Remastered Marine and an essay on StarCraft

I was a huge fan of the internet personality Totalbiscuit (John Bain). He passed away this spring due to cancer. In his absence his Youtube and Twitch activities are being carried on by his widow, Genna. She had appeared in several of his gaming videos before (E.G. WTF is … Octodad), and they were always my favorites. The whole situation has obviously left her in a great deal of stress, so as a fan of the channel, and of her, I decided to show my support the only way I know how: by making a drawing. Keep it up, Genna!

Let’s now talk about StarCraft. Yet again we are talking about one of my favorite games, and wouldn’t ya know it, it’s a Blizzard game… My love-hate relationship with Blizzard stems from the dissonance between what the company gave me in the past, and what it has become nowadays. I know this can sound a lot like a “back in my day” argument, but personal taste aside, there are plenty of objective reasons to dislike the modern day Activision-Blizzard.

But that is off topic. I want to talk about StarCraft. A real- time strategy game that became one of the most prominent esports of its time. The expansion of the game, Brood War, is still touted to be one of the, if not the best competitive video game to date. I’ll leave the truth about that statement up to the experts, StarCraft was never that to me. I never competed in the online scene, I was there for its story.

Oh, yes! There was in fact a time when Blizzard wrote really compelling, mature stories, rather than the Saturday morning cartoons they create nowadays. StarCraft took place in the distant future, where societies of humans had broken off from Earth and created factions out in the farther sectors of space. Also inhabiting this area of space were the hive-minded Zerg, a race of giant, insect-like creatures bent on spreading all across the galaxy; and the Protoss, an ancient race of highly advanced aliens who saw themselves as superior to all others. There were no good guys here. The Zerg just wanted to consume all, the Protoss were bent on eradicating all life on Zerg infested planets indiscriminately, and the several Terran factions were just as bad as the others. Indeed, the Terran story of the game has you leaving the corrupt and incompetent Confederacy to join a militant group called the Sons of Korhal, only to find out that they too are just as vile as the ones before. This is why I found this game so intriguing. There was no single big galactic evil to overcome, just you and your buddy Jim Raynor trying to not be bad in a world of bad guys.

Not the first game, nor the expansion had any happy endings. Victory in the first game came only through the self sacrifice of the Protoss hero Tassadar. In the aftermath, the betrayed ghost operative turned infested Zerg psychic, Sarah Kerrigan enacted a plot to wipe out all other factions. Heroes like Alexei Stukov and Fenix lost there lives to betrayal. And if you have never played any of the games, than none of these names mean anything to you, but to me every mention of them brings back feelings. And the treatment of this beautifully dark and tragic story in the second game and its expansions invokes anger. I won’t go into detail here, know only that it was new Blizzard working on the story now. Characterizations were radically changed, what was once mature and interesting became dumbed down, and formulaic, relationships were altered to fit a simpler revenge story, and overall the whole thing just sucked. The game play was loved by everyone, and the multiplayer scene was huge, but as I said, the game was never that for me. But the truth is Activision Blizzard just doesn’t make games for people like me any more.

StarCraft did give me many things. Awesome gaming memories, one of the my favorite female characters in video games, beautiful music, and a fantastic story.

DeviantArt link here.

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