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Before World of Warcraft dominated the planet, Blizzard was known for a few other famous franchises. They announced a sequel to one of them last weekend with StarCraft II, and we've corralled the best coverage.

Korea <3's this

Unveiled during the weekend at a Korean gaming tournament, the announcement of StarCraft II came from about as left field as a new game can. While there were rumblings that something big would come out of Blizzard's Worldwide Invitational in Seoul, Korea, not many folks expected to see a sequel to one of the greatest PC titles of all time, particularly since there's been another StarCraft game on Blizzard's back burner for years.

Due to the difficult timing and far-away announcement locale, there were precious few outlets that were able to produce genuine impressions. Here are some of the choicer quotes we've collected regarding Blizzard's big new game:

The big three gaming sites all featured live coverage of the event, but 1UP's was arguably the best. While GameSpot and IGN featured the facts as they happened, 1UP truly captured the explosiveness of the event, with editor James Mielke providing great pictures of the chaos with an excellent, personal liveblog that the other news sites couldn't match. Here's but a snippet of his live impressions that captured both fan fervor and attention to detail:

the sight of the Terran marine having armor clamped to his appendages, Doctor Octopus-style (via Sam Raimi) spinal clamps attached, and visor thrown down and hissing into place as the marine utters something badass in Korean(!) is, to me, more awesome than seeing whatever Master Chief might have up his sleeve. This is 10 years in the making, folks, and this is a total homecoming of the most uber, menacing, badass type.

Now, contrast this with IGN's terse writeup, which doesn't seem to have evolved from the note-taking stage:

- ship can be moved around while planet cracker laser is active - the ship looks like a metallic, triangular sand dollar - mothership can create a black hole anywhere it wannts to - creates distortion that actually sucks ships in and destroys them - in the demo the black hole destroyed four terran battle cruisers in about ten seconds.

Then there's the opposite end of the spectrum, with GameSpot's overly dense news story, which, while presenting a great news story, fails to intrigue folks who aren't intimately familiar with the RTS genre. Here's an example of the descriptive, but ultimately unexciting report:

The battle ends with an orbital strike that wipes out both sides, save for one infantry unit on each side. Both get mobbed by Zerg units, which crawl out of the ground and butcher them and then mutate into their new form and crawl into formation to spell out the letters "GG" (an abbreviation many online players use to say "good game").

1UP's meaty coverage definitely won the internets this time and in the process, proved there are some areas that the blogs still can't quite compete in. Without the resources to cover an event in a country has traditionally been a non-entity in the gaming world at a time when coverage would go unnoticed, sites like Kotaku, Joystiq, and Destructoid had to settle for pimping the big sites and repackaging info from other sites. Which isn't completely wrong, provided you're up front about it :)

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Blackbolt

Posted at: 05/22/07 at 1:12 PM PST

Now, that you mention it, 1Up did have the best coverage of StarCraft II. Right when it was announced, they were fairly quickly at putting up interviews, gameplay videos, screen shots and their comments while I was drooling away like Homer Simpson that StarCraft got a sequel. But man, Blizzard had the whole works. They were ready to blitz all gaming media. Usually it's like an announcement, then 6 months later, screen shots, and another long wait, the trailer. Blizzard show everything in one announcement. All hail Blizzard!!!

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