We need to talk about Starcraft 2

I kind of hate Starcraft 2.  There, I said it.  That feels better.  I guess, I should be more specific – I don’t hate the game itself, as it seems like a perfectly good (probably an all time great) RTS.  I had fun with the single player aspect.  What I hate is what it’s turned players into.  You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting an SC2 player studying build orders and worrying about their lackluster ‘macro’.  It’s almost impossible to find someone just playing for fun, and if they say they are, they are probably taking it easy on you.  Not much fun for them.

My time with Starcraft is some of the best gaming I ever had, but I should’ve seen the cracks even then.  I played Bunker Command and Bunker Command 2, a ‘Use Map Settings’ map that pit you in a fast-paced game against the other players where you got points for blowing up their dudes, which in turn earned you new units.  The trick being you had to defend your bunker while you went after theirs.  Simple and fun, and it didn’t take 2 hours to play out.  But as SC aged, people stopped playing it.  It was all about improving their rating.  No one had time to play a game that ‘didn’t count’.  SC2 has jacked that up ten times at least.  Sure, there may be a few holdouts like me, but I don’t have time to find them.  It’s honestly one thing that has driven me away from multiplayer gaming and back to things like Skyrim and Dragon Age.

If anyone finds a working SC2 version of Bunker Command, I’d be interested.