There's now even less of an excuse for not owning Diablo 2, StarCraft or Warcraft III as Amazon is today offering 50% off the Battle Chest editions of Blizzard's classics.

$10 nets you the StarCraft Battle Chest, containing Blizzard's absolutely essential real-time strategy and its expansion pack Brood War, plus strategy guides for both.

The deceptively-named Diablo Battle Chest might not contain the original Diablo but does give Diablo II and its expansion pack for $20, and of course those guides. The Warcraft III Battle Chest similarly grants the game, expansion and guides for $20.

The offer runs until midnight PST so get your Gore Riders on if you don't get this joke.

A college class based entirely around Blizzard's real-time strategy game StarCraft has opened at UC Berkeley, according to a course listing found by StarCraft Wire.

The class will begin with a lecture on topics "from the viewpoint of pure theory to the more computational aspects of how exactly battles are conducted." Following the lecture, replays of students' battles will be "analyzed," and "homework" will be assigned. Required materials include a copy of StarCraft: Brood War and an "open mind."

"What may look like complex topics are just ways we want you to think more deeply about the game to derive a greater satisfaction from playing," reads the course description that will make pure academics tear out their hair, and any gaming fan not attending Berkeley intensely jealous.

Unfortunately for those looking to pull up their GPAs with a few Zerg rushes, the student-taught class is only offered for two pass/fail credits that do not contribute to general education requirements.

The full course description follows:... Read more

A new patch for Blizzard's nearly 11-year-old RTS StarCraft is now available on FileShack in both regular StarCraft and Brood War expansion form.

The 1.161 update resolves a bug that was introduced with the last patch, speeds up palette cycling and adds the option to enable CPU throttling at your own discretion.

Feature Changes
• 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.

Ten years later, Blizzard is still releasing patches for StarCraft.

Today's update, now available at FileShack, comes in two flavors: one for those with plain old StarCraft and one for those with the Brood War expansion.

Patch 1.16 brings some CPU optimizations--the game "now only uses as much CPU as it needs to run smoothly." In-game chat but not whispers is now saved in the replays. There's also a few bug fixes and the removal of numerous exploits. Sorry Terrans, no more drop-anywhere nukes. Don't worry, the Zerg lost some exploits too.

Feature Changes
• In-game chat is now saved in replays. Note: whispers are not saved.
• Hitting the Escape key while in the chat room will... Read more

Blizzard may be one of the luckiest game companies in the industry, considering its ten-year-old game StarCraft is still in the sales charts. But with that success comes responsibility, and Blizzard has exhibited just that by removing 350,000 hackers from its online service Battle.net--or, in Internet lingo, they've dropped the banhammer.

An official post on the Battle.net website, spotted by Kotaku, explains the details of the bans:

As part of our continued effort to ensure a fair and fun online experience for all Battle.net players, we have expanded our efforts to remove cheaters from StarCraft and Diablo II. We have identified and closed over 350,000 StarCraft and Diablo II accounts which were found to be using third-party hacks.

The Diablo II CD keys associated with the closed Diablo II accounts are now restricted from playing on Battle.net for approximately 30 days. Repeat offenders will have their accounts closed and their CD keys permanently banned from Battle.net.

As a reminder, we reserve the right to close the accounts and ban the CD keys of players who are caught cheating on Battle.net. Cheating ruins the game experience for legitimate players, and we will not tolerate it.

Battle.net will see upgrades including advanced cheat detection in time for the releases of sequels StarCraft II and Diablo III.

Blizzard has released new StarCraft patches, updating the original game and Brood War expansion pack to version 1.15.3.

The new update takes care of a communication bug affecting third party leagues, and pressing Alt-F6 will no longer cause the game to stall under Windows.