Starcraft is still the best game ever (even if I'm still hopelessly bad at it)

[A Black Falcon]

Starcraft is the best game ever made.  It's an exceptionally amazing game which requires extreme skill to be good at and has a near-infinite skill ceiling.  Being good at Starcraft is one of the hardest things to do in gaming.  I have always loved the game, since I got it the week it released, but have always been terrible at the game...

So what have I been doing this year?  Well, one thing I've been doing is getting back pretty hard into my favorite game ever, Starcraft.  SC has almost always been my favorite game, of course, but other than several dozen games in 2017-18 after the release of Starcraft Remaster, I'd barely played it since about 2009, when I mostly stopped playing RTSes nearly as much as I had before for several reasons.

What were those reasons?  They include my increasing interest in retro console games over modern games, how Blizzard was clearly not the same company it had been before being ruined by World of Warcraft, arm pain when playing mouse-intensive games, that I always was bad at them and you get tired of losing like 95% of the time after a while, and more.  I had hopes for Starcraft 2, there are a few old posts of mine here about the game when it released, but I ended up dropping it almost immediately, and barely ever playing it again after that post I made here around its release.  SC2 failed to hit the mark for several reasons, including its more cartoony Warcraft-ized art design, the bad decisions they made about Blizzard control of custom maps people made (these were hugely important to SC and WC3's success of course!), the awful story that ruins the characters of the original in favor of generic stupid nonsense, my reduced interest in the genre at the time, that arm pain, etc.

In 2017, Blizzard released Starcraft Remaster.  It's an exceptional HD update of the original which changes nothing about the gameplay of the original, every bug and glitch is perfectly preserved, as the SC pros wanted.  It's exceptional and was my game of the year that year.  As I said I played it a bunch for a little while but not very seriously and after a little while I lost interest again.

Then, early this year I got into watching pro Starcraft on Youtube.  I'm not sure exactly why but I do remember thinking about Warcraft 2, watching some WC2 videos, then it recommended some SC and... well, yeah, I was hooked.  WC2 is a simpler game and I do love its music even better than SC's, but SC has more depth, it's overall even better than that amazing classic.  I watch probably way too much Youtube, of course, but I've never gotten into watching pro gaming or speedrunning, other than the Mario platformer streamers/youtubers I like to watch and that's at most semipro, they're mostly just streamers.  But in South Korea of course pro Starcraft is actually a real sport with a sizable player and fan base, and I've found it really interesting to watch the best players play.  Of course it's kind of like, I can play the game but they're a hundred times better than me or more and I'll never be and never was anywhere remotely near that level, but still, watching people who are really good at such an exceptionally amazing game with such a stratospheric skill ceiling?  It's really, really interesting to watch.

And then... there's actually playing the game.  I have gotten back to playing some SC here and there this year, inspired by watching the pros.  Well, inspired to play, not to play well... heh.  I'm still awful at the game and aren't really trying to be great, I'd rather just have fun with it than put a full effort into being good.  For instance, I am fully aware that to be decent at SC you need to heavily use keyboard hotkeys, but I've never liked that so I still don't.  Is this a factor in why I almost always lose?  Yes, of course it is, but so far I haven't changed that.  Oh well.  I'm having fun anyway.  SC is a very intense and stressful game to play, but it's also incredibly fun.  It's the best.

The main issue is, my play would work fine if the matchmaking was better, but unfortunately SC's matchmaking is pretty badly broken.  That is, a lot of people quit instantly the moment the game starts, and when that happens it counts as a loss for them and a win for you.  This makes it totally impossible to get an accurate MMR (player rating), because my score gets artiifically raised by the huge number of 'wins' over insta-quitters.  Seriously, it's a LOT -- I probably actually win maybe 5% of the time still, same as ever, but I win like 40-46% of games overall.  Yes, the insta-quitting plague makes facing opponents on your skill level pretty much impossible, most games are either against an instant quitter or someone a lot better than me (who has a similar rating because of the quitters).  Obviously I could quit myself to lower my rating but I hate the idea of doing that so so far I haven't.  Ah well.

Despite this though SC is the best and I'm so happy to be back to playing it, and to be following pro Starcraft closely for the first time.  I knew of Slayers Boxer in the '00s of course and had watched a few of his games, but otherwise I wasn't watching pro SC back then.  Now I am.

[Weltall]

I feel similarly about the first four Civilization games. I love them all, I have been playing the series for nigh unto 30 years, and despite all that, I can only consistently do well on the lower difficulties; even the non-insane higher difficulties find me falling behind early and almost never catching up. I lack the patience to do all the granular, manual work necessary to overcome the stacked odds, and I won't continue once it's obvious that I can't possibly win. And, this all applies extra hard to the few RTS games I've tried. It's hard enough to not get slaughtered when I can take all the time I want to make moves and decisions. When I have to react in real-time, I'm cooked. Watching high-level players play at a high level is a lot more enjoyable when it's not personally at my expense. :)

[Dark Jaguar]

It's hard for me to consider Starcraft the best game ever made, mainly because I prefer turn based strategy to twitch style "APS" measuring games like this that I may enjoy the single player campaign of, but will never, and I mean ever, win even one multiplayer match.  But, everyone's got a favorite, and the popularity of this game over time accounts for that.  It's just a shame Blizzard had to go and force "always online" DRM into the game, plus "time limited DLC" in the form of those preorder skins and all that nonsense.

For me, best game of all time?  Link to the Past, I think.  I play through that game once a year, and have started playing some fan mods.  Super Metroid comes close, as does Doom, which is why I love mods for all three of those games that just blatantly borrow elements from each other.

Of course, we have a full conversion of Zelda 1 into Doom:


This mod, combined with the levels from Saturn X, makes for a good Metroid styled experience.


And then... Unloved.... Weltall I think you'll enjoy this one.



And the Super Metroid/Link to the Past randomizer, breathing new life into both games at once.

[A Black Falcon]

Oh, one other reason I stopped playing SC or WC3 as much was because I lost contact with TheBiggah in ~2010.  We'd played a lot of SC and WC3 over that decade, I have dozens of SC and WC3 replays of our games... it's not one of the major reasons, more like 'perhaps because of the other reasons why I was playing RTSes less this happened as well which caused me to play even less', but it's worth mentioning.  (Oh, another thing that reduced my RTS playtime for a while in the mid '00s was my Guild Wars 1 addiction from like '04 to '07... though that would fade after a few years too, after which I really did play mostly retro games games for over a decade.)

But yeah, SC is just the best.  It has a level of depth to its gameplay that almost nothing else does.  The level of skill a great SC player needs to achieve in order to be good is so mind-bendingly hard it's kind of absurd, you need to do more things at once than a human can but some people can come amazingly close to playing almost perfectly.  Actual perfection in SC control is impossible for a human, of course, it just demands too much of the player in the amount of micromanagement of your units and buildings that you need to do in order to not lose.  But that is a key part of what makes the game so amazing.  When you compare Starcraft to games which do more, which are easier to control, like Warcraft 3 or Starcraft 2... they're fantastic games too, but there's just something about SC and how much raw skill it requires that I find more impressive. 

Don't get me wrong, I loved WC3 a lot and still like that game, and it's also pretty hard though for different reasons -- namely learning the hero skills -- but it's no Starcraft.  With that said though, I went back to WC3 a bit after getting into SC and found it actually very difficult to win at.  I remember it being quite a bit easier to win games at than SC, but that was like 15 years ago and clearly the WC3 meta has changed since then, it's a pretty difficult game to win at now.  The game is so focused on your heroes and their skills, you need to be very good at hero management and countering enemy hero abilities to have a chance... and then my opponent somehow heals all their units and kills mine and it's over.  Heh.  It's weird that going back to WC3 made me question my 'WC3 is easier to win at than SC' belief that I have had for so many years now, but honestly it has... though if I played as much WC3 as I have SC this year, I'm sure I'd be better at it.  I definitely have not done that, I've played lots of games of SC but only a handful of WC3. 

I thought WC3 was the best game ever when it first released and really got caught up with it, but looking back its focus on hero abilities would end up undermining the RTS genre, as the DotA genre pretty much replaced RTSes at the peak of real time strategy pro gaming... except for South Korea of course, who still love Starcraft.  But even apart from that, the purity of watching and learning about SC1 build strategies is something I find much more interesting than trying to relearn the WC3 hero abilities and how to counter them and such.  It's kind of shocking how much about WC3 I'd forgotten, I couldn't even remember what a lot of the units were and stuff, and this is a game I played a whole lot of... then kind of forgot about, unlike SC which has always been in the back of my mind, along with other games I think about a lot like NetStorm (another one of the best games ever!).
 

It's hard for me to consider Starcraft the best game ever made, mainly because I prefer turn based strategy to twitch style "APS" measuring games like this that I may enjoy the single player campaign of, but will never, and I mean ever, win even one multiplayer match.  But, everyone's got a favorite, and the popularity of this game over time accounts for that.  It's just a shame Blizzard had to go and force "always online" DRM into the game, plus "time limited DLC" in the form of those preorder skins and all that nonsense.

SC Remaster doesn't have "always online" DRM.  You're probably thinking of SC2 there.  Starcraft Remaster actually still has LAN support!  It's not Battle.net only for multiplayer. 

It definitely is a game that requires extreme twitchy 'how high an actions per minute counter can you manage?' skill to win at though, that much is certainly true.

I feel similarly about the first four Civilization games. I love them all, I have been playing the series for nigh unto 30 years, and despite all that, I can only consistently do well on the lower difficulties; even the non-insane higher difficulties find me falling behind early and almost never catching up. I lack the patience to do all the granular, manual work necessary to overcome the stacked odds, and I won't continue once it's obvious that I can't possibly win. And, this all applies extra hard to the few RTS games I've tried. It's hard enough to not get slaughtered when I can take all the time I want to make moves and decisions. When I have to react in real-time, I'm cooked. Watching high-level players play at a high level is a lot more enjoyable when it's not personally at my expense. :)

Civilization 1 was a pretty great game.  I never played a lot of it but what I played I liked.

Civilization II took things to a much higher level, and is one of the greatest things ever made.  I got the game when it was fairly new and while I haven't played it regularly since, I certainly do still love it a lot.  I've often thought that Civ II is as close to perfect as any game ever has been.  Literally the only thing it doesn't have that is worth mentioning as a flaw is that national boundaries aren't drawn on the map, that's it.  Now, why gaming's most perfect game isn't my favorite game ever is something that has me kind of stuck.  All I've been able to think of is that I just like other genres more. Starcraft certainly goes above Civ II, as probably do a few other games, such as the best Mario games.  Civ II's a top five all time game for certain though.  It's just absolutely amazing, even if you have to move with the numeric keypad, I never have liked that thing. Heh.  Oh, and the intro animation is still my favorite game intro.  I doubt anyone else understands, that thing is so simple... but it's perfect, come on.

But after that?  Civ III is one of the most disappointing games ever, I got it when it was new and I'm sure I said that here at the time.  What a failure that game is, it makes multiple major mistakes.  That siege weapons like catapults can't kill units and that you need rivers for agriculture and not the ocean and don't always start by a river immediately come to mind, come on that's not right.  The removal of the wonder movies and high council videos were also disappointing.  Objectively it's okay but in comparison to the second one it's pretty awful.

And honestly, even though I own several of them I still haven't played any Civ game since that.  I know I've said this before, and then I think about trying them... but I still haven't.  Oh well.

The thing that separates Starcraft and Civilization though is that while both require deep strategy, SC requires fantastic fast action response as well as great strategy.  Sure, as a strategy game it's not as complex as Civ, but once you combine in both elements of the game the result is one of the hardest games to be great at that is played professionally.  But I do really, really love Civ II...