The best game ever made is now free (& Remaster is coming)

[A Black Falcon]

Yes, a slightly updated version of Starcraft, with its Brood War addon, is now free as of the just-released patch 1.18! It's kind of a promo for the Starcraft Remaster that Blizzard is going to release (for money) this summer, but still it's a pretty nice thing to do. Unfortunately for those of us who have owned the game forever you will need to download the new version and run that in order to play the patched game, as it requires a new install due to the updated menu interface, but once installed it works just fine, and the menus, particularly in Battle.net, definitely look better now; the old, sort of broken on modern OSes BNet interface, with its overlapping text glitches and all, is gone in favor of one that actually looks decent. It's a nice improvement. There are some other minor bug fixes in the new patch as well, and they added one new feature, real Observer support with separate slots, instead of observers having to take up some of the eight player slots.

On the other hand though, there's one problem with this: you now cannot play online multiplayer without this new version, which, since it has those updates, is not going to run on old computers that could previously run the game just fine but now are stuck running it offline-only -- the new version apparently requires more CPU power than the original release, an actual graphics card and not just integrated Intel graphics, and BNet might require an OS newer than XP, instead of running fine on anything from Win95 and up? It's not clear since there aren't system requirements. I should try this on my Vista computer and see what happens. Fixing BNet for modern computers is great, but it's unfortunate that to do that they broke it for old machines, and don't have an option to use either interface depending on system power. Ah well.

I actually played a little SC a few weeks ago, and comparing that to this, the free release sure has gotten a lot more people onto SC BNet, as you'd expect. I wonder how long it'll last... it's still nice, though! But it reminds me, as much as SC is better than WC3, WC3's BNet interface and featureset is better, both in its more powerful map editor, and in added features such as auto-matchmaking, which is much simpler than having to find something in the games-open list as you have to do here. Ah well, it's still the best game ever regardless. :)

You can get the new version either by trying to log on to BNet with an original copy of SC, which will prompt you to install and download the new version, or from the website, where you can also find information about the upcoming Remaster, which will have the same gameplay but all redone in a much higher resolution. The images you can slide between the two versions are interesting, and the new one sure is much higher resolution. Does it look better? I'm not sure about that, I'll need to see more... SC has always looked how it does, so it's kind of weird to suddenly see this highly detailed version of it, you know? We'll see. (I also hope they add auto-matchmaking in the remaster, that'd be nice... so long as SC/WC3-style UMS/Custom support is in, but I am not too hopeful there given how SC2 does things. Who knows at this point.)

It's been a while since I've played much SC, and I never was any good so I'm sure I'm even worse now, but it's still the best game ever made no question.

Site for info on the remaster: https://starcraft.com/en-us/

1.18 full download (PC/Mac): https://us.battle.net/forums/en/starcraf...0754425295