With all of this talk about the latest World of Warcraft expansion, Battle For Azeroth, happening in the blogosphere it got me to thinking about Blizzard titles I’m actually interested in. Despite playing WoW here and there over the years its never really held my interest like some of the company’s other offerings. I remembered the other day that I had picked up the Necromancer pack for Diablo III and never really played it all that much, and yes I also picked up a copy of StarCraft Remastered because it’s quite simply one of my favorite PC games of all time. I hadn’t played the original in over a decade at least, so my memory of it was fuzzy before I fired up the game. After a few missions I remembered plenty, though I don’t remember many details. Memories come in flashes, but it’s still clearly the same game with some slight differences.

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Graphically it’s still running on the same sort of engine. They haven’t made any sort of major changes to the UI, story or maps. This is still the game you would have played in the late 1990’s down to the sound effects and gameplay. What has changed is that it runs in a higher resolution (1920×1080) and though everything looks sharper from that alone they also changed out character models. The buildings look a little better. The units look a little better. The characters whom you talk to look better. Outside of that it’s the same game and I’m good with this. It would have been nice I suppose to have the game redone completely in the StarCraft 2 engine just so that it really stood out, but I guess holding onto some of the nostalgic bits is still desirable. I absolutely loved this game when I was in high school and I played it for a good few years. After Brood War came out I played it even more. I came back around to it at least once in my adult life, and now I’m a handful of missions into the Terran campaign and would love to finish it again. I still never beat all of StarCraft 2 either, so I suppose this could lead into that as well.

Bottom line, is purchasing StarCraft Remastered worth it? I think that’s subjective. You can currently play the original game for free through the Battle Net launcher, so you don’t necessarily have to play the remastered version at all if you just want you retro gaming fix. Otherwise, it’s $15 for the remaster and that’s not too pricey either. I think it was worth it to see a slightly more polished version of the game you loved. If you weren’t into the original, this probably won’t change your mind about it. If you have only played the sequel, the step back in graphics quality might be a turn off for you. For me, I enjoy going back and playing old games and I also enjoy new games that choose to use pixel art so I might be the target audience for this. And I’m good with that.