Black Box

The Low-End Mac Portable Gaming Page

STARCRAFT

This is the flagship of the entire 'Real-Time Strategy' genre. As the name suggests, it takes the whole idea of wacraft-like gaming from post-Tolkien fantasy into the world of space opera. And that is really a good idea! All those 'human versus orc' scenarios in Warcraft always sounded a bit overstretched for me. After all, it's hard to believe in a real-time scenario in which a lumberjack chops wood, wood is magically transported to a carpenter, who builds real-time barracks producing real-time soldiers. This chain of supply looks much better with exotic space minerals and machines. The campaigns follow a fascinating storyline of the space opera kind, stuff like 'Starship Troopers' meet 'Star Trek'. And to make my review even more flattering: sound and graphic are just perfet. Put your headphones into your ear, startup your blackbox and play - in no time you'll be transfered from the boring library table before you into a realm of science fiction dreams.

OVERALL RATING: The game to have - very addictive and long-lasting (you may complete it three times and still want to start it all over again). Tailor-made for the road warriors and fits powerbook 1400 hardware abilities like a hand fits a glove.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: Any Powermac or compatible running System 7.6, 16 megabytes of physical memory, screen capable of displaying 8-bit 640*480 resolution. Requires 27 megabytes of free RAM, so only 32+ mega machines will run it without virtual memory.

CD-ROM: Required as a copy protection.

SCREEN: Absolutely perfect. See a screenshot here.

SLEEP: Compatible, however the screen might look distorted after the wake-up. A quick and simple solution is toggling command/m (full screen on and of). This forces the QuickDraw to redraw.

KEYBOARD/TRACKPAD: A trakcpad works a bit cumbersome in this game (real mouse, especially with two buttons, strongly recommended), but the game is addictive enough to cover minor nuisances.

BUGS: None detected.

MORE INFO/PURCHASE OPTIONS: Try Blizzard website. Bear in mind you do not need a special Mac-version CD; the game is sold on hybrid Mac/Win CDs.


Return to the gaming page or to the main page.