A titles at all sorts of bargainous prices (I can't remember the last time I paid £39.99 for a PC game in a shop), but honestly, this game is different, like L'oreal, it's worth it. Or you're worth it, or something.

Whatever, just get it, you'll thank yourself.

I think it's worth the price, and I haven't even played it. Sure, I don't think every game can be priced that high, but thinking about how much you used to have to pay for a game in my Amiga days and what you pay now, I don't think we've got any room to complain.

I'd also pay £40 for Civ 5 providing it was awesome. Though I still think Colonization (the original) and Alpha Centauri represent the peak of Firaxis-dom.

It is worth every penny.

Bye bye, I'm going to play it now.