Want an early look at Starcraft II, widely expected to be one of the year’s hottest PC games? You can — but it’s going to cost you.

Considered by many to be the best real-time strategy game ever made, Starcraft has racked up nearly 10 million sales since its 1998 debut. It’s a stalwart of the professional gaming scene at home and abroad — and especially in South Korea, where televised Starcraft tournaments continue to attract millions of viewers, and the game’s still something of a national obsession.

Analysts expect its sequel, Starcraft II, to sell as many as 8 million copies when it’s released later this year — but a select, invite-only group of fans are getting to test out the game early, aiming to help its developer Blizzard squash bugs and address gameplay problems.

Access codes to the “beta test” were handed out for free, with many thought to have come from giveaways at a 2008 fan festival organized by the game’s developer, Blizzard. But a few enterprising fans promptly put theirs up for sale on auction sites like eBay — and the going rate is as much as $400.

Impressed? It’s certainly a high price for a few months’ play. Typically, beta accounts stop working shortly before the game’s release, and testers need to purchase the game just like everyone else, if they’re not already sick of it. It’s also of questionable legality — it’s not clear whether recipients of the keycodes actually “own” them — and Blizzard would be entirely within its rights to cancel any beta accounts it deems to have been acquired in ways it considers inappropriate.

All that said, the prices are far from a record for Blizzard. Beta keys for the most recent expansion to its hit online game World of Warcraft were changing hands for over $1000 in 2008.

Source: http://videogames.yahoo.com/

LOS ANGELES, Calif. – July 22, 2009 — Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. and Legendary Pictures announced today that Sam Raimi has signed on to direct the eagerly-anticipated major motion picture based on Blizzard Entertainment’s award-winning Warcraft® universe. Raimi has, in the course of his career, clearly demonstrated a genius for developing and adapting existing fictional universes for mainstream audiences while staying true to the spirit of the original content.

Raimi directed the Spider-Man trilogy, which has broken box-office records around the world and garnered five Academy Award® nominations. Known for his imaginative filmmaking style, richly drawn characters and offbeat humor, Raimi wrote and directed the cult classic, The Evil Dead and produced 30 Days Of Night. He most recently wrote and directed the supernatural thriller, Drag Me To Hell.

“At its core, Warcraft is a fantastic, action-packed story,” said Raimi. “I am thrilled to work with such a dynamite production team to bring this project to the big screen.”

Source: http://www.blizzard.com

I imagine the Warcraft’s world to be sort of an epic like the setting of Lord of the Rings. I hope that the producers won’t go low budget on this one. A high-profile project like this do not deserve to be played safe by going mid-size. It is a guaranteed box-office hit just to measure the number of hardcore game players that would come to watch. So we should be expecting to see another epic-scale production that deserves a two-thumbs up to the highest level!