Blizzard are masters of making perfection seem easy and they do this by making story and character as enjoyable as the gameplay and Starcraft is perhaps the purest example of this rare skill. Yet perhaps the most enjoyable element in Starcraft is the aforementioned humour. There is little room for innovation in the strategy genre, so Blizzard concentrated on getting the core elements right and building upon them with there own design quirks. Its influence has spread far and wide into the gaming ether many games have adapted elements of it’s story (the plague-like Flood of the Halo series aren’t too far removed from the Zerg) and many have pilfered from the wonderfully balanced faction system. Starcraft is one of the greatest, most successful real time strategy games in a genre overrun by classics, played by millions to this day, it’s the only RTS, nay, the only game that can lay claim to being the unofficial national sport of an entire country (that would be South Korea for those of you who don’t read the gaming press). Of course there are legions of elements that go into making a good game, but it’s amazing how far just a sprinkling of humour can go.
