The Starcraft 2 Collector’s Edition is a fun little package. It has some epic wrapping, comes with some pointless and some great goodies. I felt that it was a well compliment in terms of their special editions so far. The comic was a little weak, I’ll admit – with some pretty basic plots but drawn well enough. The sound track is your classic little throw-in, along with a really nice hardcover art-book filled with some really pretty pictures. One of the best, is the Jim Raynor dog-tag that doubles as a 2-gig USB drive that comes pre-installed with the original Starcraft and Brood War. Also, you get a Director’s Cut DVD with some behind the scene stuff, another nice throw-in.

Over-all, the CE is another finely crafted product from Blizzard that is good delivery for any big nerd of Blizzard and Starcraft. Obviously, Pics included!

Now, praise of the their product delivery aside… There’s some serious issues with Battle.net. It’s nothing that hasn’t been beat to death in the Beta forums and by Beta testers alike, in fact, I even had already used Battle.Net 2.0 in the Beta when I got a key for my pre-order. However, I did not in-fact believe that that was the final product I’d be using in release! It feels incomplete and laking.

The first big thing, is the lack of damn chat rooms. This should have been a bad April Fool’s day joke. You log in, and you’re presented with multiple different buttons presenting you the option to join different game types. However, there’s at first, absolutely no social interaction aside from your buddy list on the bottom right-hand corner. The buddy list is great and all, but with the lack of any sort of random chat interface, how the hell are you supposed to bump into and converse with strangers at all? You know, like a gaming social environment. It’s a huge let-down. Surely, you can converse with players when you run into people in the random matches, however – when you’re in a dead-heat for destruction of each other, it’s not exactly the best time to chat. Blizzard’s response to the lack of chat rooms was that they were filled with too much spam and wanted to avoid that. Spam is your excuse to avoid chat rooms? Please. Surely that can not be an impassible barrier. If anyone has played World of Warcraft, they are aware of the notorious ‘Barrens’ chat from the early days of the game. Did they eliminate the Barrens? Absolutely not, they worked their chats until they got it right. It’s a weak excuse.

The next problem is the random games. You get a small choice of random custom games, which is unfortunate considering that was one of the most popular and long-lasting features used in the old Starcraft battle.net. Of course, custom games still exist, but now their showing is based on popularity alone – so the ones that aren’t as popular, or the more rare-game types, won’t show up in the custom match finder. You can still create those games, but unless you have friends that you can invite to join directly, you won’t ever get strangers to join your match if it isn’t one of the current popular maps.

Really – that aside, it does its job well at finding you balanced matches. You can find games easily, I haven’t ran into many connectivity problems either. The lack of random chat interface is really the big downer for me. With this missing, it feels a lot less like a social game environment and much more like an isolated experience – split up into individual game experiences. Players don’t care about Facebook interaction as much as they do finding like-minded Starcraft players to engage in bloody battle with.

If you liked Starcraft and haven’t picked up the sequel, you’re strange. Go out, play it! If you’re into strategy games and never played the original, give this one a shot. It isn’t a waste of time.