Addiction

Yesterday I went by my local EB games and picked up Starcraft 2.  You may notice that I also did not make a blog post yesterday.  These things may be connected.

I started up the single player campaign and was instantly hooked.  The cinematics are very good, not as good as Avatar, say, but still really pretty and polished.  The campaign is a lot of fun and the strange and varied mechanics of each mission keep things fresh.  All that is great and all, but just building a good single player game isn't enough to keep me so thoroughly engrossed to the extent I was yesterday.  That level of addiction requires good gameplay and characters I can fall in love with at the same time.  Blowing stuff up + tragic love story = Sky is hooked.

The hero is James Raynor, a former thief who ends up being part of revolutions against the evil empire and one of the very few people who can save the innocents from the rampaging aliens.  He has a real white knight complex, a drinking problem and is incredibly resourceful and dangerous.  Raynor is full of courage, smarts, regrets for past mistakes and is terrified he will fail to protect those closest to him once again.  Delicious.  I absolutely love the story of the broken hero trying to make up for mistakes he cannot forgive himself for.  Of course it doesn't hurt that he has a love interest named Sarah Kerrigan who is

1.  Hot.
2.  A Redhead.  You can like what you want, but I will always go for the redhead.
3.  Psychic.
4.  A Ninja.

Really?  A hot, redheaded psychic ninja as the love interest?  Is this supposed to be an early birthday present?  Thankfully Kerrigan is also exceedingly capable and dangerous and not some damsel in distress.  Tragic love stories are more compelling when they contain two people who are both dangerous and multifaceted.  Kerrigan lacks Raynor's many flaws, which might lead to a flat character, but she ends up being kidnapped by the deadly aliens and transformed into the evil Queen of Blades, a mishmash of Kerrigan and alien.  Kinda hot, kinda disgusting, 100% deadly.

I suppose Blizzard wasn't trying to hook me specifically on SC2.  There are probably a lot of guys that are suckers for beautiful psychic ninjas regardless of hair colour, though probably less of them that are so hooked on tragic love stories.  Nonetheless, they sure got me good.