Could Blizzard have done better ? Could Blizzard have made their games less
complicated on purpose ?
I thought I had seen it all but now : awesome, unbelievable, remarkable
... .
A friend recently gave me a compilation of the Starcraft/Broodwar missions
he'd made himself. He had put these together with the very best missions
he'd found on internet but then most severely altered to change difficulty
or to make them more fun. Enslavers from Blizzard is also included.
Especially
the very last level (GeertFinal) is extremely special : you see two other
Terran tribes battle each other all the time while you fight the Zerg. But
if
you come near the Terrans, both attack you (!). Surprises are never far
away
in this level, and when you think it's over... .
Can it be that Blizzard avoided to make it so complicated ? Or didn't take
the
risk to make something so complicated ? Also, in some levels, another race
battles together with your tribes, but indepedently and without your need
to
interfere. This race even comes to help you when you're attacked. This
allie
has its own AI but is attacked too by your enemie. So, sometimes you need
to
defend this allie or he could be lost for the rest of the mission ! I
wonder
why Blizzard never accomplished that ! The fact is that everybody can make
impossibly hard missions with the campaign editor. But good balance
between
still possible but rather challenging, that's what we need. I think, this
"ExtraMissions"-zip from my friend contains the best Starcraft/Broodwar
maps
ever made for singleplayer. BTW I have done nothing here. It's all a
friend's
work, but I asked him to share this with the "world" because they're
really
worth being played and so I've put them on my server. Anyone who doesn't
believe
me and who still has Starcraft/Broodwar lying around, just point your
browsers to http://lena.servegame.com:1025
and download the ExtraMissions zipfile (14.3 MB in one file). The missions
are
made especially for veteran players. Some levels are extremely difficult
but all
can be played to victory, and in fact not all are difficult of course.
Indeed,
the first level (Geert01) is rather easy. No need to say that brute force
isn't
always the good path, ruse and good thinking can sometimes bring you far
too :)
Also, take a look at the code of "GeertFinal" after you've played it.
Isn't that
a beauty ?!? Also worth mentioning are "Badlandswar" and "DesertKerrigan".
And
now that I've said all this, I come back to my starting questions : after
years
of working on the serie, the Blizzard crew must have noticed the above
mentioned
possibilities. So why didn't they make us a mission like GeertFinal ?
Enjoy the game ... En taro Adun ...
Oh, BTW, if my server is offline, you can also get the ExtraMissions from
http://www.starcraft.org/s***s/maps.asp?mode=search
Just do a search for the map name "extramissions" on this page. It's 15
zipfiles
all together here (ExtraMissions01-->15). It seems that I messed up during
uploading, so there is a 2nd number 02 instead of number 03. Just download
both
02's. All zipfiles have a readme.txt to get you started and all files are
about
1MB each. I'm in Europe, my server is daily at least online 10 --> 24
(Western
European time).
Lena
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