Starcraft 2

Yeah, so I did the crazy thing and went to Best Buy at midnight to get a copy on opening day. Actually I went at 12.45, and there was no one there except the employees...so no waiting.

Fired it up at home...and did the tutorial. The gameplay mechanics appear to have not changed at all. It IS visually prettier--but it still needs the zoom way way out that Supreme Commander has. All the keystrokes are the same.

The EULA is a bit annoying...if I were to use the editor kit to make something, Blizzard owns it. Guess I won't be doing any.

It's good that this is finally out...been a long time coming. We'll see how it goes.

[later...]

It's a lot prettier than the first game. the cinematics are excellent...the way this works is that you do a mission, you end up back on Raynor's starship. If you did the side missions, you maybe have some money and research points to spend on things, which you do while on the ship.

The in-game animations are really good, too.

But what of the "story" ? So far it seems like the SC 1, the story takes place as narrative and cinematics while you blast aliens. One thing I don't like is that it doesn't let me finish blasting the aliens everywhere...Redstone was the first map where I did.

[days later]

I'll post a walk-through of sorts before too long, for the campaign.

There are four difficulty modes: Casual=you're new to RTS games, Normal=you've played RTS games, Hard=you've played through StarCraft 1 not too long ago, Brutal=you're a master at SC 1.

Even with that, the maps vary in difficulty: some on Normal are more difficult than others on Hard.

One story sequence has Zeratul appear, and then you actually play as Zeratul for a few missions--the last one of which is harder than anything else I've done in SC2 so far--this is primarily because I don't really know how to play as a Protoss, and doing the other missions isn't really going to teach you.

As you proceed through missions, new mission possibilities pop up, featuring different characters: Zeratul, Tosh, Tychus, Mengsk Jr. You are working towards a point where you are maybe going to be able to rescue Kerrigan !?

I'm not finished yet...

Latest on compy games

Played the Supreme Commander 2 demo earlier this year (figuring I'd get SupCom 2 when Steam has it cheap enough), and so I finally got motivated to buy the original...

With which I have issues...

1) It won't even install on Win 7 Pro. Grrr...It's not like this is from some little micro developer. Back to XP.
2) My XP box just barely has enough horsepower, despite being an AMD 2800+ dual-core, with ATI X1600 graphics.
3) It aborted really badly on me yesterday, and I cannot recover. I was in the middle of the final episode (#6) for the UEF faction, did something that caused it to crash hard, and I cannot get it going again...not for lack of trying, but none of the saved games will get going, not even the tutorial behaves properly.

SupCom1 is an update to Total Annihilation, from years ago. One extra feature is that your army can be A LOT larger, I think 400 buildings and fighting units, which is great (considering that Starcraft limits you to 200, which gets to pinch a little sometimes), but this does mean that extra compute power is needed. So with this crash, something is now wrong in that it seems unable to handle more than six or eight units/bldgs. So game saves just barely even load, and won't run.

This crash was so bad that I went and looked at services to turn off, startup apps to remove, and ultimately had to uninstall the game.

Fortunately, I only paid $3 for the game, on Ebay...but still. That is absolutely the worst software crash I've experienced. Ouch.