If you’re not Korean, odds are you don’t have (or don’t intend to ever get) some of the harder-to-earn achievements in Starcraft 2. Among the more impossible and annoying are several points and portraits awarded for winning 1,000 games as each race option, with Team Zen Master awarding 20 Achievement points and -20 Having-a-Life points for obtaining 4,000 wins in Team Quick Matches.

Of course, in a year or two it’s likely someone will earn this ridiculous prize. I mean, at 15 minutes a game, that’s just 1,000 hours. Oh, right, that’s only if you win every game.

So let’s say 2,000 hours. If you played for 10 hours a day you could easily earn Team Zen Master in a little under a year, allowing for holidays and life. But who would devote that much time and effort to this pursuit?

Apparently a gamer known as Monoxide has already completed the majority of these trails. Is he a god? Does he avoid all sleep? Is his APM in the thousands?

Last time, we established that the majority of improvements between Starcraft 1 and Starcraft 2 were actually improvements from Starcraft 1 to Warcraft 3. From the basic 3D camera to the UI and control improvements, a lot of the credit Starcraft 2 has received for its advancement since the original is probably a tad overstated.

More puzzling, however, was the large number of RTS innovations included in Warcraft 3 that are absent in Starcraft 2. The previous article focused primarily on anti-cheesing measures built into each race’s infrastructure that decreased the rock-paper-scissors aspect of early game rushes. With them, Warcraft 3 managed to remove the majority of all-in cheese from the game without placing awkward terrain or time restrictions on players.

What else did Blizzard’s oldest RTS include in its newest offering? For one thing: dynamic environments.

Sure, there are counters for the Terran bioball, but too often Zerg players are forced to perform superior macro and micro in order to tech to and utilize these counters. One need only glance at the leaderboards to show that, for whatever reason, Zerg are extremely underrepresented.

What’s Blizzard’s take on all this?

Danny5329 of GameFAQs managed to find an official statement from the developers themselves.

The results may shock you…

Congratulations to Radius and Leetinha, the winners of the Starcraft 2 Guest Pass Giveaway!

Just a reminder that we have two contests ending tomorrow.

If you want a shot at winning one of three quirky music games, be sure to submit your dopest rap by commenting on this article. There have been relatively few submissions so far, so your odds of winning something are pretty high!

If you’re an APM fiend and want a chance to receive a Starcraft 2 guest pass, tell us about your favorite intergalactic unit here.

With all the fawning and fanfare over Starcraft 2, it’s easy to highlight how long it’s been since the original Zergling simulator debuted, and how much has changed and improved.

But as accumulated play time increases and more and more aggressive, odd, and cheesy builds emerge, it’s just as easy to overlook how little Starcraft has actually evolved. Where is the modern RTS dynamism and evolution gamers have been waiting for?

Turns out they missed it. It was called Warcraft 3.

If you haven’t gathered by now, I recently caved and purchased Starcraft 2 at KMart’s incredibly reasonable generous $40 price point. What does this mean for you, other than the fact that there’s one more terrible, terrible player in Silver League now? Well, I’ve got 2 Guest Passes available, entitling whoever wants them to 7 [...]

While I’ve certainly learned from experience, experience requires time, effort, and thought. Not particularly willing to dedicate all three of those resources to Starcraft, I discovered two YouTube channels with incredible educational and (dare I say it?) entertainment value.

If there’s one thing gamers of middling skill hate, it’s button mashers. We all know a button masher: a sibling, a child, a significant other, or even a mildly disabled cousin. He/she has a basic understanding of how a given game works, but when the shit hits the fan, strategy and planning give way to wildly spamming as many commands as possible with no discernable logic. Lucky for us pro, top tier gamers, these mashers rarely win.

Right?