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StarCraft II (view source)

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Like ''[[Starcraft (Video Game)|Starcraft]]'' and ''Brood War'' previously had, Starcraft II has [[Tournament Play|a prominent competitive scene]], complete with professional teams, paid players, tournaments and sponsors. Blizzard caught on to the importance of the progaming scene and built SC2 from the ground up around [[Competitive Balance]] while providing extensive first-party global tournament infrastructure. They also regularly solicit feedback from top players regarding the [[Metagame]] and act on certain suggestions, resulting in a constantly changing [[Metagame]].
 
This series also has its own [[Shout -Out]] page [[Starcraft (Video Game)/Shout Out|here]].
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=== This game shows examples of: ===
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* [[Zero -Percent Approval Rating]]: Mengsk in the border worlds. After {{spoiler|Raynor exposes his crimes}}, this spreads to the core worlds as well
* [[Acronym and Abbreviation Overload]]:
{{quote| '''Goliath''': Go ahead, TACCOM. Milspec ED 209 on. USDA selected. FDIC approved. Checklist complete... SOB.}}
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* [[Brick Joke]]: One of the SC1 Marine [[Stop Poking Me]]'s is "How do I get out of this chickensh*t outfit?" The SC2's [[Stop Poking Me]] is "I'm ''still'' trying to get out of this chickens*t outfit."
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* [[Broad Strokes]]: Continuity regarding the [[Non -Entity General]] player characters of the Magistrate, the Cerebrate, and the Executor from the first game. Current Canon/[[Word of God]] holds that the first game's Executor was Artanis, and the Cerebrate was among those killed by Zeratul during the defense of Aiur, while Kerrigan's ''Brood War'' Cerebrate eventually died without the Overmind to sustain it. The ''Brood War'' Executor may have been Selendis. The UED captain is probably dead. The Colonial Magistrate was mentioned by Raynor directly: apparently they parted ways after the events of ''Brood War'' and Raynor has not heard of him since.
* [[Broken Faceplate]]: A scene near the end of the game shows the aftermath of a battle, with many broken and immobile suits of Terran power armor strewn across the ground. One prominent shot shows a large hole shot through the characteristic domed visor.
* [[Bullet Hell]]: The Lost Viking arcade game, particularly the Zerg level and the Terra-Tron boss.
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** Additionally, the lines that {{spoiler|it intercepted as part of the Tarsonis defense network prior to the Zerg attack}} (along with the lines from Raynor's flashback of above event) are the exact same ones from the last few Terran missions in Starcraft 1.
* [[Contrived Coincidence]]: Swann reverses-engineers the Thor from the Odin, and it just so happens his schematics for the Thor are exactly the same as the Dominion Thors. The only differences in the optional upgrades you can purchase... which Dominion Thors automatically get {{spoiler|if you rescue them in the initial invasion of Char}}.
* [[Convection, Schmonvection]]: Apparently if you're badass enough, you can walk around a hell world covered in molten magma full of infectious agents without putting down your safety mask. Additionally, your units rapidly lose health if they're caught in a wall of fire caused by a supernova, or if they're caught in a rising "tide" of lava; merely being in close proximity to the fire or the lava is fine. {{spoiler|And if you're attractive enough, you don't even need to wear ''[[Fan Service|clothes]]''. [[Rule of Sexy]] trumps mere 1000 degree heat, any day. Or can create it.}}
* [[Cosmetic Award]]: There are TONS of Achievements to get: something like sixteen hundred points from the single player campaign alone (each Achievement being worth 10 to 20 points), and getting them is surprisingly addictive. The only reward is getting more portraits and a higher points score for your player avatar, but it's still fun to get awarded for pulling off something hard like blowing up 20 different things with Yamato cannon blasts, killing 50 units with Zeratul in a single mission, or preventing the protoss from destroying a single SCV of yours in a mission where they're constantly being exposed to fire...to say nothing of completely esoteric and (on the surface) impossible ones, such as warping in a zealot...while playing as zerg.
* [[Creative Sterility]]:
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** This is also thought to be the reason the game has Facebook integration and lacks LAN multiplayer.
* [[Exploding Barrels]]: Even the RTS genre isn't safe. In this case, they make an appearance in the secret terran mission.
* [[Failure Is the Only Option]]: {{spoiler|The final mission in Zeratul's flashback campaign in the second game has you controlling the last protoss army in a fight to the death against The Dark Voice, his hybrids and the mind controlled zerg. The mission only ends when ''all'' of the protoss are dead, including the normally un-expendable hero units. There are no victory conditions, just "you have killed enough zerg to be worthy of the name protoss", and optionally you can defend a key building long enough to [[Fling a Light Into The Future]]. Also counts as [[Story -Boarding the Apocalypse]].}}
* [[Fan of the Past]]: The jukebox in the Hyperion's cantina plays nothing but Southern rock and country, including covers of [[Lynyrd Skynyrd|"Sweet Home Alabama" and "Free Bird"]].
* [[Fanfare]]: The game's main menu music starts off with a remix of the original menu music and then usually fades into a quieter background theme, but every now and then it will instead progress right into the [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyfqxU7mzyM full main title]. It is awesome every time it happens.
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* [[Gunship Rescue]]: The mission "Zero Hour" pretty much involves holding out until the ''Hyperion'' can arrive and pull this off, seguing into "[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0NSFLxStp0&feature=related The Escape from Mar Sara]". Later, {{spoiler|1=toward the endgame, a squad of Banshees [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lp8z_2GWTLU&feature=related serves the same purpose] on Char.}}
* [[Harder Than Hard]]: The [[Nintendo Hard|aptly-named]] Brutal mode.
* [[Herd -Hitting Attack]]: Psionic Storm and Hunter-Seeker Missiles are good at clearing out clusters of weaker enemies.
* [[Heroic BSOD]]:
** An otherwise unheroic Dominion reporter gets one in Starcraft II when {{spoiler|he finds out Mengsk turned the zerg on Tarsonis, and he's seen on-air mumbling "I had a brother on Tarsonis...I had a brother"}}. Later the field reporter takes his position, stating he committed himself to a mental institution, [[Noodle Implements|"dressed only in his socks and in possession of the Emperor's manifesto and a pound of peanut butter"]].
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* [[It Can Think]]: ''Heart of the Swarm'' promises to introduce several other intelligent types of zerg capable of speech, including Kerrigan's [[Voice With an Internet Connection|Voice with a Hivemind Connection]].
* [[It's Personal]]: Kerrigan was the Confederate Ghost who killed Mengsk's father, mother, and ''[[Dead Little Sister|little sister]]''. This leads to Mengsk [[Fate Worse Than Death|betraying]] [[Love Interest|her]]. Oh, and he [[Genghis Gambit|killed a couple billion people]] and [[Awful Truth|lied about the foundation of his empire]]. Mengsk's betrayal of Kerrigan pushes Raynor into rebelling against him, (although he may not know about the whole Kerrigan as a Confederacy Ghost thing) and is the reason he mentions most often in both ''[[Starcraft]]'' and ''[[Starcraft II]]''. Horner even calls him out on it.
* [[ItsIt's Raining Men]]: Mercenaries, MULEs, and a couple of protoss tech upgrades deliver units in orbital drop pods. The Zerg get their own equivalent of this in some of the ''Wings of Liberty'' campaign missions; some kind of purple, fleshy torpedo falling from the sky that unleashes zerglings and creates a Creep Tumor on the spot. The Protoss are exempt from this trope, presumably, because they just warp in units via teleportation.
* [[The Jimmy Hart Version]]: An almost note-for-note rendition of a common [[Firefly]] theme appears as {{spoiler|Raynor stands victorious over Tychus after their bar-fight.}}
* [[Karma Houdini]]: {{spoiler|The Queen Bitch of the universe herself, Sarah Kerrigan. It's even pointed out that she deserves death for the crimes she's committed, but they need her so she get's off without as much as a slap on the wrist.}}
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* [[Man in The Machine]]: Immortals and stalkers.
* [[Meaningful Name]]:
** Probably Dr. Emil Narud. Emil means "to rival, to emulate, to copy". Now spell his last name [[Sdrawkcab Name|backwards]] and consider the meaning of his first anew. On a more prosaic note, take a wild guess as to the profession of [[Four -Star Badass|Horace Warfield]].
** Also, Valerian's ship, the ''Bucephalus'', is named after Alexander the Great's horse.
* [[Mega Manning]]: How Raynor expands most of his arsenal in the campaign. The Raiders head to a new planet and either see some abandoned vehicles in the environment or get a gift of new units from an ally. Engineer Swann scans their schematics and voila, you've got your own set of blueprints and can manufacture them freely from now on. There's also the Research upgrades. As you collect protoss relics and zerg DNA samples, the ''Hyperion'' scientists learn more about the other two races and can eventually duplicate choice bits of their technology/biology for usage in your army.
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* [[Outlaw Town]]: Deadman's Rock, an entire outlaw planet.
* [[Outrun the Fireball]]: The "Supernova" mission. And the end of the "Belly of the Beast" mission.
* [[Painfully -Slow Projectile]]:
** The nukes are still awesome, but good luck hitting anything other than buildings. You can get ghosts pretty early while their prerequisite building also manufactures nukes, but it still takes a good 10 units of time for the nuke to finish dropping.
** The Raven's Seeker Missiles. There is even an achievement for dodging one for long enough for its fuel to be spent.
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* [[Schrodinger's Gun]]: The mission setup and outcome for the "Haven" missions. A protoss named Selendis is preparing to annihilate every community on a planet because some of them are infected with zerg parasites. You can choose to help out in slaughtering the infested terrans or to tell her to back off and fight her because the colony's doctor insists she can cure the infested humans (and incidentally, Selendis doesn't take it personally if you fight her). If you choose to fight off the Protoss, the "infested colonists" are represented by about five guys with tentacles in a holding pen and the rest of the colony is just fine. If you choose "exterminate the infection," the ''entire colony'' is a pulsating, writhing mass of [[Meat Moss]]. So either way, your actions are justified.
** In addition, if you decide not to cleanse the Colony, the Doctor is seen walking off afterwards just fine. If you DO decide to cleanse it, turns out she was secretly harboring a Zerg infection, and turns after. Same thing happens in any other branched mission; if you side with Tosh, it turns out he really is a revolutionary. Go against him and he turns out to be a scoundrel as Nova said.
* [[Sci -Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale]]:
** When the terrans first arrived to the Koprulu sector, they numbered approximately 32,000. According to Blizzard's website, there are at the very least twelve ''billion'' terrans in the Koprulu sector at the beginning of Starcraft II, and in the game Raynor mentions Kerrigan killing eight billion people during the first game. He might have been including the protoss, but that still means you're looking at more than twelve billion humans living in the sector. [http://sclegacy.com/forums/showthread.php?p=6756 As mentioned here,] to have this many people after only 240 years would require the population to at ''least'' double, every decade, for 24 decades. To put this in perspective, it took four decades for the human population to double between 1960 and 2000, and it's been slowing since.
** We're low on resources and space here on Earth; in the Koprulu sector they're always expanding to new worlds and refining new resources. Hypothetically speaking, if they ''did'' experience a population boom like that they'd probably have a much easier time sustaining it than we would. But it's still a ''huge'' boom that needs to take place.
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* [[Stealth Pun]]:
{{quote| "Why is the Stalker talking about taking pictures of me and calling my phone? ...''Oh.''"}}
* [[Stop Helping Me!]]: Invoked by Tychus when Stetmann lectures the group on [[Taking You With Me|Bane]][[Suicide Attack|lings]].
{{quote| Stetmann: "Those things are pretty nasty. Next time you should try not to let them splash you.<br />
Tychus: "Thanks for the advice, son. Now shut up." }}
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** Lampshaded with the Odin: it's only a tad bit bigger than the Thor in-game, but Swann specifically notes that it's too big to even fit inside the hanger, while apparently you can fit multiple Thors inside.
* [[Unwitting Pawn]]: {{spoiler|As a result of working for the Moebius Foundation, Raynor unwittingly ends up allying with the Dominion he had been fighting with all along. On top of that, it's possible that both have been double-suckered by a third party.}} Poor Jimmy seems to get suckered at every plot twist and turn since the first game.
* [[Viewer -Friendly Interface]]: The first cutscene showing Swann shows that his console is identical to the one the player uses when selecting upgrades for units. Apparently he personally arranges it so that every single piece of hardware has but two possible upgrades--no more, no less. Seems an odd way of doing things.
* [[Wacky Wayside Tribe]]: The Tal'darim, who give an [[Excuse Plot|excuse]] for TvP levels in the campaign.
* [[War Is Glorious]]: Reconstructed with flair near the end of the game. Fighting the zerg is still [[War Is Hell|horriffic and suicidal]], but "some things are just worth fighting for". So Raynor [[Rousing Speech|rallies the troops]] with a private monologue that just accidentally happens to be broadcasted to all marines on Charr. And in the end {{spoiler|the terrans manage to leave a positive impact on the greater story of the universe for the first time ever.}} [[Manly Tears|Hell yeah!]]
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* [[We Have Reserves]]: Kerrigan demonstrates that the species that is the [[Trope Namer]] for [[Zerg Rush]] still holds to that line of thinking after more than ten years. She practically lampshades it.
{{quote| "My forces are without number."}}
* [[Wham! Episode]]: The entirety of Zeratul's mini-campaign. {{spoiler|Starting on Zhakul, we have our first contact with an active hybrid. It's all but immortal and ''gets stronger every time you defeat it''. After that, there's the trip to Aiur in which we learn not only that Tassadar is still alive, for a given value of alive, but also what the Overmind's true motivation for creating Kerrigan was and realize it wasn't as evil as we'd thought. Lastly, and the most whammy of them all, the Overmind's vision of the future, in which we learn what happens if Kerrigan is killed. You control the last remnants of the protoss race against the immensely powerful Dark Voice and his army of hybrids and zerg. It ends with the Dark Voice extinguishing the star you're orbiting and presumably destroying all life in the universe.}}
* [[What a Piece of Junk!]]: Raynor and Swann have a tense discussion about [[Does This Remind You of Anything?|vulture]] [[Recycled in Space|hover-bikes]]. Swann thinks the model is a deathtrap. Raynor, having iconically [[Starcraft|owned one himself]], is not amused.
* [[What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome?]]: If you take the time to read the terms and conditions the first time you run the game, you'll be doing so to the main theme mentioned above.
* [[Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?]]: Raynor laments about the wall of fire in the Supernova opening cinematic with this trope.
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