That’s Jack and me with his copy of StarCraft from Gamestop’s midnight launch. Yeah, midnight. And I’m thirty one years old. God bless Jack for his undying inner child and our mutual fondness, respect, and history with StarCraft.
So my running joke I had with Jennilyn when I bought the collector’s edition, which is a huge splurge for me since I’m not a big collector nor spender on video games, was that instead of getting a harley or a sports car, my mid-life crisis was the StarCraft 2 collector’s edition. I’m glad she plays along and encourages me to partake in geeky gamer endeavors.
I actually haven’t stuck with StarCraft for as long as my brother and some college friends have. They still play it from time to time to this day whereas I’ve moved on to different games. However, the game StarCraft teleports me to my first year in college where I played it every Friday with my dorm mates as we did laundry. Thank God for the ability to pause during multiplayer matches while we switched the laundry to the dryer.
But my favorite memories of StarCraft were in the years after, when there were at least eight of us who were StarCraft multiplayer regulars on the same floor in the dorms. At some point after dinner, some one would get the urge to play and go down door-to-door and say “Craft at 9?” And homework would take a back seat to the intergalactic war that ensued.
In my database class, my final project was to create a web interface to review StarCraft statistics that were collected on the fan-made Battle.net game service alternative bnetd, which we lovingly called it Cattle.net (I’m not aware if my friends knew that Blizzard has an fixation on cows).
My project partner ran a Linux server with bnetd so that our multiplayer games would be less laggy than doing it over IPX, in the days before TCP/IP protocols were becoming more of the norm. Anyway, the final project allowed me and my friends to see our gameplay statistics in the games we played. I could say that StarCraft got me into web development because the project introduced me to PHP and MySQL. How’s that for a game-changer?
Back to favorite moments of StarCraft, and I’ll finish with one memory or else I’ll be typing instead of gaming, one particularly fond memory I had in StarCraft was actually a competitive multiplayer match. Although I preferred cooperative games where all my friends would battle the computer artificial intelligence, which by the way, was extremely lethal and a threat throughout, we had too many friends playing to do cooperative matches exclusively.
In one long match, my friend Matt had completely decimated my main base, but I had expanded to multiple bases. For those who don’t know, in StarCraft, the winner is determined not when the enemy army is destroyed, but when all the enemy buildings are destroyed. So, in theory (and practice in my case), your enemy could have a massive army and lose if you wipe out all their buildings. I used that to my advantage as a mighty technical tactician (ahem).
Back to the match, it was down to my friend Matt and I, all our other teammates were wiped out. He was Protoss and I was Zerg. He had a carrier fleet going through the game map destroying all my bases, trying to eradicate me. I had expanded very many times, but only had one base that was producing my army. I built a quick zergling army to do a strike at his only base. He was getting frustrated after destroying each of my expansion bases and still not winning.
As he searched for me with his carriers, I sent my zergling army up to his base, which was protected by several photon cannons and a high templar. The photon cannons and the high templar’s psionic storm would easily defend against my weak zergling strike, but I had two aces up my sleeve.
One, I had one remaining queen which I used its spawn broodling ability to quickly kill the high templar. Two, I had a defiler, which I rarely made use of, use its dark swarm ability over the photon cannons so that my zerglings could attack them unharmed by the cannons’ ranged attack. The strategy was so brilliant that I can hardly believe I thought of it.
I’ll never forget the screams and yelling I heard down the hall when I finished off his base before his carrier fleet could destroy my base. It seemed like a sure win for him until I outsmarted him.
Ah, the glory days…now, I just gotta click on every StarCraft 2 unit multiple times to hear all those funny sayings…