The march of DRM
StarCraft took you through the stories and made you begin to want to help the characters along through the inherently linear world they lived. Personally this was the first time I had ever experienced this in a computer game, and it ranked only with Half Life in its ability to draw me in. The last act required for its canonisation was its multiplayer. Up until then the idea of playing a game with a friend used to require a healthy budget of time simply to get the dialup networking working, or a separate application to find a running game server which didn’t offer horrifically bad latency.Multiplayer in StarCraft brought about a new level of gaming for RTS fans. With the laddering and ranking on Battle.Net it allowed people to compete with someone of an appropriate level, rather than repeatedly losing in five minutes over and over. But it wasn’t just the network friendly nature of StarCraft. It was the obvious effort that had gone in to allowing balance whilst having variety that allowed for such amazing diversity in strategies.
Lately it’s become a requirement to mention the installation of a game, personally I normally skip over those bits of the review with about as much interest as someone talking to me about the ultrasound of their new baby as they insist you can see the fingers but it feels like they are just clumsily administering a Rorschach test. With StarCraft II it is actually worthy of note. The user is entertained by a little re-cap of the story in the StarCraft world, just enough to understand the back story if the user so wishes, if they simply ignore it they will be at no disadvantage. In this manner the story throughout the game is almost like an all you can eat buffet, if you’ve got the attention span of a grasshopper you can just ignore it. The game will force only the smallest morsel of information upon you though. However, they also cater for those who came in with their belt undone a notch in expectation of getting a quite considerable fill.
Once the story playback had finished the installer leapt into hyperspeed, finishing in a couple of minutes on my gaming spec machine to the SSD. Once installed, the CD key had to be associated to my Battle.Net account, so there is no going back now. A lot of people have been upset by the march of DRM lately, and whilst I would prefer it without this limitation, it is the tolerable option compared to some of the more draconian systems. That said I did have this lovely message come up on my attempt to install
Continued overleaf...