• Building your own army is fun. Whether it’s a platoon of cigar chomping grunts in powered armor or a legion of bioengineered, hive-mind alien beings, ordering up specific units to exploit specific weaknesses is fun.
• It’s modern day Chess. You have different pieces that can move in specified ways and have different strengths and weaknesses, just like Chess. Unlike Chess you can create more pieces provided you have the resources to create those pieces you can also have more that 2 players.
• Decimating your enemy with atomic fire has never been so satisfying.
• I enjoy completely obliterating my enemy. Winning is not enough. I want to erase every last trace of them as if they never existed. I will not finish a campaign until not a single enemy unit remains.

In the immortal words of Conan the Barbarian, “What is best in life? To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women.”

1. Image from the StarCraft II cinematic trailer. ©2007 Blizzard Entertainment

This is beside the point. Several months ago I purchased those two games and when I got the package in the mail, I was in for a surprise. I cracked open the box and pulled out StarCraft, Diablo II and World of WarCraft (WoW). At first I thought that WoW was a demo but upon closer inspection I realized that it was the full game. I checked the invoice and only Diablo and StarCraft were on it so I knew that I hadn’t been charged for it. Blizzard had sent me a full WoW game. What many people don’t know is that WoW comes with a one month free subscription (to try it out I guess). I thought about installing WoW and trying the one month free. I thought about it for a long time. I knew enough about WoW to know that it is one of the most addictive games created and that I probably wasn’t strong enough to keep it from eating my soul so I decided NOT to install WoW. Let me explain myself… I have a wife and kids (who I love very much), I have a full-time job and I’m in grad school. I just don’t have the time to commit myself to something like that. If my wife and kids died in a car crash, then I would install WoW and play it, but until then I won’t be playing WoW. I firmly believe that Blizzard sent me that WoW on purpose. Like a crack dealer they’ll give me a free fix to get me hooked and then they’ll start charging me full price. I won’t allow myself to fall down that slippery slope. StarCraft and Diablo II are enough, although I think I’m going to pick up the WarCraft III battlechest, and then there is StarCraft II to think about…