Wishful thinking put Starcraft on last year's Holiday Hot 100; unfortunately, it didn't hit store shelves until well after the holidays. But if you're a strategy gamer, and you still don't have this spinning in your CD-ROM drive, you're missing out on the best traditional real-time strategy game so far this year.

Forgoing formations, 3D graphics, and other bells and whistles, Starcraft focuses squarely on deep, addictive gameplay. Gamers can play as one of three truly distinct races, each with its own advantages, drawbacks, and unique unit sets. While other games make few real distinctions between races apart from the odd uberunit, Starcraft delivers a dramatically different gaming experience depending on whether you opt to play as the scrappy Terrans, the mystic warrior Protoss, or the hideous, Alien-like Zerg.

Bolstered by a strong story, the single-player game is a study in constantly escalating challenge. The scenario design is stellar, featuring one of real-time strategy's most surprising and dramatic scenarios early in the game, as hordes of scampering zerglings overrun a Terran base. It's a testament to Starcraft's beautifully balanced play that there is no one way to win a scenario - thus eliminating that annoying, almost puzzlelike quality that plagues so many other strategy titles.

As great as the game is solo, multiplayer is where it really shines. You can develop your multiplayer chops by squaring off against the computer's brutal AI in randomly generated scenarios. When you're ready, you can play over a LAN (up to eight players can spawn and play off one CD) or use Blizzard's free battle.net service for Internet play.