Starcraft

With the StarCraft II beta having been in full swing for the better part of two months now, we can assure you that there is definitely no shortage in the bastard/cheese strategies department. For the uninformed, a cheese strategy is any high-risk/reward battle tactic that essentially makes or breaks the match. We’ve had our highly trained specialists hard at work to bring you coverage on all the irritating tactics circulating the beta community. Results have shown a combination of brand new tricks, as well as the return of a few classic tactics…

Before the year 2007, Bill Roper was beloved by PC gamers, due to his work on Warcraft, Diablo and StarCraft. Then in 2003 Roper left Blizzard to co-found Flagship Studios, and began working on Hellgate: London. When Hellgate was released, the high hopes of many PC gamers were crushed, and Roper went from beloved to reviled.

Until recently Roper was the Executive Producer of Cryptic Studios’ MMO Champions Online. He took a break from fielding job offers to answer a few questions...

Anything new and relatively untested will be subject to more misconceptions than facts. Ridiculous and sensational news reports about the seedy underbelly of Animal Crossing and batshit-insane lawyers like Jack Thompson have diluted the truth about gaming. Combine their ignorance with our own misconceptions as gamers, and there’s a lot of nonsense to sort out. We can’t sort it all out, but we can at least hit some of the bigger points of confusion with our hammer of truth and brief internet research

When talking about the idea of videogames as art, it’s become increasingly popular to lament that the medium doesn’t yet have its “Citizen Kane.” Seemingly everyone, from industry luminary Ian Bogost to film director Guillermo del Toro, has sounded off about how games either need, don’t need, or will soon receive the masterpiece that will force the medium to “grow up” and be accepted as an art form by the mainstream.

The second-to-last mission in the original StarCraft's Terran campaign gives you a strange directive: while you're supposed to wipe out every trace of the hyper-advanced Protoss aliens, you're specifically ordered not to bother the swarming, bestial Zerg situated right near your base. What happens once you carry out those orders affected us in a way we never knew a real-time strategy game could.