BlizzCon Hands-On: StarCraft II: Starjeweled - Preview
by VGChartz Staff , posted on 27 October 2010 / 2,968 Views
I am not good at StarCraft II. There's a lot going on. I don't have the mind for strategies. Anything requiring more than "aim" and "shoot" is just baffling to me. There's a lot of buttons, and I can't tell the difference between a Terran, a Zerg, and a Protoss.
However, I am good at Bejeweled. I can tell the difference between red, purple, and blue. I can make lines of three, four, or (gasp!) five like-colored gems with an expert level of hand-eye coordination developed after years of video gaming and self-love. A new StarCraft II mod is set to combine these two thoroughly addictive games into one glorious conglomeration that will probably suck away all the productivity of PC gamers until roughly the end of time. This mod is called Starjeweled, and I had a chance to try it out at BlizzCon this weekend.
In Starjeweled, half of the screen is filled by the SCII play area, a long, thin warzone with one team on either end (the demo I was able to try was 2v2). The other half of the screen is that classic match-three gameplay that all the casual gamers hate to love. Underneath that, you'll find the units and abilities that can be purchased.
See, the thing here is that you basically play Bejeweled on the right side of the screen, and combos net you points that you can spend on sending units into the battlefield (more points spent = bigger, badder units) or abilities to support them (healing, lightning attacks, and the like). Bigger combos give your more points. The faster you Bejewel (that can be a verb, right?), the faster you build points, and the faster you can send out more and bigger troops to crush the opponent's base.
It definitely helps to have at least a working knowledge of which units do what on the battlefield. However, I Bejeweled with such speed and grace that even though I just sent out the most expensive troops I could find (bigger is better, right?) with no knowledge of exactly what they do, I almost won the battle. Of course, my partner was more of a SCII purist and clomped off halfway through the demo, leaving me to be crushed by my opponents' Zealots. Boo! Still, I've yet to see anything StarCraft related that's this accessible to the layman. That alone will win (and lose) some fans.
StarCraft II: Starjeweled is one of four user-made mods that have been given the official Blizzard treatment and will be released to the public within the coming months for FREE on Battle.net. (The others are Left 2 Die, Aiur Chef, and Blizzard DOTA.) Keep an eye on it if you're looking for something with a little lighter flavor in your normally hardcore StarCraft II experience.
