To all those PC naysayers of Apple, I say “Ha!” Seems that games will no longer be the software achilles heel much longer for Apple.
My intial reaction to the announcement of StarCraft II was really, “about time!” Seems that Blizzard had all their time consumed by World of Warcraft which seems fun yet is only cheaper than crack. When WoW appeared, you’d see someone at work playing it pretty often in his cube and I suppose it did pinnacle with the episode of South Park poking fun at it. Then StarCraft: Ghost proved to be vaporware for the PS2. I never did like the game’s premise, it seemed to be a “me-too” title of StarCraft wrapped around Splinter Cell, same as every Star Wars-licensed property. The bright side of SCII is Blizzard releasing the Mac OS and Windows versions at the same time, whenever that may be. My greatest hope for Blizzard is not inserting “heroes” in it as they did with WarCraft III. When playing the storyline, which was really a long tedious tutorial, keeping the main characters alive and building up their special powers was fine. However, Blizzard’s RTS-line of games are more enjoyable when you play against others or use maps without the heroes. For example, WC III stunk if I tried to command the Human army in a generic map because my strategy was the same one I employed in SC. It didn’t matter how many towers or long-range weapons I built, the stupid computer-player’s two hero characters just destroyed my defenses by themselves. There’s no point in developing regular units; WC III tried to be a roleplaying game or a knock-off of Warhammer. Now if SC II still lets me dig in with a quartet of tanks in siege mode reinforced with bunkers and they still blow away a Zerg or Protoss hero foolishing charging right into the line of fire. Then I’ll forgive Blizzard for making WC III lame.