Today I saw Starship Troopers for the third time (also for the first time after I saw Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Amusing).
I still think it's the 3rd-best adaptation of the novel. Well, "adaptation of the novel" might not be entirely accurate, since I read it about seven years ago and skimmed everything that wasn't shooty kablooies (I was 15). The 2nd-best is of course the movie Aliens, and the 1st-best, even more obviously, was StarCraft.
Good Lord, I adore StarCraft. I'm nowhere near good enough to play it on a professional level (I still really, really suck at getting my base up and running in next to no time), but I love the game anyway.
Brood War came out and was generally awesome too, though I, like a bunch of other fans, absolutely hated having to kill Fenix near the end (yeah, if that's a spoiler, you'd probably be shocked to learn that the princess is in another castle). But hey, you got to build Dark Templar. That alone made the expansion worth owning.
StarCraft II. Hoo boy. Or as I like to call it, StarCraft II Episode One. Well, I don't hate it. Well, other than the map editor, which blows, I don't hate it. No, seriously. The map editor for SCII is such utter crap. The one in the original was utter perfection. How do you mess it up that badly?
Anyway, all the cheap units are utterly nerfed, so say goodbye to your Zerg Rushes as well as my favorite tactic of just building up one hundred Marines, a couple of Medics, giving them extra armor, firepower and range, and sending them to waste everything. They also took away the Goliaths, which were by far my favorite unit (Brood War gave them a bigger range with their rockets and made them even more awesome). In its place is... well, nothing, really. There's Thor, a giant mecha who talks like Ahnold, and there are the Vikings, which can be mechas that shoot stuff on the ground or fighters that shoot stuff in the air. They're pretty cool too, I guess. But I miss me my Goliaths!
The other thing about the Terrans is that now you can do other stuff with the Command Center, like make it a fortress (with turrets and all), or give it the ability to boost supply depots' outputs. Which is kinda nice.
The Protoss are as broken as ever; now the Carriers already have 4 interceptors to start with (i.e, they're built when the thing arrives) and you don't have to research the extra capacity. Also, you can summon a Mothership, which can do pretty much everything the Arbiter could and fight as well. You can only summon one, but you only need one. And then there's the Collossus, which can walk right up and down cliffs. Yikes.
The Zerg. Well, frankly I'm terrible at playing the Zerg, and I always was, but they've got some new tricks. For one thing, creep now goes down ramps so you don't have to start a new colony every time you change elevation. Also, your dudes move faster on the creep, so it's a great idea to just flood the map in the gunk. There's a unit that can move while buried, which seems like it would lend itself easily to some freaking terrifying stealth attacks. And the Ultralisks no longer look like elephants. That said, the Zerglings are downright useless (because the cheap units got nerfed; see above).
On the whole, StarCraft II seems all right. I don't think it's a good idea to subject the balance to the whims of the playing community - if something was broken in the original game, we worked a way around it. Changing the rules every month or so hardly seems fair.
But still, it's a fairly solid game, and it continues StarCraft's noble tradition of turning things I like into video games; StarCraft was "Aliens the Video Game," Brood War was "Starship Troopers the Video Game," and StarCraft II is "Firefly the Video Game."
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