EPTOn July 05 2026 06:28 Jeremy Reimer wrote:
I'm one of the few people who absolutely loves Broodwar ZvZ, and wouldn't want it to ever change.
It always feels like every match is on a knife's edge, with one zergling or one drone possibly changing the outcome. Muta and scourge wars are fast, furious, and amazing. Getting one sunken down with zerglings, or leaving it standing with 1hp, could win or lose you the game.
It's given us things like JvZ, which people are still debating the merits of today. Did he just get lucky with build orders? Or was he so amazing at the matchup that he could win every time he got a build order advantage and make it close even if he didn't? The answer, of course, is yes.
And rarely, VERY rarely, you get a pro ZvZ match that goes into lategame, like that one game with Effort in ASL. And everyone loses their goddamn minds. You get defilers and ultras and even devourers, and you remember that game until the day you die.
In contrast, Starcraft II's ZvZ is a lot more fair and has more combinations of things that can happen more often. But it's rarely memorable. The best parts are when one player seems to have the other's number, like Reynor did over Serral for a while, or Dark over Reynor.
And I challenge anyone to remember even a single notable thing about Infernal vs. Infernal in Stormgate.
I'm one of the few people who absolutely loves Broodwar ZvZ, and wouldn't want it to ever change.
It always feels like every match is on a knife's edge, with one zergling or one drone possibly changing the outcome. Muta and scourge wars are fast, furious, and amazing. Getting one sunken down with zerglings, or leaving it standing with 1hp, could win or lose you the game.
It's given us things like JvZ, which people are still debating the merits of today. Did he just get lucky with build orders? Or was he so amazing at the matchup that he could win every time he got a build order advantage and make it close even if he didn't? The answer, of course, is yes.
And rarely, VERY rarely, you get a pro ZvZ match that goes into lategame, like that one game with Effort in ASL. And everyone loses their goddamn minds. You get defilers and ultras and even devourers, and you remember that game until the day you die.
In contrast, Starcraft II's ZvZ is a lot more fair and has more combinations of things that can happen more often. But it's rarely memorable. The best parts are when one player seems to have the other's number, like Reynor did over Serral for a while, or Dark over Reynor.
And I challenge anyone to remember even a single notable thing about Infernal vs. Infernal in Stormgate.
In fairness to Stormgate, the game died. So we never actually saw what it would have looked like if you had a vibrant player base pushing it to the limit.
Maybe there coulda been some cool stuff? Who knows?
Part of what makes SC(s) so great to watch is almost every bit of juice has been squeezed of the orange, and plenty of other great RTS titles don’t really have that.
I’ll add the rather obvious caveat that Stormgate kinda sucked and was a complete botch job
