It was supposed to be all wrapped up around about the time the Orange Box was released.

The CE is a big enough rip off now.

yes

Here it's £70. The average retail price of a new release is £25. Starcraft 2 is £35, naturally. But that's beside the point. But anyway, throw in the original which is about £5, and we'll call it £35 for the sake of argument.
2GB USB - £4
Full colour art books you can get for £5. I've got a few good fairly big ones at that price. I doubt that the Starcraft one is larger.
Comic book - hard to tell, but let's be generous and call it £2.50.
Bonus discs - not exactly expensive to produce seeing as the content has already been developed for the game.
WOW pet - just advertising. You don't pay for that.
So, being really, really generous we could call that about £50's worth there.

I decided to just get the regular. In other news, HOLY SHIT I HAVE STARCRAFT II IN MY HANDS
Edit: 12 Gig Installation? On one DVD? Great, more waiting and then a patch.

Don't forget, it also has Starcraft I and the expansion on there, so that's more like $20.

To each his own, I guess. But I don't get it, why the hate?

Okay, I haven't seen the SC2 art book yet since I won't be getting the game until after work today. However, from earlier experience with the WoW art books they are worth a good bit more than £5. Full color, high quality, hardcover books with 150-200 pages worth are more than £5 here at least.
I'll do my own calculation;
2GB USB: £4. With the original SC + BW preinstalled, that's a further £8 worth. Total: £12.
Art book: £15.
Comic book: Okay, I'll go with £2.50.
Bonus discs: Not expensive, but not free either. Let's say £2.50 pr. disc. Total: £5.
WOW pet: As you say, just advertising. £0.
One copy of the game: £35.
This adds up to £69.50. It retails for £70. And I wasn't really trying to match the numbers, even if I ended up suspiciously close. Obviously Blizzard has more than £0.50 net profit pr. unit sold, so my estimates are probably too high. Still, it's not a bad deal compared with the £35 base game.
Hate the game all you like, but the pricing isn't off.

star craft and broodwar can be got in 3 for £10 deals that makes it worth £3.33 :P

Well, you don't really have to factor Blizzard's profits into your calculation. The tally is just what it would cost you to get all the same stuff separately at retail or auction. It goes without saying that it costs them a heck of a lot less.

When the hell did SC1 +BW = £15? £5 is what I'm seeing it sold as and £5 I'm listing it as. Plus, if it's actually on the flash drive then that kinda devalues it if anything. I'd have preferred separate discs.

What hate? You don't have to hate something to see it as bad value.

I'm using standard retail prices as a guide here. You think that publishers of comics, books flash drives etc don't make a profit or something? I'm allowing for Blizzard to make a standard amount of profit off of each item included. Which adds up to quite some considerable profit. Especially when items usually go down in price when bought together like this.

Nope.

Well, I just fucked off home from work early and am now in the process of unboxing, which I will of course detail while the game takes 12GB of my harddrive away. The installer plays some lore and music bits while installing, which is nice. No real reason to replay SC+BW for the lore, you get a full fill of it from the installer.
The box is pretty cool, it's a bit smaller than the WoW CEs and it opens from the top "like a door" from the game. It's made of thick cardboard and feels very sturdy, as a collector's item should.
The way the items inside are packaged leaves a little to be desired however. Since the box is a "toploader", the items are also stacked that way inside, which makes the contents look a bit disorganized when the box is open.
The art book is definitely the cream of the crop here. It's a bit smaller than the WoW art books, however the quality is definitely top notch. There are few page numbers and no index so I'd say about 160 pages of beautiful hand-drawn art. It seems to be divided into three roughly equal parts; terran, protoss, and zerg. I was hoping for a bit more art from the lore with rough explanations of each zone etc., like for example the northrend art book, but overall the book is still excellent.
Next up in the unboxing is the USB dogtag. It comes in it's own cardboard casing, and the chain is separated from the dogtag itself. The dogtag is cased in metal, and the USB connector slides out to minimize damage to the connector when not used. The front lights up with J. Raynors information when inserted. However it's size is a potential problem for peripheral-hungry laptop users like me; there's no way to attach something to the neighbouring USB port because of the width of the tag. It comes with the SC+BW installer as advertised, and about 1.3 / 2 GB space is used. It's definitely a cool collectible, but the chain that goes with it is pretty useless unless you're planning to hang it in your collector's cabinet. Not many people are going to be wearing this as a piece of jewellery, I hope. The plastic on the top is a bit loose, and because of the metal fitting it takes a bit of force to push the connector in and out.
Next up - the comic. This is a new one to me - I've never read any of the WoW comics. The "Starcraft #0" comic book is pretty small - I count 22 pages of comic, 4 pages of "War pig profiles", probably background information on the main characters in the comic, and at the end there's an interview with Chris Metzen over 4 pages, and 2 pages of advertisements for the Starcraft and Warcraft comics, respectively. The story in the comic seems to be your average drooling teenage variety, and I doubt I will become a regular subscriber.
The soundtrack - not much to say about it, it's a CD with 14 tracks of SC2 music.
Making of DVD - comes in one of those plastic fantastic slimcover cases like the WoW making of DVDs. The plastic cover on mine was very wrinkled. The contents are standard fare; cinematics, behind the cinematics, designer interviews, artist interviews, storyboards, concept art, and a rather cool starcraft retrospective.
Finally the game itself - two guests passes + 1 WoW guest pass. No manual (!), just a quick reference book with a few pages of "the lore so far" in it. Let's hope the game has decent tutorials.
And that's the unboxing. Pretty much what I expected, but nothing more. The comic, when looking at it, is pretty much just advertising, just like it is with the free cardgame cards you get with the WoW collectors.

After playing a bit of the campaign, I can confirm that this game is awesome. Unfortunately, in my first 2v2 game my partner was kind of a jerk and basically ragged on me because I was a noob.

Yeah, people in MP can be jerks. My advice: play custom games. They're way more fun than normal MP.

3v3 and 4v4 seems quite unbalanced, to say the least. The usual is, two defend and the other one/two mass powerful t3 units. It takes two good teams to make the game fun and unpredictable at these modes.
1v1 is the best mode anyway. But if you really wanna play with someone else, make sure you know him, that way you can build a nice in-game relationship and mutual understanding.