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

[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...