Brood Wars expansion and I must say - very impressed.

I played this game 8 years ago when I was 9, but I only played custom games like Tower Defense and such (those were the days).

Now, after watching countless proffessional Korean videos, I realized this games shines even brighter as, well, a real RTS. At first the graphics kind of slap you in the face, but after a couple hours, they actually become attractive 0_o.

So I went on battlenet, and went 1 and 13. I got my ass handed to me practically every game - and I loved every second of it. Having just come from trying to play CnC3, Starcraft seems so perfectly balanced, yet the races are so diffrent from eachother-- it makes CnC3 look like broken garbage (honestly that game needs major patching, yet they decide to make an expansion!?).

From watching videos, and being a fast learner, I caught on to the Protoss strategies fairly quickly - but that's the easy part. The speed and mental skills required to play this game effectively is mind blowing, and I'm bad at it. Now I am a pretty good WC3 player, but I could not handle Starcraft.

You have to find your enemy quickly, monitor his behavior the entire game while adjusting your own strategies, and then pressure pressure pressure him. I cannot emphasize pressuring enough. You need to keep your opponent down, cautious, and slow. If you don't harass or attack him every 2 minutes, he'll probably have 6 bases on the map and an army to match it. There is so much to learn in this game, it's no wonder Korea respects its so much.

The community was also very mature. Obviously, SC isn't as big as it was 10 years ago, but there's still a good 40,000 players on at any given moment. They all wish you good luck and to have fun before the match starts, and say gg when you lose/win. Unlike my WC3 experiences, where it seemed I was facing a member of the KKK every game, who felt the need to call me a noob or something worse whenever I lost a game, or even a small skirmish. The SC players would also be very helpful when I asked for advice on how to get better, or asked them what I was doing wrong.

Infact, I faced quite a few koreans, and after getting completed ripped apart by one, we had a talk and he asked me if i would be his penpal.

I haven't had this much fun in an RTS for a while, and Starcraft 2 couldn't come any sooner.