Passing judgment on the most eagerly anticipated game of the last few years is no easy task; it's difficult to set aside prejudices that would sway one's opinion either way. Let's face it: Starcraft comes with a great deal of anticipatory baggage, and it would be easy to say that it's either a huge disappointment or the greatest thing since real-time strategy became a household phrase. Truth is, it's neither. Weighed on its own merits, Starcraft is an extremely well-crafted game, albeit one with a few notable problems. It doesn't stray far from the blueprint created by its predecessors (namely the Warcrafts and Command & Conquers), but it is, without a doubt, the best game to ever adhere to that formula. Starcraft offers a lengthy single-player campaign featuring ten missions for its three diverse races, totaling 30 single-player missions in all (there's also an unsupported veteran campaign included as part of the campaign editor). The story is compelling enough to make playing through all three worthwhile, and the campaign difficulty is tiered so that each is more challenging than the last. While this may seem like an uninteresting point, it helps Starcraft to avoid the problem that has plagued every other game in the genre: Each side is not the same. You don't have to go through a set of training missions once you've already mastered one side. The missions themselves mainly stick to the "gather, build, and conquer" philosophy, but there are a few innovative missions thrown in, and Blizzard has added some narrative elements to the missions themselves that help to keep things interesting. With the exception of the installation missions (in which you are given a handful of units to raid an enemy base, an attempt to break from the mold that is only occasionally successful), the missions are well designed. The solo player also has the option of skirmish missions, though the computer opponents have the annoying ability to see everything you are doing and defend accordingly, making the dreaded "rush" tactic one of the only viable means of emerging victorious. Starcraft offers an equally nice suite of options on the multiplayer side: There's head-to-head and up to eight-player battles over LAN or Internet (though Internet play is only available over Blizzard's Battle.net server, which includes a ranking list and seems to be as lag-free as it gets nowadays). There is a good variety of multiplayer game types, and you can easily download new maps. Multiplayer has its own set of negatives, the major one being the predominance of rushing. Like it or not, creating a horde of the most basic units and attacking the enemy immediately is an effective tactic. Only a heavily defended base will survive an early rush of Terran Marines or Protoss Zealots. Starcraft has a built-in safeguard to discourage rushing, but it's one of the game's most problematic areas. This safeguard is in the interface, which only allows you to select 12 units at a time. This isn't especially effective, considering six Zealots will smoke a base early in the game. The selectable unit cap does make rushing more difficult, but it also becomes frustrating at times, especially for those used to the ability to select unlimited units at once. Often, selecting the chosen units from a large group becomes a time-consuming effort. During battle, it can be an exercise in frustration. You can assign groups to hotkeys quite easily, however, lessening the frustration of the selectable unit cap - but this system isn't nearly as good as in Total Annihilation or Dark Reign, and units aren't marked by their group number like in said games. Multiplayer battles can often be decided by who has the best manual dexterity and can overcome the built-in limitations of the interface the most quickly. Recent real-time innovations regarding unit control are included, with mixed results. Each production facility can have up to five units queued at once. There's a waypoint system, patrolling, and the like - but many of these options aren't particularly well implemented, and some of the options seem tacked on. On the other hand, pathing is great, with only occasional glitches (where a unit will run around in cute little circles). Starcraft most notably lacks the ability to define unit behavior (as in Dark Reign or Total Annihilation), leading to much micromanagement. What Starcraft does have, though, is personality. Playing any of the three races is a notably different experience. You have the Terrans, "space trailer trash" with moving buildings; the frightening, insect-like Zerg who can burrow underground; and the hi-tech Protoss who can easily construct many buildings at a time. Each race features totally different units, often with no equivalents on the other side, differing construction and repair principles, and even different (though equally effective) interface art. Blizzard has managed to keep it well balanced despite the great diversity. One of the greatest things about Starcraft is that no unit is ever rendered obsolete during the course of a game. Each unit is key in certain situations, and you'll still be relying on your most basic ground units in the endgame. Aesthetically, Starcraft is impressive. Graphically, it stands alongside Age of Empires as the best-looking 2D strategy game around. What it lacks in visual innovation it makes up for in style; the unit and building animations are highly detailed and imaginative. There are some nice translucency effects, such as the flickering shields on Protoss units. The tilesets and maps are varied and interesting, and the unit portraits are expressive and realistic. And the cinematics, of which there are many, are outstanding. The only real complaints about the visuals are that the viewing area is a little small (the bottom quarter of the screen is occupied by the interface), and the minimap presents only rudimentary information. The music, apart from some new-agey Terran tunes, is appropriately melodic and dark, the sound effects are believable and distinct, and the voice acting is great, bringing the characters to life. Starcraft's personality goes a long way towards rendering its minor shortcomings obsolete. The game has so much life in it - whether in the great, narrative-driven single-player campaign or the multitude of multiplayer options - you won't grow tired of it anytime soon. And even if you blow through it all, there's an incredibly versatile editor that allows you to create your own full-featured campaigns, right down to spoken introductions and triggered events within missions. It all comes down to this: Starcraft may not do anything particularly new, but it does the real-time thing as well or better than any game before it. If you're willing to give the formula another go, Starcraft is highly recommended.

Brood War doesn't look all that much different than the original Starcraft, although there's plenty of new visual content. Fortunately, Starcraft's graphics have aged nicely, and the game still looks great. Brood War's new units fit right in with the returning cast, and although the new snow terrain is too bright, the twilight and desert tile sets are beautifully drawn. Meanwhile, the stylish new intro movie and ending cinematics for each of the three campaigns are emotionally moving and tie in much more closely with the larger story than the original Starcraft's cutscenes. Brood War boldly improves upon Starcraft's unforgettable audio, with new music and sound effects and a lot of new speech. Each of the three races gets a new music track, and all of it is outstanding, particularly the orchestral Terran theme that eclipses the New Agey stuff from the original. With the exception of the Dark Archon who sounds like he has laryngitis, all the new units in Brood War sound every bit as good as the originals, and many of them have very amusing things to say if you keep on clicking. Every surviving character from the original Starcraft returns with many more speaking lines in most cases, and as in the first game, the voice acting in Brood War is first-rate. With rare exceptions, the dialogue during mission briefings and during frequent in-game scripted events is completely convincing and adds up to what's one of the year's best stories in any gaming genre. It picks up right where the first game left off, and much like the original, the three plots are brilliantly written to be both self-contained and deeply connected. As you'd expect, the Brood War campaign is much more difficult than the original Starcraft campaign. Nevertheless, the missions are far superior by design. They're heavily plot driven, with scripted story events frequently punctuating the action. Occasionally your mission objectives will change after you complete what you thought was the extent of your duty. At other times you'll be given a choice of objectives, and your decision will directly affect the course of the following mission. New units are introduced in context, and the scenario will teach you to use them by demanding you take advantage of their particular specialties. It is worth noting, though, that the designers start to run out of steam by the end, as the innovative scenarios that permeate the Protoss and Terran campaigns finally give way to more straightforward against-all-odds Zerg-centric massacres, although the story remains captivating to the end. With Brood War, Blizzard took the opportunity to reevaluate the play balance of an already well-designed real-time strategy game. The results are outstanding; seemingly minor but terribly significant modifications to unit costs, damage rates, hit points, and build times suddenly make the game play very differently, as units that were once ineffective (such as the Protoss Dragoon and the Terran Goliath) are powerless no longer. In the end, almost every single unit in the game has been changed in one way or another. Likewise Blizzard addressed the common complaint that Starcraft catered itself toward rush tactics, where an early attack by basic units would often prove decisive, by augmenting defensive structures to better handle small numbers of weak units. These changes to the original units are included not only in Brood War, but in the Starcraft 1.04 patch. At the same time, the six new units in Brood War demand serious consideration, as each race now has the means to deal with enemy swarm tactics. Now more than ever, the player who just piles up one type of unit will surely lose to he who combines his forces. The end result of all the changes and additions is a game that feels much more strategic than before. The only consequence is that Starcraft's interface, which demands that you carefully micromanage your forces, is ill-equipped to handle the game's newfound complexity, and without some serious practice you'll have trouble putting the specialized new units to good use. Moreover, if you're weary of the real-time strategy formula that culminated in Starcraft, you may be put off that Brood War, when you get right down to it, is fundamentally similar. Nevertheless, if you liked Starcraft in the least, it doesn't take a great deal of thought to understand that Brood War is essential. What with the superb campaign, the new units, the overhauled gameplay, and dozens of new multiplayer maps, you have both a more-than-worthy successor to Starcraft and one of the finest computer game expansion sets of all time.