Judging from the videos it seems that Blizzard has chosen to continue with the Brood War style of very clear counters. Take the new Protoss flyer, the Phoenix. It's obviously very good against light air units like Mutalisks and extremely bad against heavy Battlecruisers. So the other new Protoss air unit, the Warp Ray, does precisely the opposite – it's extremely good against single, heavy targets but extremely weak against multiple smaller ones.
Now on the surface this isn't bad at all. It creates balance and causes the player to think, but the counters are so obvious and so strong that it doesn't permit a short-term micro solution to a long-term macro problem. With some good tactics and numbers, Zerglings could defeat Marines where normally they'd be at a disadvantage. Hydralisks were this sort of jack-of-all-trades unit that didn't dominate its opposition but also didn't have any clear counters. It left a lot of room for upgrades, numbers, and micromanagement to decide battles with/against Hydralisks. We hope that Blizzard doesn't get caught up in the passion for clear counters to every unit and leaves some gray areas in.
One very strange thing from the videos was the Protoss Mothership. This is absolutely unlike any other Blizzard RTS and straight out of Command and Conquer or Homeworld, to be honest. Super units generally do not work well in a tightly balanced RTS and it's surprising to see Blizzard of all companies embrace one. It's unknown whether or not Terrans and Zerg have their own super units, or even if the Mothership will make it through the coming months (or years, after all, this is Blizzard -ed.) of development.
Blizzard has made controversial choices in the past – 2D Diablo II, three unique races for StarCraft, making a MMO with World of WarCraft, and so on. In every situation, their choices have paid off for them, at least in the short run. Moreover, a lot is subject to change before the game goes gold – I'm sure we all remember the early StarCraft screenshots, or the features cut from World of WarCraft. So, in that respect, the individual details are never sure.
What is sure, however, is that this is StarCraft 2. It will almost certainly have a traditional economy, unlike Homeworld/Dawn of War/Company of Heroes, it won't have a huge focus like Supreme Commander, and it will require significant attention to battles, unlike Age of Empires. There are certainly some cool new developments and units, possibly some interesting choices with balance, but we wouldn't bet on anything revolutionary. That just isn't Blizzard's style. StarCraft 2 will be to StarCraft like Diablo II was to Diablo.
Intel Core 2 Duo E8600 Review
With dual processing cores clocked at 3.33GHz, Intel's Core 2 Duo E8600 is a serious performer, but it's an even more impressive OC'er. Check out Brandon's thoughts on the CPU in our Core 2 Duo E8600 review!
Madden 09 Review
With solid graphics and gameplay, there's a lot to like with EA's latest iteration of Madden, but Brett reports that there are still some annoying AI quirks that hold the game back. Read on for the full review!
Sapphire Toxic Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon 4850 Dual Slot Review
The Sapphire Toxic 4850 is loaded with features. The card ships with an all-copper dual slot, dual heatpipe cooler from Zalman, the VF900-Cu. But that's not all, the board is also OC'ed to higher speeds than any other 4850 card on the market. In this article we officially review the Sapphire Toxic 4850 as well as its younger brother the 4850 Dual Slot. Both cards deliver cooling that's significantly improved over ATI's cooler. Find out how well these cards perform in today's review!
Soul Calibur IV Review
Are the additions of Darth Vader and Yoda enough to carry the Soul Calibur series? Yes and no. Brett finds the fighting enjoyable, but Namco Bandai's isn't perfect. Read the pros and cons in today's review!
FiringSquad Rumor Patrol: Apple, NVIDIA
FiringSquad's top secret division looks at technology rumors floating around the 'net. In this round: NVIDIA and Apple!
Palit GeForce 9800 GT Sonic Review
Rather than rely on NVIDIA's reference board design for the 9800 GT, Palit has incorporated a number of improvements into their 9800 GT Sonic, including a 3-phase board design, dual-slot cooling, and OC'ed clock speeds. How does the 9800 GT card perform in comparison to the popular GeForce 8800 GT and a host of other GPUs? Find out in this article!
Budget Gaming PC Roundup
In this article, Jakes takes a look at three different $1,000 gaming PCs from CyberPower, iBuyPower, and MainGear PC. Each company took a different approach to tackling the $1,000 budget, and one company really stood out with their extraordinary build quality. See how the various PCs fared in our Budget Gaming PC Roundup!
PhysX Performance Update: GPU vs. PPU vs. CPU
After posting our PhysX story last week, many of you wrote in asking for PPU benchmarks, so today we've delivered! Armed with our original BFG PhysX card, we booted up an X48 Core 2 QX9650 testbed and re-ran the benchmarks. See how the PPU fared against the CPU and GPU in this quick article!
ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 Performance Preview
With 1600 shaders, 2.0GB of GDDR5 memory, and 2.4 TeraFLOPS of graphics horsepower, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is one impressive performer. See how the card stacks up running 8xAA against SLI GeForce GTX 280 and 260 in single card and 4-Way CrossFire. We've also thrown in 24xAA benchmarks as well. Is 2GB of memory really necessary? All the answers lie inside!
PhysX Performance with GeForce
Later this month NVIDIA will open up GeForce-based PhysX processing to their entire range of GeForce 8/9 and GTX 200 GPUs. In this article we take a look at their performance (as well as ATI's Radeon HD 4000 series), in four different PhysX applications. What kind of performance can you expect? Find out inside!
Why it will be the way it will be
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