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I, on the other hand, like the awkward, dirty look of its initial character models.

Some players might like the idiosyncrasies born from the sloppier parts of StarCraft's controls. Arcturus Mengsk looks at least 50 percent less like an older Kurt Russell.

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Kerrigan looks less like a TV fortune teller with space goggles and more like a high-tech super-soldier. He's another glowering, perfectly chiseled space marine. Here, Jim Raynor isn't a soft-edged, small-town sheriff. Which is to say, they look more in line with StarCraft 2's art style. Many of the human characters, however, look more like generic 'video game' characters than their old selves. They're undeniably more technically impressive than the 20-year-old models. I'm less universally sold on the game's character portraits-the close-ups you see when selecting units, or when talking heads spout exposition at you between missions. The next, a planet-killing warlord betrays you by throwing an all-devouring swarm at your favorite psychic commando.В The game drips with personality, from the stilted claymation-y cutscenes to the annoyed responses of in-game units. One minute your Vulture pilot is picking his nose and balking at orders.

User interface foibles aside, nothing has ever quite recaptured SC1's blend of backwoods sci-fi and high-concept horror. That leaves players at my skill level with a consolation prize: a nostalgia trip through the single-player campaign. It takes me about that long to lose to a Zergling run, too. In my experience, matching into games took a little less than a minute. But try as I might, I couldn't really keep up with theВ few thousand weapons-grade players still searching for ranked matches after all these years. Watching that precision play out is impressive, and only more so with refreshed visuals. You can even set it to alert you if your movements drop below a certain frequency. The remaster nods to that necessity with the addition of an in-game actions-per-minute counter. StarCraft is as much a game of short-term skill as it is aboutВ long-term strategy. Which isn't to say I don't see the appeal. (We still have work to do to clear out the other campaign missions, obviously.) Actively and constantly babysitting your units, due to weak AI,В is another. Micro-managing control groups and flitting back to base is one thing. I could readjust to the old, limited controls if I put the time in (they worked just fine for me in 1998), but other fundamental issues and design decisions drive my older self nuts.В 'Pathing'-the moment-to-moment decisions units make when walking around obstacles and each other-is far worse than I remember.В 15 minutes in, I saw Hydralisks split up and walk single-file around a Starport to their doom, rather than groupВ together and gang up on the one Goliath I told them to target. I find myself constantly trying to queue building construction, only to remember I can't in this game. Micromanaging my workers to start harvesting resources is painfully slow. Control groups, capped at 12 units, feel tiny. Going back to Brood War, I sorely miss those same changes to SC2 that aggrieve top players.

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There's resurging interest in the original game among pro players and casters as a result. It's more accessible for casual fans (like me), but high-level players have long expressed frustration that the sequels automate too much of Brood War's hands-on design.

'Quality of life' improvements, like better hotkeys and user interface options, made SC2 a fundamentally different experience than the first game and its expansion. Part of the StarCraft competitive scene is in the same boat, albeit for different reasons.

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It certainly made more of an impression than the nonsensical science-fantasy soup that the series became across the StarCraft 2 trilogy. Maybe it's because I was eight years old at the time, but the campaign's dark, sometimes comedic, sometimes horrific tale of space rednecks fighting giant bugs and psychic plant people has stuck with me like few games of the era.

I'll admit that this latest excuse to play the original StarCraft and its expansion, Brood War, appealed to me.

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(Which, even if you somehow avoided buying a Battle Chest compilation for nearly 20 years, is now free in its unaltered form.) For $15 you can bolt these nicer-looking and sounding features onto your existing copy of the 1998 classic. That's about the long and short of what's new in StarCraft: Remastered.

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