RGB Classic Games Forum

Feel free to rate and discuss this game.

Yay! Starcraft was the game for me in the late nineties - early 2000's. However, I only played the demo campaign much later, having first obtained its enhanced version (that is effectively a free add-on bonus campaign for the full game).

Starcraft is definitely a huge step forward in the development of the RTS genre. It featured some very impressive graphics and FMVs for its time too. However, to me, one of the most important features of this game is its rather complicated, in-depth storyline. It may seem rather trite today, but back then it was a real hit - all those mission briefing dialogues that show the story unfold, and the player would feel involved in it to a great degree. The fictional universe of the Koprulu sector is well thought out and very detailed, and some of the plot twists come as quite unexpected (often this happens halfway through a mission) to keep the player focused on what's going on.

StarCraft and Quake2 had such a similar atmosphere and palette, not only were they like bread and butter as mainstream hardcore games were, they practically made the year 1998 right there. I get instant highs of nostalgia from playing either game. it probably doesn't help that Starcraft was originally slated to come out in the same month as Quake 2 (yay delays!)

I do have a CGW exclusive demo, but I doubt it's redistributable, also it's quite big as it has music. also the demo isn't historically old if you're wondering (it's apr/may 98ish, not dec97 like the bnet beta)

To understand Starcraft's greatness you have to be in the situation where there's this game, Age of Empires, and loads of C&C clones trying to cash in with weird gimmicks. I played almost all of them, it's mostly a UI design nightmare

another neat thing to note is that it STILL has very low system requirements, even after patched and expansioned. A Pentium 90 w/ 32mb is enough to get it going smoothly. Starcraft has some brutal x86 ASM work in there.

leilei wrote:StarCraft and Quake2 had such a similar atmosphere and palette, not only were they like bread and butter as mainstream hardcore games were, they practically made the year 1998 right there. I get instant highs of nostalgia from playing either game. it probably doesn't help that Starcraft was originally slated to come out in the same month as Quake 2 (yay delays!)

I didn't know it as I've never played Quake 2. In fact, I missed most (if not all) of the FPS games from about 1997 till early 2000's because basically I had an aversion to true 3D graphics, greatly preferring the good old 2.5D ones

leilei wrote:I do have a CGW exclusive demo, but I doubt it's redistributable, also it's quite big as it has music. also the demo isn't historically old if you're wondering (it's apr/may 98ish, not dec97 like the bnet beta)

The CGW exclusive demo, again? Do you mean it has the same missions as the Precursor campaign I linked to above? And what's with the music part? The regular SC demo has music too. BTW, I was also quite disappointed that in the regular demo, half of the unit quotes is missing, presumably to reduce size (i.e. normally each unit has four quotes of each type: what- yes- and pissed-quotes; here, you have only two of each type per unit).

leilei wrote:To understand Starcraft's greatness you have to be in the situation where there's this game, Age of Empires, and loads of C&C clones trying to cash in with weird gimmicks. I played almost all of them, it's mostly a UI design nightmare

My friends and I played Warcraft II a lot just before Starcraft came out. I don't remember AoE being very well known, or very popular among us school-kids back then. Later, some of my friends played AoE and AoK, as well as Tiberian Sun and RA2.

leilei wrote:another neat thing to note is that it STILL has very low system requirements, even after patched and expansioned. A Pentium 90 w/ 32mb is enough to get it going smoothly. Starcraft has some brutal x86 ASM work in there.

Ooh, that's so true! For some time, I had it run pretty nicely on a PC that had an insanely old video card with only 640 Kb memory (that machine, initially a 386SX, was a result of a series of upgrades, and the video card was the last to be replaced).