Be Excellent To Each Other

Getting back into this. Finally convinced a couple of mates to get it so we've been having weekly four player sessions. I've also played three, won three in my placement matches for the current 1v1 season. Wonder what league I'll get into this time!

Alright! Gold League!

I'd imagine it's pretty lonely inn there.

I just had the most vivid déjà vu. Almost scary.

Heart of the Swarm down from £33 to £17 on battle.net at the moment, I'll probably give it a punt at that price.

Hopefully that fucking wanker Raynor is nowhere to be seen, cigar-sniffing prick that he is.

Oh brilliant Cockface Raynor is in it right from the start. When alone with Kerrigan early on, and let's remember she's probably THE MOST POWERFUL SINGLE BEING IN THE UNIVERSE, he comes out with shit like 'Just keep it together dahhhlin' whilst handing her a gun and telling her it's like riding a bike.

THE WOMAN JUST KILLED AN ELITE CREW OF MARINES WITH THE POWER OF HER FUCKING MIND YOU WHISKEY-ADDLED CIGAR FIXATED FUCKING WANKER - SHUT THE FUCK UP.

I really hope I get to kill him when I'm back to being the Queen of Blades, that would bit the best ending for the campaign I think.

Ahhhh yes I am bumming the Zerg campaign to pieces.

Thank fuck Cuntface Raynor and his motley crew of dickheads aren't too much in on the action, it's all about Kerrigan going postal and laying waste to anything and everything that gets in her way, courtesy of a delightful cadre of evil Zerg cohorts. (I do rather like the utterly immoral genetic engineer she's got working for her.)

Kerrigan's still got a bit of angst about her, but basically we're just all into the TOTAL ZOMG KILLING. The 'talent trees' and 'tech choices' have been rejigged to suit the Zerg as well (you can change most of them when you want), which suits me a lot better since you couldn't really make informed choices in the Terran campaign.

I've playing on Normal difficulty because I'm more about the spectacle than anything else, but it's still providing what I'd describe as a 'modest challenge' up to now, which suits me fine as I'm an old bastard with limited game time.

Obviously being Blizz it's all just as gorgeous and slick and lovely as you can possibly imagine, and it's totally taken over from WoW and Pinball Arcade. (BF4 I've been keeping as weekend entertainment with the chaps anyway.)

Anyway, yeah, Zerg campaign is fab, if you were a bit '8/10 underwhelmed' by the Terran campaign as I was, give this bad boy a try.

See now on one level you could accuse it of breaking down the fourth wall a bit in a 'bad way' and not taking itself seriously enough, but then again, anyone who keeps clicking on the same unit in a Starcraft game knows exactly what to expect.....

On the one hand my mission really is pure evil, as befits the Zerg, infesting an entire Protoss mothership and killing/dissolving/leeching any and every living being I come across, with an ultimate command TO KILL EVERYTHING.

But hey, this is Starcraft, so my newest recruited Broodmother to the Swarm got the click treatment and eventually finished up with, in a heavily sarcastic female voice, something along the lines of - 'Things were so much easier when I was a larva, now it's all just kill the Protoss this and evolve the brood that, I'll tell you what, I'm never going to treat my larva this way.'

(Along the way I got stuff like 'It is difficult to follow your commands when you do not give me any' and 'Why would the Protoss gather so many creatures when they have no mouths to eat them with'.)

Also, the Zerg really are quite thrilling to play when they get their swarming boots on.

The Protoss campaign for this game has finally turned up 'cheap', and by cheap I mean Blizzard have dropped it down to £20 from £30.

That was good enough for me so I snagged it earlier this evening and have had a decent crack at it already, it's basically MORE STARCRAFT II but with a Protoss single player campaign, so everyone knows what to expect.

Fortunately all the characters in the Zerg and Protoss campaigns are far more likeable than spunkbucket Raynor in the Terran campaign. I'd take a Zerg larvae over him.

Starcraft Remastered incoming!

Yes it's the original 1998 game brought a 'bit up to date', although the original still works fine on modern operating systems and is indeed still being actively patched (!).

As part of the next patch the original game and the Brood War expansion will be made completely free, which is pretty cool, but they'll be selling the 'remastered' game from sometime in the summer.

Obviously I'll be buying it. I could listen to the Terran Campaign music all day.



AWESOME MUSIC starts at 3m56s

Oh my, £13.

IN.

Starcraft II goes free! The Terran campaign (which was the entire single player game at launch) and some multiplayer stuff is 100% no strings attached free.

Can't really argue with that.

Runs very nicely on lower specced PCs or half-decent laptops. Give it a go. Just try not to focus on what an arsehole Jim Raynor is.

https://starcraft2.com/en-gb/#free-to-play

Don't miss the shade thrown at Battlefield in this Twitter thread either: https://twitter.com/StarCraft/status/930534868139646976

Number of hours it takes to earn the full StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty Campaign: 0

— StarCraft (@StarCraft) November 14, 2017

Battlefront.

Aye, that's the fucker.

Oooohhhh burn.

(Also slightly cheeky considering Blizzard have done quite a lot of frigging with Hearthstone over the last year or so to tweak it more and more towards being pay to win, and repeatedly put certain key 'must have' cards for some classes/decks into the epic/legendary categories which makes it far less likely you'll get them by random chance, and thus nudges folks towards dropping some cash on packs.)

Is SC2 an all-out old-school RTS or is more in line with the modern RPG/RTS hybrids like Dawn of War 2?

Being free by itself isn't reason enough to try it. I don't have much time now.

Old-school.