1) There are these cool structures called Xel Naga towers spread out across the maps…. they look like some kind of portal thing, but what they do is allow you to have a larger range of vision around that tower if you have a unit standing next to it.

2) You can now “hotkey” as many units as you want into one sub-group on the number pad. That’s right, you can select more than 12 units and assign more than 12 units to a hotkey. I had 41 mutalisks hotkeyed to #1 earlier and it was pretty awesome.

In the three games that I played, here are some things I’ve noticed….

• The nexus can cast “chrono-boost” which makes the targeted building produce units 50% faster for about 30 20 seconds (they just nerfed it in a patch, it used to be 30 seconds).
• The nexus can produce a Mothership which is very similar to the Arbiter from Starcraft 1. Except it cloaks buildings. (Screenshot below)
• Producing units and teching up feels a lot faster.
• Warp gates (when upgraded) can warp in ground units to any location on the map where a pylon is present.
• The robotics bay can make an awesome giant robot unit that looks like something out of Star Wars

Overall Protoss has a very futuristic feel (even more so than in the original) with a lot of high tech units and cool abilities. The music is pretty awesome too.

• Creep works differently; it’s sort of self-growing and doesn’t cost minerals
• Hydralisks are now an advanced unit
• You can make a queen from your Hatchery at the start of the game.
• Overlords are no longer detectors.
• You can set two rally points from the Hatchery; one for drones, and one for attacking units. It’s super handy.

Overall, Zerg is still a really fun race to use; it’s still fast paced and about massing tons of units to create a horde of terror. There’s less of a need to create a farm of Hatcheries because the queen can use an ability that causes a hatchery to produce about 6 larva pretty quickly.

So far, the self-growing creep is my favorite feature.  Queens can plant little (and by little I mean 1 square unit) buildings that expand the creep, and then that building can create one more creep expanding building, etc. So each building can grow one more building, effectively allowing the creep to grow out infinitely without having to use any drones.

The replay feature is pretty handy; you can access replays of every single game you’ve played on battle.net (in fact I think you can access the replays from any computer as long as you log in to your account).

There are a lot of convenient controls for selecting different visibility or team options during the replay and you can jump around in the match with a timeline slider, much like you can skip through a streaming video.

I had time to play a 1v1 match against a computer today — the only difficulty setting available in the beta is “very easy” so it was essentially sandbox mode to become familiar with the new game… which is exactly what I need because it’s kind of disorienting to learn a new way to play Starcraft.

The Zerg are still essentially pretty awesome. It took me a while to figure out that creep is built slightly differently; you can spawn a Queen unit from the Hatchery which can create these creep buildings which can *also* spawn more creep buildings from themselves. I’ll try to get a screenshot later today….. it’s definitely more convenient than having to use up a drone every time you need to expand your creep zone.

When I finally did move in for the kill, the computer AI sent me a chat message:

Player 2: gg

I didn’t have much time tonight to try the game itself (I had many more important things to take care of…. like writing necessarily long papers for difficult college classes teaching me invaluable life skills), but I did have time for a quick 1v1 match with Terran.

The opening menu screens for the game are pretty epic. Blizzard didn’t hold back with the epic fanfare of the login and menu screens.

The first thing I had to do, however, was turn all the settings to “low” because the interface was lagging on my “college student budget” laptop. At “low” however, the game runs perfectly fine and looks a lot like Warcraft III. In fact, if I had to describe the game itself I’d call it Warcraft III in space.

There are a lot of the same units and buildings and a lot of new units and buildings. They keyboard shortcuts are all pretty much the same but a lot of units have changed. One thing I noticed right away is that there’s a tech tree chart built right into the game which is handy.

At first glance, my reaction is that I don’t really like the game — but maybe that’s just from having such high expectations after the original Starcraft. I have faith, however, that I’ll learn to love it as I play more and that it really will be one of the most amazing games of the decade. Blizzard hasn’t failed us yet….

Update: After a couple of days of playing, the game is definitely way more fun than I thought it would be and I’m really starting to love it.

The lengthy message I received explained that I had been granted access to the beta test “because you attended a special Blizzard Entertainment event, participated in a related contest or promotion, or have otherwise been selected to join the beta-testing process.” It included a standard blizzard game key and instructed me to enter it into my battle.net account. Sure enough, a wonderful, glimmering game icon labeled “Starcraft 2 Beta” appeared in my account accompanied by Blizzard’s echoing “new game” sound accent.

Blizzard’s proprietary torrent based game downloader seemed to feature extra security precautions; I switched wi-fi networks at my University a few times and each time I was informed that my download was un-authorized and was forced to re-download the game downloader from battle.net each time. The 1.63 GB download did, however, resume from exactly where it left off each time without so much as asking.

Upon completion of the download, the game itself installed quickly and quietly with the automatic settings.