OMG StarCraft

I stumbled upon this StarCraft cinematic today and thought it was a brand new Blizzard teaser trailer at first. Come to find out, it was actually created by a fan who goes by the name "Freespace" and is a member of the StarCraft: Legacy community.

For those of you who aren't familiar with StarCraft: Legacy, it is one of the oldest StarCraft fansites and communities on the Web. According to the Web page dedicated to the cinematic, titled StarCraft: First Contact, Freespace is a creative director at his fledgling CGI start-up company, Tractor Media. He has a passion for CG and is combining it with his passion of StarCraft in hopes to jump start his business.

Read the plot to this original prequel idea and watch this amazing cinematic after the jump!

Three lucky artists have taken top honors in this month's "Vespene Laughs" comic contest held by Blizzard and will receive beta keys for StarCraft II. Some comic strips are funnier than others but all are great attempts. Lord knows they draw better than I could ever hope to. Click the comics below to head to the gallery, from there you can click on each one again to see the full version.

Robert Klemm

April's three Vespene Laughs winners, who will get beta keys for StarCraft II, have been revealed recently.

Congratulations to the winners of our monthly StarCraft "Vespene Laughs" Comic Contest! We'd like to thank everyone who participated -- we received many hilarious and creative comics from all around the world, and picking the winners wasn't easy.

--starcraft2.com

Click here to submit comics for the Vespene Laughs contest. Winners receive a key for the StarCraft II beta.

Hit the jump to check out the other 2 winners.

The latest comic contest winners are out. Don't forget that there is still time to enter into Blizzard's comic contest as well as their Theme Park contest to win StarCraft II beta keys.

Check out the gallery below for the winning comics.

News has been very sparse the past weeks and perhaps that's a good thing, maybe the devs are nearing a release date, or at least a beta date.

Despite this, Blizzard has announced that in addition to its comic strip contest and its theme park contest, they will be holding a writing contest.

Interested fans should submit a piece of fictional writing between 3,000 and 10,000 words that takes place in one of Blizzard's universes. The winner will get a trip to Blizzard's Irvine, California headquarters to meet with the writing staff, and will go home with a Frostmourne Sword. Seven runner-ups will get various Blizzard books as prizes.

You may remember that over 6 months ago the Ghost used to have a cool ability known as the "drop pod." Ghost's were able to use their laser designator to call in a drop pod loaded with friendly Terran units, just like they would call down a nuke.

At first the drop pod could only be filled with Marines and was a means for quick reinforcements anywhere a Ghost was on the battlefield. A smart player may have even used the Ghost's cloak ability to get behind enemy lines and then call in the drop pod to land more forces deep within an enemy's base, behind their outer defenses. Later the developers toyed with the idea of allowing any unit to be put inside the pod. Players quickly started to dream of scenarios where pods would fall from the sky releasing eight SCV's at a mineral line for quick base expansion.

A while back Blizzard asked fans to vote for their favorite Dark Templar model and the results are in. So long as the developers listen to the fans like they said they will, we should be seeing both the Lenassa and Zer'atai clans of Dark Templar in the game.

The group of mod makers that created Legacy of the Confederation for StarCraft Brood War many years ago, has already begun porting it to StarCraft II.

LoTC will have 34 maps from StarCraft II that will span over three episodes with many of the maps being used more than once. The original LoTC consisted of two episodes, Past Purposes and Dawn of Darkness, but for StarCraft II the modders have created a third episode, Galaxy of Fire.

The modders will also release 4 pre-rendered cinematics with it using StarCraft II's 3d engine, along with close to 13 hours of pre-recorded dialog that will run through all of the missions.

The first two missions are slated to be released 3 or 4 months after the release of StarCraft II. After that, one mission will be released each week until the first episode is complete. Episodes 2 and 3 are expected to follow a similar pattern.

Best of all -- it's entirely free to the public!

Check out what PC gamer magazine had to say about LoTC many years ago and watch a 6 minute prerendered teaser trailer of the project after the jump.