StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty

In this oddly fortunate mutual cock-up, however, despite losing almost all my barracks and factories I was left with a reasonable amount of resources, and enough Probes (the Protoss builder units) to come back, to stage enough of a defence to fight off whatever his second assault would be and then push forwards myself, while he was without an army.

I could see exactly what I had to do, the sustained clicking and planning, and how quickly I'd need to do it. It was eminently possible. But I lacked the will. I was weak, I was feeble, and I succumbed to the tiredness I felt when I thought about the physical and mental exertion involved. It was the point where your legs start to burn when you're out jogging; do you listen to the invisible PE teacher screaming at you in your head and push on, or do you give up and go buy some Monster Munch and a Fanta from the corner shop?

I did the latter. I spent everything on building a bloody great Mothership and pinged it straight to his base, where it was immediately shot down by a wall of anti-aircraft turrets. I knew it was a mistake. I'm not stupid. I'm just very lazy.

StarCraft II, in its current form, does not truck even the slightest laziness. You need to learn every unit, and how it counters every other unit. You need to learn exact build orders, the fastest route to get the good stuff and the good upgrades for the good stuff. You need to pore over the post-match replays and statistical comparisons with other players. Graphs! Numbers! Maths! So. Much. Maths. All the information you need is there, in a very slick, very modern and very Blizzard way. You absolutely can learn from it: this is something StarCraft II does very well.

The question is - can you be bothered to learn it? Becoming better at StarCraft II multiplayer is the only reward you're going to get for giving yourself to StarCraft II multiplayer. It does pretty much everything a veteran StarCraft fan could want - the same but different, deeply traditional but with the very internet as its spine in such a way that it's incredibly modern; breezily cartoonlike but built as hardcore from the very foundations.

In an age where every other RTS is trying to be all things to all men - compromising the multiplayer to try and let newcomers in and (arguably) comprising the single-player because there's an industry-wide trend to squeeze role-playing into strategy - StarCraft is pure. The build-and-bash model may seem overly classic, but it's also an exceptionally rare beast in these genre-bending times: a gift to those who want to treat strategy gaming as a sport rather than a pastime. No quarter is given, no sacrifice is made to allow newbies in too.

This is a good thing. Gaming needs and deserves titles as sure of themselves and their audience as this is - it's just that it means StarCraft II isn't for some PC gamers. Maybe even most PC gamers. Right now, you're somewhere near the bottom of that towering pyramid of skill. Are you man/woman/robot/alien enough to climb it?