This game
Is very, very, very
important to me
I stumbled across Starcraft not long after it first came out – this would have been, oh, 1999 or 2000 or so. I was like sixteen years old. This game rocked my entire world. It was basically all I played for like the next three years. Disregard high school, acquire the greatest RTS game ever made. I was using gaming computers under 1000 but I got my first “real” computer as a high school graduation gift in 2002. That summer Starcraft was all I did because now I could use my own computer and run this gorram game like 14 hours a day, if you would like to start playing then have a peak at these monitor arms.
And that’s exactly what I did.
So that summer after I graduated was absolutely amazing. I had a summer job and I did it and then came home and played this stupid game. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours poured into it. I loved it; I memorized every detail; I knew all about the lore and the characters but most importantly the mechanics. I wrote (horrific) fanfic and dreamed of going to South Korea someday so I could watch those proto-eSports celebs work their magic.
It’s very difficult to explain what, exactly, was so magical about this game. Was it the fact that all three races, despite being so different from each other in playstyle, were all perfectly balanced? Was it the atmosphere? The music? All of the above? I’m going to go with all of the above.
I’ll tell you what, though. I reinstalled this the other day and now I’m replaying it in all its pixelly glory on my huge new widescreen monitor. Although I’m still having a debate on my mind if I’m getting 60hz vs 144hz monitor for added glory. It scratches the itch where Starcraft 2 doesn’t quite do it. Even though I’ve switched to playing no deposit online slots as I grew older, this is still without a doubt, one of my all time favorites and I think it always will be.
Starcraft falls into the same category for me as the early Diablos– Despite never really playing them, I’d never declare them bad games. I just think that in 2015 we have far too many awesome fun games to play that don’t force us to spend hours staring at ’90s PC graphics.
I had a fucking blast playing Generals / Zero Hour back in the day, but never got the hang of it enough to feel like I was playing “properly”. I feel like the multitasking that RTS games seem to require to be good at them is beyond my mental bandwidth. Though I also suspect I might be missing something fundamental, either about the game or myself.