Starcraft 2: preview, beta soon!

Wanted to link you, my fair reader, to the results of a recent PR effort by Blizzard to bring a bunch of game journalists and Starcraft fan sites to their offices and let them play Starcraft 2, which puts them right at the top of the list of People I Want To Strangle Out Of Jealousy.



The interesting-est facts I gleaned:

• SC2 is ready for beta. It's just that Battle.net isn't ready. We should see beta soon, and the game before the year is up. Given Blizzard's history, this is hard to believe. Might be that there's some Activision shareholders nervously staring at the company's financials while holding a candle under Blizzard's ass.
• They expect a lot of crossover from casual WoW players. Dear god, now I suddenly understand while people talk about "WoW tourists". Starcraft was my first PC love! Get your grubby "I never played a PC game except the Sims until I found out you could make an Elf" mits off my game! Go away!
• They are beefing up the matchmaking to accomodate those WoW players. This is great, because constantly facing off against very skilled opponents is one of the major weaknesses of Blizzard's previous online RTS titles. Qeueing up for a WC3 online match was like pulling down your pants, grabbing your ankles, and then getting launched out of a cannon backwards towards a wall made of spiked dicks.
• Lots of tutorials, help, and convenience added to the game, and the replay system was heavily beefed up. This is awesome because I like it when online games have training for the actual online parts, and when there is a way to go back and easily learn from your own matches or the matches of others.

Go check out the previews at:

1up.com

Joystiq

Kotaku

And this summary of fansite responses at my favorite SC2 community site, SC2Pod