Twelve years after Starcraft captured the minds of gamers throughout the world, its much anticipated sequel has been released!
Starcraft II features the same three factions: Terran, Protoss and Zerg. Its first release (that’s right, the first release) has a playable Terran campaign mode.
There will be two more SC releases in the future, each featuring Protoss and Zerg campaigns.
So what are you waiting for?! Get on Battle.net and play the most epic RTS this side of the millennium!

The current minimum requirements are as follows:

• Windows XP SP3/Vista SP1/Windows 7
• 2.2 Ghz Pentium IV or equivalent AMD Athlon processor
• 1 GB system RAM/1.5 GB for Vista and Windows 7
• 128 MB NVidia GeForce 6600 GT/ATI Radeon 9800 PRO video card
• 1024×768 minimum display resolution
• 4 GB free hard space (Beta)
• Broadband connection

An update to the Starcraft II Fansite kit was also released with new unit rendors and screenshots.  Pick it up here!

- In-game Speed Options menu now has a “Enable CPU Throttling” checkbox.
Enabling this option will allow StarCraft to consume fewer CPU cycles. By default this option is off.

Bug Fixes

- Fixed an issue with the reply feature where any character followed by a “r “was being treated as a reply.
- Removed an unnecessary delay when processing palette cycling updates.
- Lessened the imposed delay in the CPU Throttling feature.

1UP: Do you anticipate the production cycle for the StarCraft 2 trilogy to feel like making three separate games, or more like World of WarCraft and its expansions, where the bulk of the work is on the first installment, and subsequent ones are more about iterating and refining rather than inventing?

DB: Well that’s the hope; that a good amount of the hard work of designing gameplay mechanics and systems, as well as the internal tasks of creating tools and protocols to develop all this content, is mostly settled at this point as we get deeper into the creation of the core game. So once we ship the core game of StarCraft 2 and start delving into the expansions, we’ll have a great deal of that infrastructure under our belts and be able to concentrate primarily on content creation for the two expansion sets.

That said, we’re conscious of making sure we are providing new and compelling content for the expansions. The meta-aspects of the Zerg and Protoss campaigns, for example, will work a lot differently than how we’re doing things with the core StarCraft 2 game. It doesn’t make sense for Kerrigan to be flying around in a battlecruiser and picking out mercenary missions for cash, which is what you’ll be doing with Raynor in the core game’s campaign. So we’ll be doing something different with Kerrigan to get her to evolve and grow her Zerg army. Meanwhile, Zeratul’s Protoss campaign may require you to engage in diplomacy with the different Protoss tribes in order to gain access to different units and technologies.