This REALLY annoyed me. The artifact can wipe out almost all Zerg on Char but Mengsk uses it to torture one person rather than wipe out the entire Zerg swarm that's attacking his capital planet???
Spoiler
Didn't it have to charge for a long period of time for the Char-blast? I imagine that letting it charge up prior to Kerrigan reaching his chamber probably would have keyed her in that he was planning to use it, but I may be misremembering the final WoL mission. I'm guessing Mengsk figured that he would leave it dormant and just fry her with the lower power setting. Though it still doesn't excuse him just sitting on Korhal waiting for her.
It was 30 in game mintues IIRC. Not sure if thats what it is in the lore. But when Mengsk KNOWS that Kerrigan is coming for him (for days or weeks at least when he makes the threat of executing Raynor) and we see his desperation when he makes the transmission recalling all Dominion forces, it seems completetly retarded that he wouldnt use its full potential.
Marcus Aurelius: ...the Swedish S-tank; the exception is made mostly because the Swedes insisted really hard that it is a tank rather than a tank destroyer or assault gun Ilya Muromets: And now I have this image of a massive, stern-looking Swede staring down a bunch of military nerds. "It's a tank." "Uh, yes Sir. Please don't hurt us."
Perhaps Mengsk wanted to torture Kerrigan to death with a low setting, stupid yes but at this point Mengsk seems to have gone of the deep end and is not acting rational in any shape or form. Also we must remember Acturus Mengsk is a really really arrogant person, with a fondness for the thearetical, so it wouldn't really be out-of-character for him to do what he did, even if it was really dumb of him to do so.
I may be an idiot, but I'm a tolerated idiot
"I think you completely missed the point of sigs. They're supposed to be completely homegrown in the fertile hydroponics lab of your mind, dried in your closet, rolled, and smoked...
Oh wait, that's marijuana..."Einhander Sn0m4n
It was 30 in game mintues IIRC. Not sure if thats what it is in the lore. But when Mengsk KNOWS that Kerrigan is coming for him (for days or weeks at least when he makes the threat of executing Raynor) and we see his desperation when he makes the transmission recalling all Dominion forces, it seems completetly retarded that he wouldnt use its full potential.
Spoiler
Oh, I get all that. I'm just wondering if he knows Kerrigan would be able to sense it if it's holding a massive charge and avoid arriving in person, instead electing for a long range solution.
Perhaps Mengsk wanted to torture Kerrigan to death with a low setting, stupid yes but at this point Mengsk seems to have gone of the deep end and is not acting rational in any shape or form. Also we must remember Acturus Mengsk is a really really arrogant person, with a fondness for the thearetical, so it wouldn't really be out-of-character for him to do what he did, even if it was really dumb of him to do so.
No, this is simply bad writing. He is not too arrogant to use every other weapon of his on max setting. Why not use the artifact? In fact, none of Mengsk choices seemed very smart to me throughout the whole game which is my major problem with him being completely non-threatening as an opponent.
Whoever says "education does not matter" can try ignorance
------------
A decision must be made in the life of every nation at the very moment when the grasp of the enemy is at its throat. Then, it seems that the only way to survive is to use the means of the enemy, to rest survival upon what is expedient, to look the other way. Well, the answer to that is 'survival as what'? A country isn't a rock. It's not an extension of one's self. It's what it stands for. It's what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult! - Chief Judge Haywood
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Thanas wrote:No, this is simply bad writing. He is not too arrogant to use every other weapon of his on max setting. Why not use the artifact? In fact, none of Mengsk choices seemed very smart to me throughout the whole game which is my major problem with him being completely non-threatening as an opponent.
Spoiler
The only smart thing he did was hold Raynor hostage against Kerrigan, though the guards fail heavily for not walking in the cell and pulling the trigger as soon as the attack on the prison ship was launched.
Marcus Aurelius: ...the Swedish S-tank; the exception is made mostly because the Swedes insisted really hard that it is a tank rather than a tank destroyer or assault gun Ilya Muromets: And now I have this image of a massive, stern-looking Swede staring down a bunch of military nerds. "It's a tank." "Uh, yes Sir. Please don't hurt us."
From what I heard the protoss that kerrigan infected was originally supposed to be a larger character, in that Kerrigan would be forced to confront her atrocities after meeting someone who was directly hurt.
I loved the scene in the prison ship, and felt that the way they parted was also well done. They won't be together, but it's still under better terms than last time
(Not saying anything specific to the game, so I'm not spoilering it)
Atg, that's one of the big problems with having a hostage as your main line of defense in the first place. If you kill the hostage, you lose all your leverage, and your enemy will still be attacking AND probably vengeful now. But if you don't kill the hostage, the enemy may take their chances.
About the only time hostage-taking 'works' in the long run is when it's done by a large organization, against an enemy too weak to defeat it quickly. A dictator may take someone's family hostage to control them, and horrible as it is, that works, because they actually can kill the hostages and survive the attempts of that one person to get revenge. They can be 'forced' to kill a hostage, actually carry out the threat, and survive the experience with a reputation for meaning it when they say "or else I'll kill the hostage."
When a criminal takes a hostage as a way of securing his escape, on the other hand... that does not end well, because if he kills the hostage he's a dead man, and everyone involved knows it.
Perhaps Mengsk wanted to torture Kerrigan to death with a low setting, stupid yes but at this point Mengsk seems to have gone of the deep end and is not acting rational in any shape or form. Also we must remember Acturus Mengsk is a really really arrogant person, with a fondness for the thearetical, so it wouldn't really be out-of-character for him to do what he did, even if it was really dumb of him to do so.
No, this is simply bad writing. He is not too arrogant to use every other weapon of his on max setting. Why not use the artifact? In fact, none of Mengsk choices seemed very smart to me throughout the whole game which is my major problem with him being completely non-threatening as an opponent.
Spoiler
It's unfortunate, too, since Mengsk was pretty canny back in SC1 and Brood War. He wasn't afraid to make a run for it to lick his wounds when the situation wasn't in his favor, like he did after his coalition failed to take down Kerrigan on the Char Platforms. It's strange that he would stick around on Korhal in the face of certain defeat, unless he was certain that he could pull off a win somehow (and to be fair, he did have a couple of super-weapons waiting that failed to pan out).
*sigh* I miss the old days, when it was about power and the struggle for survival, the Terrans were a bunch of feuding assholes (aside from Raynor), the Protoss and the Zerg were just the long-dead Xel'Naga's last two pet projects fighting it out, and there was none of this "prophecy" or "Dark God of Evil" stuff. The whole thing would have been more interesting if Raynor's rescue of Kerrigan had just been a decision by him at the last minute to save her rather than kill her (as he promised back in Brood War after she killed Fenix), which ends up deciding the fate of the three races in the wake of Duran's scheme and the hybrids.
That said, aside from some interludes, that mostly what these two games were about.
“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.” -Jean-Luc Picard
"Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them." -Margaret Atwood
What you call "canny" I call "outstaying his welcome". Arcturus really should have died at the end of Brood War with Valerian taking over the Dominion which would have given WoL a completely different, less stale, feel. Other than cheaply creating conflict, he's completely superfluous and unnecessary in Stacraft II. Heck, the ending of the original Terran campaign already more or less ended his arc conclusively, there was nowhere for him to go.
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Saddam’s crime was so bad we literally spent decades looking for our dropped monocles before we could harumph up the gumption to address it
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Just finished the game. I was half expecting the artefact in Mengsk's office to convert Sarah back into human form again, if thats possible.
Throughout it I found myself more interested in the Raynor/Kerrigan relationship then the fate of the sector. Apart from some stirrings in WoL this was the first I really heard about Aemon. What relevance does he have apart from past crimes? Is her vendetta against him just revenge? Or does she feel he needs to be taken out for the good of everyone?
Final mission was WAY too easy though. Steal the little base to the right, build a bunch of hatcheries and just attack move swarmlings into their base.
By the way that drop pod ability of Kerrigan is WAY overpowered. Enough forces comes down that you can basically wage a war with them...
this Zerg back story stuff completely clashes with previous material. I remember all the way back in the SC1 manual, it said that the Zerg were simple parasitic life forms until they were uplifted by the Xel'Naga. Now there are these fully sentient "primal" Zerg running around? I love the presentation of the story in these games, and the mission variety, but it seems like Blizzard kind of lost the plot in the ten years between the original Starcraft and Starcraft II.
Actually... Spoiler
When you meet with the Ancient One it shows you the original parasitic Zerg, which continues to exist as larvae.
Guardsman Bass wrote:I just finished it, and it was a ton of fun. I played it on "normal", which is really easy - you can win a lot of missions with decent macro-management of your bases, plus RAR ZERG SMASH! tactics. I think it was significantly easier than the "normal" setting in Wings of Liberty. My brother told me that even the toughest difficulty wasn't too bad.
I played WoL on hard except for the terrazine mission and it was way easy. Blizzard was never one for challenging campaigns, however, though I played this on normal since I suck at Zerg. On normal I was able to one-base pretty much every mission. Big no-no in ladder.
Guardsman Bass wrote:Spoiler
6. It's probably best to just accept that Blizzard has retconned the hell out of the background details from Starcraft and Starcraft: Brood War. Zerus looks like Aiur now, whereas in the original booklet it was a volcanic waste world where the Zerg were this tiny larva-like species. There's a ton more people and planets in the Koprulu Sector, etc, etc.
Spoiler
This is meaningless speculation but we really don't know how long ago the Xel'Naga were there and what, exactly, they did to the planet. IIRC in the original material the Zerg had more or less spread over the surface when the Overmind rebelled so it's possible they terraformed it and what we see is the result of that after the Swarm left
Overall I liked it a lot. Quite frankly, I liked it far better than the BW Zerg campaign, which I'd touched a bit before hand. BW felt a lot more forced than it did on the first few play-throughs I did of it (This is just the Zerg missions, I've played the UED one enough to have memorized it [/fanboyism]) but perhaps that was just the feeling you get from the good old mission briefings contrasting with the new method.
It's been a long time coming, but here's my review.
Storywise I liked it. I wish they had kept Lassara around, or established the Duran = Narud, but otherwise it was a damn fun ride.
Kerrigan was compelling for once, mainly because she actually grows as a character. We first see her as the confused divided individual who has been given a chance to finally forge an identity for herself for the first time since she was 8 years old. Also, while starts out as a ruthless warrior willing to do anything to exact her revenge, she's still far more likable than when she was the Queen of Blades, largely because she didn't actively seek out the protoss and they technically threw down the gauntlet. After Warfield calls her out on her callousness, she starts to grow more humanity and compassion (though being purged of Amon's taint on Zerus probably helped her a lot). At the end, she's awesome; somewhat ruthless, but also more humane and compassionate. Her interactions with Raynor were beautifully done; Raynor trying to help the woman he loves overcome her inner demons, Kerrigan seeing him as the one man who truly tried to help her for something other than being a weapon. They part on relatively good terms, and the reason raynor didn't fulfill the oath actually made sense
Izsha and dahaka were bland, and Dahaka's voice was irritating, but nevertheless the guy pulled through. Stukov kicked ass, and I loved the way he got revenge on Duran (Sabotaging his assets much like Duran did the UED); out of all Kerrigan's luitenants he's the most three dimensional.
All in all, a kick ass game, and I can't wait for the final battle in Legacy of the Void
Darth Yan wrote:All in all, a kick ass game, and I can't wait for the final battle in Legacy of the Void
Remember that this is Blizzard we're talking about. You may have to alter your definition of "final" somewhat.
Who knows though. Maybe splitting the game out over three expansions will remove their urge to milk the cash cow and undo everything in an expansion or MMO.
And this is why you don't watch anything produced by Ronald D. Moore after he had his brain surgically removed and replaced with a bag of elephant semen.-Gramzamber, on why Caprica sucks
Amon's returned, the hybrids are back, the protoss have to unite......either way the stage is set for a throwdown between kerrigan and amon.
If anything, they're going to have RETURN OF THE UED as a sequel. They didn't bring most of their big guns last time, and hopefully the guy they send won't be a dumbass like DuGualle was.
Maybe the Queen of Blades (aka the pre-deinfestion version) didn't think that was really all that important, while the human/primal Queen of Blades did.
I may be an idiot, but I'm a tolerated idiot
"I think you completely missed the point of sigs. They're supposed to be completely homegrown in the fertile hydroponics lab of your mind, dried in your closet, rolled, and smoked...
Oh wait, that's marijuana..."Einhander Sn0m4n
Lord Revan wrote:Maybe the Queen of Blades (aka the pre-deinfestion version) didn't think that was really all that important, while the human/primal Queen of Blades did.
Yeah, that's what I'd go with. Revenge against Mengsk wasn't a motivation for Kerrigan until she could actually realize she had something to get revenge for. Intellectually, I'm sure the Queen of Blades knew Mengsk had betrayed her, but I don't think she would particularly care at that point.
Coyote: Warm it in the microwave first to avoid that 'necrophelia' effect.
Not knowing much of the SC1 lore: How much individuality did infested Kerrigan/Queen of Blades have?
IIRC one of the news segments in Wings of Liberty mentions regarding the QoB "No infested terran is known to control their actions" (something like that).
What I got from WoL was that the Queen of Blades essentially became the 'leader' of the hive mind akin to the Overmind, but 'Kerrigan' wasn't in control of her actions. In that case while the swarm's hive mind is aware that this particular infested terran was betrayed by a person called Mengsk... why would it care?
Marcus Aurelius: ...the Swedish S-tank; the exception is made mostly because the Swedes insisted really hard that it is a tank rather than a tank destroyer or assault gun Ilya Muromets: And now I have this image of a massive, stern-looking Swede staring down a bunch of military nerds. "It's a tank." "Uh, yes Sir. Please don't hurt us."
Kerrigan the human pretty much got changed by the overmind into the Queen of Blades persona. Individuality, yes, distinct from the hive mind, yes. But not quite her. SC lore pretty much established her to have a split personality at this point, with the queen persona in control and Kerrigan suppressed. None of that was apparent in the game itself, it could have been inferred by some of her actions but the real proof was background material. SC2 confirmed that by showing a telepathic projection of Kerrigan during the last mission in wings of liberty cheering you on as the queen of blades tried to wipe you out.
Whoever says "education does not matter" can try ignorance
------------
A decision must be made in the life of every nation at the very moment when the grasp of the enemy is at its throat. Then, it seems that the only way to survive is to use the means of the enemy, to rest survival upon what is expedient, to look the other way. Well, the answer to that is 'survival as what'? A country isn't a rock. It's not an extension of one's self. It's what it stands for. It's what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult! - Chief Judge Haywood
------------ My LPs
