Introduction
Of the games I play the most, Starcraft, GeoGuessr, and Super Mario Maker 2 stand above all others not only because they are the games I am playing the most, but also because they are also the games I watch other people play on Youtube the most. I also watch a fair amount of retro gaming Youtube, though less than I used to before I got back into Starcraft a year ago now. The other games I play, including Diablo IV, Dead or Alive 6, and a few others I play occasionally such as Overwatch and Splatoon, are games I don’t watch video of, I just play them once in a while. I got back into Diablo IV yesterday, actually; I bought the expansion when it released but didn’t really play it until now. I will certainly continue with that, it’s still a great game.
With that said though, as much as I overall prefer text to video I waste way too much time watching Youtube, so why not make some videos of my own? I don’t yet have the ability to record from my TV — the problem basically is that I would need a computer in my living room area to record to but I do not have that and it would not be easy to have such a thing unless I buy a pretty nice laptop or something and hope that works — but even though I’ve never used it I can record on my PC, I have OBS and two monitors.
Starcraft: The Greatest Game
And so, yesterday I finally got around to recording something: my oldest Starcraft replay. I bought Starcraft the week it released back in 1998, after much excitement. I have never been more hyped for a game release and surely never will be, but it fully lived up to my expectations. In fact, it was even more amazing than I expected! Starcraft is the greatest game ever made, with the most amazing mixture of strategy and skill imaginable. There are other games with deeper strategy and other games with more direct action, but no other game matches Starcraft’s perfect blend of the two. Chess or a wargame may have more strategy, but you have infinite time to make each move. Starcraft requires not only good strategy but also exceptional physical skill. It is an uncompromising, stressful game to play, you need to be at the top of your game to have a chance. I rarely manage that.
Despite that Starcraft is the most fun and rewarding game you can play. Even though I am hopelessly terrible at the game, do I quit forever? No. I’ve stopped playing for years, but always return to this game because it’s the best. There is nothing else like it and probably never will be. Games today have more player aids, more automation, and either less basebuilding, as you see in many modern RTSes such as Battle Aces, or a focus exclusively on that side of the game but with much more detail and economic complexity, as you see in They Are Billions. Starcraft is what it is: The great. Gaming’s most exceptional masterpiece, and its best representative to the world about what an electronic game can be. When I think of humanity’s great accomplishments in art, music, and such, Starcraft is gaming’s top entry on the list in my book.
However, as amazing as Starcraft is, unfortunately we couldn’t save replays in the early years. I’m sure I would havesaved at least a few if we could have before then, but we couldn’t. Replays were not added to Starcraft until May 2001, about three years after its release. Unfortunately, I did not often save replays once they were finally added. I only have 45 replays from 2001 to March 2017, before the release of Starcraft Remastered and its fantastic automatic replay save feature, and a majority of them are games against some people I knew on the internet, one guy from Tendo City particularly. Games against random opponents? I rarely saved them, for whatever reason. And while I played a lot of Use Map Settings games — Starcraft invented one of my favorite strategy game subgenres for example, Tower Defense — I have no UMS replays from before Remastered, if the game allowed you to save them. Oh well, what can you do? At least I have a few replays of random multiplayer games, plus a bunch against people I knew.
My Oldest Starcraft Replay: A 3-player FFA from October 2001
And of those games, this is the first one: a game of me against two random opponents on the then-ubiquitous map Lost Temple from October 20, 2001. It’s really unfortunate that this is my only replay from 2001, but it is. Oh well. Considering how bad I am, and was, at this game I was not expecting all that much from a game from my late teens, but this is a surprisingly fun match that I recommend Starcraft fans watch. It’s fun stuff. Back then, like most players, I played as all three races. In this game I’m Protoss but in other games I play as Terran and Zerg. Nowadays I mostly just play Terran.
This was recorded with the original Starcraft patched to version 1.08b, the correct patch for when I saved this game game replay in ’01. The video is recorded in the original Starcraft and not Remastered not because I prefer it — I actually prefer Remastered, both for significantly improved replay features and for the really nice HD graphical overhaul — but because the replay breaks very badly in Remastered. Even though Starcraft has not had a balance change since early 2001, there were many patches over the years fixing various bugs and adding other things. Some of these changes break replays unless played back with the correct old version of the game, as there is no built-in patch changer function to make old replays work. Most classic, pre-2017 replays have issues when run through the Remastered engine and this replay is no exception. When run in the classic game patched to the correct patch via a fantastic fan-made patcher utility, however, the replay works great! I decided to record a video of myself watching the replay, and uploaded it to Youtube.
The ending to this game may be somewhat cliche for a FFA, but despite this I think this was a pretty fun game, some entertaining things happen and there are some nice, if poorly microed by all contenders, battles. It’s too bad I don’t have more replays this old — this is sadly my only replay from 2001, the year replays were added to Starcraft, and I only have 45 from 2001 to March 2017 combined — but I have at least these few and I’m going to upload recordings of some of them, starting with this oldest replay I have of my games.
On a related note, I also have a similar number of Warcraft III replays but uploading them will be challenging, getting the game to the correct patches for replays mostly from the mid ’00s won’t be easy. I do want to try, but I haven’t found a WCIII patcher utility that allows you to easily change to the early versions of the game, and that is what I would need. Otherwise I would need to try to find all the patches, install base WCIII, and then watch the replays for each version one version at a time before installing the next patch. That sounds like a huge pain, but I might do it. I have not gotten back into Warcraft III as I have Starcraft, as its focus on hero skills is something I find much harder to go back to than SC’s focus on pure skill and mechanics, but still it is a game I loved and considered the best game ever for a while after its release. I would love to watch those old replays as well.
In conclusion, I am not very good at Starcraft, and never have been, but despite this it is my favorite game ever and a game I still play and enjoy. I think that just because I have never wanted to learn serious keyboard micro doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy this greatest of games as much as anyone better. I am better than you see in this video now, though I haven’t played much Protoss in a long time as I mostly play Terran now, but everyone else is a lot better as well. I’ll probably eventually record some of my modern games, though they are about as far from the skill you see in professional Starcraft games as is possible; I am a 900 to 1000 rated player and only am that high because of how often people quit instantly in order to falsely tank their ranking. I usually lose, and I don’t use keyboard hotkeys to build buildings because that has never been my idea of fun. Again, though, I am fine with this and love playing it anyway. I hope any potential viewers can accept this.
I have learned something from all the pro Starcraft I have watched over the past year, though. I may still usually lose, mostly just use the keyboard for some control groups, and struggle at both micro and macro, but have I learned anything since this game from 23 years ago? Yes I have. Executing on what I see is more difficult than it would have been when I was younger, but despite this I’m better at the game now than I ever was before. I build more than one unit production building of each type most of the time now, for example. I get a lot more workers, more than the one per patch I often did before. I use somewhat better strategy, and make more use of control groups than I used to. You will not see me doing much of those things from these games from the ’00s, sadly. But nobody was as good then as players are now. As you will see in this video, the other two players in this game are every bit as bad at the game as I was, or worse…
The Video
Me, A_Black_Falcon: Brown Protoss (center)
Red, sw-firefanatic: Red Zerg (lower left)
Blue, {HD}DarkShadow: Blue Protoss (upper right)
Not The Video
This video is of the same replay as above, but as it looks when recorded through Starcraft Remastered. Do not make this the only version of this game you watch, you won’t have a very good time. Probably do not watch this video at all unless you are really interested in the kinds of ways replays break, which I guess perhaps someone out there might be.
Conclusion
So yeah, I won! That didn’t happen often and probably was part of why I chose to save this game and not any of the others from 2001. It was a pretty crazy game too, it was close and with different decisions anyone could have won as I said previously. Fun stuff to watch.
Outside of the events of the game itself, the most interesting thing about making these videos is that contrary to what I might have expected, the video that is mostly 640×480 upscaled to 1920×1200 is quite a bit larger filesize than the one that is about the same length and is entirely 1920×1200– recording it using the default settings on OBS, the former video is ~650MB while the latter is a bit over 1GB. Huh. I guess the scaling takes up a lot of space? How odd.
Anyway, in conclusion, Starcraft is the best. Play it. If you haven’t, well, play the campaign; the original-graphics, non-HD version of the campaign is actually free to download. Though the multiplayer is really what makes Starcraft immortal, it’s a great campaign, one of the best. I will be recording more videos of some of my other replays, both old and new.
I’d love to have any comments about how to do a better job recording the replays. It’s trickier to do in the classic game than in Remastered because the game minimizes when I click on my second monitor and doesn’t always lock the mouse onto the screen, resulting in the camera sometimes moving to the left uncontrollably when I accidentally move it just a tiny bit too far left towards my second monitor, and making adjusting anything in OBS impossible while recording a game. This is not an issue in Remastered, but as you see above you can’t use Remastered for replays like these, so oh well. I figured out how to make it work but certainly could have done a much better job. Sorry about that.
