TA !!! Gamespy must die!

[A Black Falcon]

Total Annialation. Stupid unbalanced offence-only game with WAY too many units, and greatly overrated among its annoyingly loyal fans like Gamespy here. It had a bad fantasy sequel, TA Kingdoms, and then the company died.

Oh, and I'm not sure if SC was the first with truly different groups... however it was the first popular one with that, for sure. I don't remember how different the groups were in RTSes with more than two like War Wind... not as much as SC I think though. But I wouldn't automatically say that it was a true innovation without more recearch.

Warcraft I... first RTS I played as I said, I got it in August 1995. So much fun... I really loved it. I later got WC2 in summer '96, and though it's certainly the better game I had some things about it that annoyed me when comparing it to War1...(in nostalgia-value, not in quality or in 'how fun is it to play now' value, both of which WC2 wins easily) because they took out a bunch of cool features from WC1... roads (annoying? yes, but cool to be able to build them), summons, water elementals, the cave levels with their totally different enemy set, bridges, the green water in the swamps, the 2x2 blacksmith, etc... it is certainly the better game, though, and I really loved it. I also like how hard it is... WC2 is a great challenge, and BTDP is the hardest RTS I've ever played. Oh, and WC2 should have had more air units. :)

Multiplayer? I didn't play on LAN, but I did play some WC2 online (a few years after it came out) online on the Zone's Lan Spoofer...it was fun, but didn't keep track of stats or anything. Still, it was online War2... but WC2 and WC1 I mostly played in single player. And unlike SC and WC3 I actually played single missions against the computer... in those games I'd just play online, but without online I played against the CPU. Online players are better, much less predictable... ;)

Oh, and as for SC vs WC3 (both including expansions)... tough, tough question. I guess I chose SC because... setting, I don't know. I love both fantasy and sci-fi. But there are three WC games and only one Starcraft... WC3 does have more variety, it seems, in strategy -- SC feels the same a lot. And WC3 has nicer graphics, CG cinemas, etc... but still... it does have real flaws. It's WAY too easy. SC was a good medium -- not as brutally hard as Warcraft II, but not too easy. WC3 goes way over that line. They should have stuck with an SC level of difficulty. Also, I liked how SC has way more CG cutscenes... I know the WC3 ones are better tied into the story, but the SC ones are still some of the coolest ever done. WC3 has great ones, but not quite as great I'd say... also story. WC3 was such a ripoff of other games. I know SC was hardly original, but at least it was different from what Blizz had done before. WC3 felt a lot like a SC redux in too many ways story-wise. It was a lot less surprising, I'd say. Oh, the WC3 story was good, but truly great like the SC one? No. And the story matters, because the single player campaigns, to me, are a HUGE part of the game. I was pretty dissapointed to beat WC3 in like a month when previous Blizz games had taken much longer, for instance. Oh, and finally, while WC3 definitely has that Blizzard magic... it's just not quite the same as SC...

Oh, and you can't do defence in WC3. I like defence. :)