MY LIFE… FOR AIUR.
Chills. Forget the Warcraft movie, give me a StarCraft movie.

Finally, the game I’ve been waiting for since 2010 is releasing tomorrow. The Protoss have always been by far my favorite race in the StarCraft ‘verse. The Terran-centric Wings of Liberty campaign was ok, but humans in sci-fi are always so predictable; surviving against impossible odds and despite vastly inferior technology because they have more ingenuity and will to live than other races or something. Also, we’re really good at digging up ancient superweapons that everyone else forgot about. It could have been better, but it could have been worse. The Zerg-centric Heart of the Swarm expansion did its best, but I’m both awful at playing Zerg and not very interested in their story. Worth playing once, but I waited until it was on sale to buy it. Plus it spends most of its time undoing everything you did in WoL, so there’s that. Finally we’ve gotten to the Protoss campaign. I think that if the base game would have been centered around the Protoss, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to get the expansions. Protoss are just so much more interesting to me; their technology, their society, their history, and, most importantly, their gameplay. In most RTSes I usually favor smaller numbers of higher powered (and, of course, more expensive) units over large numbers of weak units; high risk for (hopefully) high reward. StarCraft has never been terribly rewarding to the whole “hide out until you can make superweapons” strategy, but the Protoss are the closest you’ll get. Lots of upgrade potential and fun late game units.

I don’t think I’ll be doing much ranked multiplayer this time around. When Wings of Liberty came out I had a lot of friends who played, and ended up getting decently good at online play. By “decently good” I mean I hovered around high bronze to low silver, but that was pretty good for an overworked college student who mostly played on the weekends. When I came back for the HotS expansion, I realized that I was sorely out of practice, and the campaign had taught me bad habits. On top of that, I’ve lost touch with most of the friends I used to play with, so I have no one to discus build strategies with and no one to play against except random matches and AIs. That said, if I found a group of people to play with again, I would be happy to do so.

I’m intrigued at this Nova Covert Ops thing announced this weekend at Blizzcon. From what I’ve read so far, it seems to be a series of small, story-based DLC packs that revolve around Nova, a ghost featured in a Wings of Liberty sidequest arc. Some are speculating that this is a tie-in for a revival of the canceled StarCraft: Ghost FPS that Nova was invented for. Gamers have been bemoaning the shelving of the PS2/GameCube/Xbox game for about ten years now, bordering on becoming Blizzard’s version of “Half-Life 3 Confirmed,” but personally I doubt they have anything in the works beyond small DLCs for SC2, especially with Overwatch on its way. But hey, Duke Nukem Forever came out after spending fifteen years in development, so you never know.