So.. I'm taking a break after several hours of campaign.  Just finished a super awesome mission where it alternates 3 minutes of daytime and nighttime.  At night mutant refugees pop up and swarm your base, during the day they hide underground and you swarm out and destroy their buildings (like 200 of them >.<).  Super fun

Graphics are fantastic.  Plenty of cut scenes to enjoy between every mission, or skip if you're not into that sort of thing.  Enjoying the voice acting as well.

Hard difficulty is giving me a nice difficulty level, not overbearing, but not too easy either.  No worries, there is still brute if you want super hard, + normal and casual.

Still used to being able to zoom in / out with my mouse wheel in the other games I play, but it's not really necessary since you can click on the map and be over there.  Minimap is as useful as always

I can't wait to see the rest of the missions after the one I just finished, especially after how they revamped the leveling quest system in WoW expac Cataclysm with creative and fun things rather than just a grind to get to the next level.

It's pretty common to have launch day issues with any online service. I haven't gotten the chance to try for myself, but, it's not like it's not going to be fixed ASAP if it's a big problem.

A group of friends I regularly play with are all hardcore RTS fans, and not one of us is interested in this.  One guy got into the beta and we all tried it out, and after the initial excitement wore off we all just kind of shrugged and went back to other games.  SC2 is TOO old school.  After seeing newer games try to advance the genre like Dawn of War 1, Company of Heroes, and Sins of a Solar Empire we just can't go back to a RTS where clicks per minute decides more games than real tactics.  Activision's obvious influence over some of their decisions and policies doesn't help either.

Maybe in a few years when they release a complete set for a heavy discount I'll take a look.

Done.  You should go ahead and quit bitching about needing the internet in this day and age.

A campaign with 1 playable race/storyline in a game that has 3 races is not a complete campaign. Play the campaign of SC1 w/o brood war for an example of what the SC2 campaign should have had in the original box.

I would argue that this allows for a much better campaign than having separate but whole campaigns in each game/expansion. I think the overall campaign(when all expansion are released) will be many times better than that of Brood Wars.

I'll get it eventually but I'm not in any hurry especially since it's $60.00.  It's just another RTS when you come down to it, just more polished then the rest.  I'm not a big RTS player to begin with and the ones I prefer are either large scale (Supreme Commander) or slower paced with pausing (Total War).  The original Starcraft was too hectic for me and this game looks similar.  I'm in the minority as I am mainly interested in the single player campaign, it sounds like it has some interesting concepts and I'm interested in the story.  Maybe I'll try multiplayer if the ranking system works well and lets me choose the kind of game I want to play but it's an afterthought at best.  I gave up on multiplayer with the old Starcraft when all my friends wanted to play at the fastest speed.  Never understood how they considered that fun.

24/7 online for single players games is a "no no" to me because they are supposed to be "single player". There could be exceptions (Dawn of War 2 for me), but only in case of extremely interesting games (and Dwn of War 2 is). Settlers 7 wasn't so interesting (well, I haven't played it and maybe it's the best damn thing in the planet, but I won't know).

Online activation? If I think that the game is good and that I'm going to have a very good time with it, I'll accept it (like Mass Effect, just to mention one). Not a fan of this mode but in some punctual cases can be "tolerated".

LAN and other multiplayer stuff? Honestly, I couldn't care less. If I want multiplayer, I play MMORPGs. If Elemental makes me change my mind (and I have the time for it), I may start caring about multiplayer more.

Companies trying to abuse your bank_account/wallet? Surprise! They have being doing it all your life and not just with videogames. Just remember that when taling about unnecesary things like videogames, that industry could go to hell and, unless you are psycologically dependant, you would survive just fine.

Starcraft II campaign divided between the main game and two expansions? Each campaign is going to be bigger. Also makes sense because they want to sell the expansion packs (surely you wanted ALL the three campaigns with the proper size that they will have, just iwth the base game, the expansions only having some units and maps).

Starcraft II is Starcraft updated? So? Blizzard has never said they were to follow Dawn of War 2 path, did they? Obviously, there is still many people interested in that kind of RTS so why the fuck cannot they have it? Are they forcing you to buy the fracking game? Seriously.

Activision is evil? Yep, very much as many others out there. Congrats for passing you spot check of difficulty 5.

A campaign three times the size of any campaign in SC1, with far more indepth storytelling, between mission upgrades, bonus objectives for optional research paths, some pretty crazy challenge modes, and hell even a fun little arcade minigame. The campaign FEELS more like a real story. The news reports alone after every mission are great, and they're far from the only thing going on.

As opposed to three campaigns of much shorter length, where the first half of each one is easy due to introducing the techs and units of the race to the player.

Have you played the SC 2 campaign? Because there really is no comparison (and I love SC 1 to death). Storytelling is a lot better when you can spend more time on one faction and actually do character development. This complaint reads a lot like they should have made a weaker campaign just to tick the boxes of having everybody playable in single player.

This time, quality won out.

Comparing Ubisoft to Blizzard... how to put this..  Using that as an excuse is like saying you wouldn't eat a Caesar salad from a renowned chef because of a report you saw of people complaining after eating disease-ridden weeds with dog shit on top.

Fail comparison is fail. There's one minor detail that completely destroys your entire point: the SC 2 single player modes work without Internet access.

In fact, I just did it to prove that I could.

God, the misinformation around here sometimes is just pathetic.

And even if there weren't, it's not like someone in China hasn't already figured out how make it work over LAN