Capitol Hillbillies — A gay webcomic, updated Tues and Fri

In short: GET. THIS. GAME.

**Spoiler Alert!****Spoiler Alert!****Spoiler Alert!****Spoiler Alert!****Spoiler Alert!**

In long: Ever since Blizzard first announced they would be making Starcraft II, I’d been acting like a fanboy whenever some little bit of new information came about it.  Then the hype died down a little bit after open beta started back in January so I was a little worried that the game might not be all that amazing.  Last week it dawned on me that maybe I should finally pre-order it and get some time off work.  I’m very happy to say that there’s no disappointment at all.

Gameplay: On a very basic level, the mechanics of how the missions are played hasn’t changed all that much.  It’s still gathering minerals and gasses to build up your base and send forth your soldiers to burn a fiery swath across the Kuprulu sector.  However, most mission levels so far have focused on a specific strategy or requirement that keep it from getting stale.

Plot: The first few levels were almost a replica of the original Starcraft’s plot with slightly different dialogue and characters.  After the first couple of  missions though, it took off on its own.  You have a degree of choice for the order in which you do the missions.  I’ve read that eventually several missions will be excluded based on decisions made earlier in the game.  In between the actual missions you hang out at your bar and later your ship and can go to different areas to talk to the supporting characters, purchase upgrades, see news events and even play a mini-game based on an old shooter arcade game (the name escapes me, sorry. If anyone who’s played it knows, please tell me).

Voice acting: Not bad for the most part, some of the dialogue is truly terrible.  Specifically, the character Ariel Hanson needs to be put on the front lines.  Or at least her script writers.  Maybe it changes later, but almost every other character is fairly strong willed and confident while she’s this little flower of a scientist who’s all empathy and sharing feelings and is out of tune with the tone of the rest of the game.  Another supporting character, Egon Stetmann, who can be spoken with in the Lab sounds VERY much like Sokka from the Avatar: The Last Airbender show.  After some checking, I couldn’t verify this though.  Only that a guy named Scott Menville who did ‘Additional Voices’ for both this game and Avatar is listed but uncredited anywhere else I looked.  Anyone else know anything about this?

Graphics: While a lot of the mission maps look like just a spiffier version of the original Starcraft, they’ve also thrown in a lot of interactive terrain objects.  There’s cinematics between every single mission and it’s very obvious how much work Blizzard has put into improving their machinima.  You’ll need a fairly good machine to run all the effects and rendering though.  There’s some very advanced graphics (mostly in the between mission phases) and my computer has tripped up a couple of times already on them (but only for a moment).  The big on I’ve noticed so far though is whenever I Alt+Tab to the desktop to look at something else (Manhunt or A4A usually), I can’t re-maximize the screen properly.  That is, the screen will come back up but it’s completely black and the menu never re-appears.  I can minimize it again and force the game to close from the desktop though.  Needless to say, it’s frustrating to have to log out and log back in just to check email or anything else.  I haven’t tried this from a mission yet so not sure if that will be the case from there.

Battle.net 2.0: You have to be logged in and connected in order to play the single player game.  WTF?  This seems like a ridiculous requirement since, as far as I can tell, it’s only for the tracking and posting of achievements.  Stu’s boyfriend mentioned this morning (or was it last night?) on Facebook that his Battle.net account had been hacked and requires and authenticator to log in.  This completely prevents him from playing the game.  There was mention online of a way to play as a Guest but what’s the point in that?  His achievements and advancement won’t be saved once his account is unhacked and he’ll have to start over again.  Otherwise, the interface is pretty easy to navigate.  I can’t, for the life of me, find how to modify my profile.  Can it even be done?  There doesn’t seem to be any options for it.  At the very least I’d like to change my avatar from the generic one.

Part 1 of 3 installments: Blizzard departed from the norm and broke Starcraft II into 3 separate games.  Wings of Liberty is just the Terran campaign but instead of 10 missions, it’s close to 30.  The Zerg and Protoss campaigns are scheduled to be released as their own games as well (or perhaps as expansions) but with another $60ish pricetag.  Quote honestly, I’m mostly ok with this.  Though $120 for the next two segments seems a little steep since they’re not releasing a new game, just more missions.  Granted though, they will be fully scripted with cinematics and another ~30 missions per faction.  It’s a tough call but then again, I’m speculating that each of the following campaigns will cost another $60.

Outside the campaign: There’s a separate ‘challenge’ series of missions that test your strategies and force you to find which units are strong/weak vs other units.  I’ve only played one so far but it was interesting and enlightening as far as strategy goes.  It also looks like they have a series for each faction.  This is the part of the game I believe is meant to prep players for the online multiplayer matches.

Summary: A very well made game.  Some graphical hangups and some dialogue/character scripts that drive me up the wall but the core game is solid (as pretty much all Blizzard games are).  Given the shear amount of content available and the options for multiplayer, this could easily tide me over until the new Fallout game in October.