Star Craft

“It isn’t a game you can hope to master in a weekend. It takes a lifetime to get good at it.”

If you haven’t managed to tame StarCraft yet, don’t worry: now you can get started on StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, which promises a deeper experience with an epic storyline, three carefully balanced factions, and a wide variety of maps and missions that test your strategic thinking. Hopefully it won’t take two lifetimes to master.

“The definition of balance is how long a game is fun,” Browder explains. “If it stops being fun after a week because you’ve figured out all the strategies, then the game wasn’t balanced very well.”

The Swarm Cometh. Terrans try to hold off a Zerg invasion.

Unanswered Questions

At the convergence of StarCraft II’s balancing act lurk the Zerg, Protoss, and Terrans. (See the sidebar “A Tale of Three Races” on page two to learn more.) The three factions look more impressive than ever before thanks to the latest technology, which Browder says has “caught up to where we can do StarCraft in 3D. Only in the last six to seven years did it become possible to do the game the way we wanted to, with the massive scale of combat we had envisioned since we did the original game.”

“[StarCraft] isn’t a game you can hope to master in a weekend. It takes a lifetime to get good at it.”

- Dustin Browder, game director

Wings of Liberty focuses its single-player campaign on hard-nosed Terran commander-turned-rebel Jim Raynor, who is still battling his former boss, Arcturus Mengsk, the leader of the autocratic Terran Dominion. “With the storyline, we’ve had a chance to revisit unanswered questions from the first game,” Browder says. “For example, Jim Raynor hasn’t gotten payback yet [for what Mengsk did to him]. He’s the protagonist of the game, and everyone revolves around him.”

Incoming. Terran battlecruisers play offense.

Unfortunately, Browder adds, Raynor also finds himself in a dark place: “After seeing way too much carnage, Jim has lost a lot of his fire for combat. He’s grappling with the loss of his friend, Sarah Kerrigan, and he’s dealing with alcohol problems. How does he handle his new situation? Will basic survival be enough, or will he be destroyed?”

“Each [mission] is a unique mini-game, and you don’t know what we’ll throw at you next.”

- Dustin Browder, game director

The game’s non-linear campaign follows Raynor’s Raiders as they take on mercenary missions to earn the cash they need for their struggle against the Dominion. Browder elaborates: “We have a lot of crazy scenarios in StarCraft II: one mission might have you fighting zombies, and another might deal with something at the heart of the universe that’s threatening its very existence. Each one is a unique mini-game, and you don’t know what we’ll throw at you next.”

One if By Land, Two if By Sea. A group of Protoss Colossus units come ashore.

Back to Game Development School

The wide variety of StarCraft II’s missions comes from lessons learned while developing scenarios for Warcraft III and its Frozen Throne expansion pack, both of which many of Browder’s team members worked on. Looking back at the original StarCraft proved useful too.

StarCraft is considered a polished game,” Browder says, “but we learned a lot from it that we applied to the sequel. For example, the starting experience is now much different: we do in-game cinematics that immerse you in the story, and we let you walk around the bridge of a starship, where you can talk to other characters. It takes the game to a new level.”

The Fiery Depths. There’s wide variety in StarCraft II’s maps.

He points out that those lessons were key to figuring out not only what worked, but also what didn’t: “We tried a lot of different things during development. For example, we tried cover systems, which have been used in first-person shooters and other strategy games, but StarCraft II is so fast-paced that they didn’t work. They made the game become stagnant.”

The team also drew on the thoughts of the many StarCraft players who fervently play the game today. “Those fans were able to educate us on what is happening now in the StarCraft world, and what they wanted to see from the sequel,” Browder says. “They helped a lot during the Beta. They were involved from the earliest stages, and they really helped us fine-tune the game based on the way the original StarCraft is currently played.”

Choose Your Path. Between missions, use that hard-earned cash to improve Raynor’s Raiders before deciding where to go next.

Fresh Strategies

Browder notes that the original StarCraft has “evolved over time as players learn more about it, even though we did very little in the way of game balancing through patches. I’m sure players will develop build orders for StarCraft II, as they did for the first game, but those will mostly fall apart when they make contact with the enemy and must adapt to a unique situation — that will make it feel fresh each time.”

He concludes: “Every time you sit down to play a game, your experience will be unique, between the differences between the races, which map you choose, and where you start. You’ll have to use all the knowledge at your disposal every time and figure out your strategies on the fly.”

: Defense Grid

: Defense Grid: The Awakening

You thought this planet was abandoned. You were wrong. Well, from a certain point-of-view: a computer that calls itself Entity is now in control of this inhospitable chunk of rock. Luckily, it’s benign. Unluckily, an alien invasion force has arrived, and Entity’s defense grid is offline.

“Ah, the aliens are back, are they?” Entity asks in a nonchalant voice as you scan your surroundings. “Yes, well, we knew this day would come, and so it has,” the computer adds, as if it’s talking to a long-lost friend. There will be time for a round of “How do you do?” and raspberry tasting later; you have work to do.

The Rub

The objective seems simple enough: place towers along the aliens’ path and blast them to smithereens. At first you only have access to basic gun turrets, but soon Entity provides others to choose from, including cannons, flame-throwing towers, spinning structures that slow down enemies, and more. As you gain resources from eliminating aliens, you can upgrade existing towers with more powerful attacks and wider ranges of fire, or buy new ones. Do you want to inflict a few devastating blows, or death by a thousand paper cuts?

Of course, the aliens come in 15 different varieties, each with unique movement rates, levels of shielding, degrees of strength, and other qualities to consider, so you can’t simply place a series of gun turrets and sit back to watch the carnage. Some of the aliens even fly, and certain weapons are useless against them.

The aliens want your power cores, and if they carry all of them off the map, they’ll prevent the defense grid from going online. Wise tower defense strategists would be wise to heed Entity’s advice: “Be merciless. They are.”

Tips and Tricks

• When you place a tower, it takes a few seconds for the structure to rise out of the pad, so make sure you’re not relying on it to take out a final alien that’s about to exit the map with a power core.
• And when you upgrade a tower, you need to give the process several seconds: the old tower lowers out of view, and then the new one rises. Your best time to do that isn’t when you need that tower to destroy some aliens in the next few seconds.
• Pay close attention to towers’ ranges of fire: place the ones with smaller ranges closer to the path, and let the long-distance guns sit back. Meteor towers are perfect for out-of-the-way spots, since they can cover long distances.
• You can click on an alien to check out its stats and monitor its health level. That’s a handy way to know if you should beef up some last-minute defenses before it reaches the exit.
• Make sure you’re prepared for boss aliens when they arrive. (The bar along the top of the screen tells you what types of enemies are on their way.) Because the bosses are so powerful, you won’t earn many resources for a few minutes while your existing towers work on taking them down.
• You’ll need quick mouse moves to survive the game’s higher levels. From the main menu, select Help and Options, then choose Controls. The first tab lets you change the mouse sensitivity: fill the bar to let your cursor move as fast as possible around the screen; empty it for the slowest speed. You can choose anything in-between to fine-tune the setting, but note that you won’t see the effect of your choice until you resume gameplay.
• Don’t place temporal towers where their ranges overlap each other; they seem to cancel each other out.
• Each tower or group of towers has a force field. Aliens must go around the force field, unless their path is completely blocked. Keep this in mind as you look for ways to lengthen the aliens’ path; the farther they have to go, the more opportunities your towers have to shoot at them, and the longer it takes for them to get away with power cores.

Tango Down

Blacklight: Tango Down (Xbox 360)
Zombie studios have created a cheap, multiplayer focused first person shooter that is a fantastic value for money. It contains 12 maps and multiple game modes including Black Ops mode which is a Co-op mode made for up to four players and has you trawling through levels killing enemies just to get to the end of the level.

Blacklight: Tango Down tells of the fight between the US Blacklight Special Forces and the US ex Special Forces called the Order. You get to play as either of these sides in a fast paced battle to the death. In order to accomplish this task you are given a few items that can help you, amongst these is the Hyper Reality Visor (HRV).

The HRV works like an upgraded version of Splinter Cell Convictions Sonar goggles allowing you to pinpoint enemies, friends and health stations by the icon or coloured dots that appear on the screen whilst activated. So you can easily spot where the battle is after respawning or find that sneaky enemy trying to hide in a corner. It has a cool down timer that stops you using them continuously to help balance out the game.

Digi Grenades create a sphere of energy that cause blindness in the area which is a worthy upgrade to a flash grenade but it affects you as well as you can’t see into the energy sphere to kill the enemy that you have just blinded, instead try spraying the area with bullets in the hope you’ll drop the enemy.

To stop enemies camping, the static spawn points the bases contain automated machine guns and players have a few seconds of invulnerability which doesn’t sound like much but on these fast paced levels it is all you need. The level design is great with lots of tight enclosed alleyways as well as open spaces for the snipers amongst you.

As you earn Kills and Assists you are awarded experience points which unlock extra weapons, tags and parts. Weapon Parts come in four types Barrels, Stocks, Scopes and Magazines, These all have a bearing on how the weapon handles. Tags are small key ring like objects that are attached to your weapon and give you extra abilities or further increase your weapons statistics e.g. Faster Reload, Quicker Health Regeneration or a bonus to the damage, but you can only have one tag on a weapon at any one time so careful choice is required.

There are a few points that could have been addressed or need tweaking such as maybe the possibility of multiple spawn points on a map and more emphasis on the story rather than finding it in a how to play option in the menu screen, but you are getting the best looking Xbox Live Arcade game. As long as this title is well supported in DLC this is a lesson to developers on how an Xbox live game should be done with great graphics, simple game-play and enough content in the weapon customization to keep you playing until well after midnight.