Rock, Paper, Shotgun

That’s StarCraft II, mind you. Otherwise, I think that’d be a dequel, and I’m not sure anyone actually wants one of those. But yes, WarCraft: A New Dawn is picking up the severed orc hand of maximum strategy Blizzard dropped after WoW exploded. As of now, it’s very much a work-in-progress, but the end goal is to craftily craft StarCraft into “a breathtaking, lore-abiding storyline spanning several emotionally-gripping campaigns containing new units, new heroes, and new features as well as a fully fledged melee mode.” Lofty goals, huh? Maybe even too lofty. The team’s released their first video, though, so you can judge for yourself.

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At the risk of bombarding you good people with tower defence games in these happy times of Plants vs Zombies and ridiculously cheap Defence Grids, let’s throw another one into the mix. Don’t roll your eyes at me like that, young man – this one is free and ingeniously different.
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Seven [actually five and a half - Basic Arithmetic Ed] years on from release, Warcraft III is still seeing new patches. Blizzard forever chase the elusive spectre of perfect balance – the RTS equivalent of absolute zero.

I wouldn’t usually bother mentioning a patch unless it did something incredible, but of note in this most recent is that it adds official no-cd support – in other words, you no longer need the game disc a-spinnin’ inside your PC whenever you want to play the game.

I’ve always found it fascinating when games do this after release. It’s an admission that copy protection is just an irritation to legitimate players, and that disc checks are a particularly buffoonish and archaic anti-piracy measure at that.
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