StarCraft

FREEWARE Play Blizzard’s seminal sci-fi RTS for free

Blizzard’s remastered version of StarCraft is coming sometime this Summer, with widescreen and 4K support, improved online features and higher-definition art assets and sound—all of which sound like very welcome additions indeed. But if you’re impatient—not to mention a little light on funds—you can play the classic version of StarCraft for free right now. In anticipation of the re-release, Blizzard has removed the price tag from both the original game and its sole expansion, BroodWar. And not for just a free weekend, or anything like that, but for the foreseeable future. While you will need a Battle.net account to play online, you can enjoy the single-player campaigns without going online and without having to retrieve the game discs from your dusty attic. To coincide with this exciting news, Blizzard has put out a fresh patch for its 19-year-old game which adds a pile of welcome features, including a windowed fullscreen option, a new Observer mode, and compatibility with more recent versions of Windows. Rather excitingly, you will be able to fight online against people playing the remastered version of StarCraft when that arrives, so you shouldn’t have any trouble finding a game.

While StarCraft has largely been superseded by its sequel in the West, it’s still a national pastime in South Korea. So much so that, after Blizzard’s game shed its price tag, presidential candidate Moon Jae-in released two free StarCraft maps, presumably to curry favor with younger voters. Maybe give them a play after you download this, for curiosity’s sake if nothing else. DOWNLOAD AT bit.ly/StarCraftFree

Not too much has changed, so you might want to wait for the remaster.