StarCraft II is here

Well, I'm not sure the game is going to meet everyone's expectations. I will say that the game is fun and doesn't suck, and I usually don't like resource gathering RTS games. I can usually tell if a game is worth playing inside of 10 minutes and I kept going long after the 10 minute mark.

I think the game is going to have lots of replay value for the starcraft fanatics that are out there.

FWIW, I enjoyed the limited amount of playing time I had during the beta. I won't be able to look at it much until after I get back from my Gen Con vacation next week.

Unfortunately, I have a bunch of friends who have decided to either not get it or not get it right away due to the Battle.net requirement. (Almost all of our play has been LAN.)

Yeah I forgot about that. That is really the one big minus of SC2. Which is a shame because it really has nothing to do with the game itself.

The requirement to log on to battlenet is just wrong and I can't figure out what purpose can be filled by forcing people to connect even when playing the single player campaign.

It was the blizzard way of getting around cracked copies of the games from my understanding of it.

Campaign mode is pretty sweet so far. I just hate all the units you'll never get to use in regular game play that you get used to (MEDIC!).

Someone need a light?

So after I got my copy installed last night and played the first couple campaign missions I went skimming through the Achievements and Unlockables. My only response: Wow. Somehow I doubt I'll ever play that much Starcraft, even if it takes another 11 years before the next one comes out. :)

The only thing I dislike so far is not being able to zoom back a bit farther. It's way too little world area on my very high resolution monitor. I understand that they want everyone to be the same in multiplayer, but I think they could have picked something a bit farther back.

And yeah, the online registration at BattleSteamPulse.NET is the copy protection. Despite my one friend insisting that "OMG nobody's ever done this before," it isn't much different from what the first person shooters have been doing for a while (IIRC). It is somewhat disappointing for the same reasons (if the servers go away then there's no game to play) but this looks to be the reality going forward and is probably better than some of the recent iterations of disc-based copy protection.