The Sanatorium You might feel a slight sting

Starcraft II – It Will Make You A Man

I love RTS games. I love the strategic aspect, the management, the mini wars and all that stuff. Strangely enough, I'm not by any means an RTS guru. I think the only ones I've played extensively are Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds and Pikmin. Yeah, that's right, Pikmin. I'm a man just for admitting that.

But here we are in August of 2010 and we are just about a week after the release of StarCraft II, the sequel to one of, if not THE most popular RTS games. It may as well be titled StarCraft to me, because I barely played the original. I was lucky enough to have a friend that donated their 7 hour trial that came with his copy of StarCraft II. I've got about an hour left and, honestly, I need to pick up this game this weekend. After playing the shit and piss out of some campaign and multiplayer, I learned a very important lesson about myself that many other newcomers probably learned at the exact same time. This lesson being "Holy shit, I'm not Korean". I also learned this game takes some serious practice.

"No shit, you idiot" You say? Yeah, I know. Of course becoming good at any online multiplayer game takes some time and practice. But not like this game. This game feels like you're fucking training for a new job. A new job at the fucking pentagon getting ready to relay orders all the way to the middle-east. So what is it about StarCraft II that makes it such a brain fuck to practice? Well, just about everything. I'm still in the practice league, so I'm a pretty big noob. The first match I played, I won. I was so high off my victory I was thinking "fuck yeah I'm going to be good at this game in no time!". That's when I lost the next several matches. I decided to try out some team games, 2v2, thinking having a teammate might help. Sure, it helped, if "help" means you play with yourself in the corner while your team mate single-handedly takes out the competition. At this point I learned something new. I needed to learn some stuff in order to get better at this damn game. I knew from the start that with a complex game like StarCraft, there are sure to be tons of of tips and tricks to becoming a better player. With little effort, I found some decent places and some decent videos that gave me some decent advice. Of course it hasn't made me a pro overnight, but the simple information I learned has already improved my game. It was really that simple. After seeing an improvement, I immediately felt fucking manly. Suddenly I felt as if I could cut down a god damned redwood tree with a small ass axe, then build myself a fucking house with that tree, and then raise a family of five off of hopes and dreams in it and it was all because I learned how to play StarCraft II better.

StarCraft II requires not only skill, but a strong mentality. Hell, I feel as if it could help me text behind the wheel better. It's a damn fun game, and probably one of the few games that may make you feel better at life in general. So if you're like me wondering what the hell you're going to do with the rest of your life, you need only play StarCraft II, and have some fun doing it.