Early Review for SC2

It's a bit humbling to remember exactly how long it has been since I last played Starcraft, and I admit to being surprised at how much I am enjoying SC2. I originally began playing some time after the Broodwars expansion to Starcraft during my days as an undergraduate. I had finally begun to tire of the repetitious nature of Diablo 2 and because Battlenet shared servers between SC and Diablo, I was coerced into learning to play by some friends who had been avid SC fans from the beginning. This meant that I had a lot of catching up to do, lots of practicing, lots of matches to observe.

As a result, I played the game socially (I can't really say "competetively" due to my mediocre skills) - always on Battlenet with my friends, and never played through the single player campaigns. Because of this, I never really understood the storyline and was unfamiliar with the main characters of the narrative. For me, it was always just a strategy game - one match after another without end. SC2 is the beginning of the story for me, and I am impressed with the simplicity of the narrative - I am not overwhelmed or confused without having played through the original Starcraft or Broodwars campaigns. The characters are solid and interesting, and each new campaign mission is interesting as well as excellent practice for someone with RTS skills as rusty as mine.

My only serious complaint is that my computer, after managing to survive years of WoW raiding on high graphics setting has finally become completely obsolete. I lag so badly even on medium settings (which, sadly for me, look phenomenal) that it makes competetive play impossible. Even on the lowest settings I feel the processor dragging. That being said, I do wish they'd produced a few more high quality cutscenes - years of playing Final Fantasy have certainly spoiled me when it comes to these. Blizzard did a good job of producing the narrative cutscenes - you get a lot of character and emotion even though they are not rendered in high quality. This makes the few cutscenes that are done in high quality stand out from the rest, but left me wishing more had been done to the same standard.