A Classic Game That Still Works Today

Sometimes it can be a joy to go back to one of your older games and give it a whirl. Despite the advances with graphics, AI, and performance, some of the newer games just don't seem to have the same charm. Pretty pictures and loads of features can be great, but I'll take good old-fashioned playability any day. Warcraft 2 fits the bill perfectly.

Warcraft 2 is a Real Time Strategy game. What that means is the action unfolds right before you as you select commands for the army and villagers. This is different from the old Turn Based model, where you select your commands and then wait a turn while the opponent selects theirs. In Warcraft 2, you face of the pressure of making immediate decisions while being attacked in several different places. You have to be quick enough to respond to several different actions at once, while also being able to develop a well thought out strategy to defeat the enemy. This can make for a very challenging game.

The Orcs have invaded Earth and its your choice whether to command the Orcs or Humans during this war. While building armies, you must make sure the have the proper resources. You do this by mining gold, collecting oil, or chopping lumber. You must build farms to make sure your army is fed. It’s not just a resource game, though. You also have to develop your technology to improve your army. As you continually upgrade your buildings (i.e. the town hall becomes a keep and then becomes a castle), you will have access to knights, ogres, flying machines, dragons, ballistae, gryphons, battleships, and much more. The key to victory in Warcraft 2 is efficiently using your resources to build the best army possible.

The Battle.net edition comes with both of the original campaigns. These are designed to introduce you to the different aspects of the game. In each of the 16 levels you are opened up to a new type of unit and must figure out how to properly use it. This is a perfect way for beginners to get immersed in the game. The level difficulty increases up to the final level where you are given a very challenging task to finally defeat your enemy. For the more experienced players, this edition also comes with the Beyond the Dark Portal expansion campaigns, which focuses on heroic characters from the original campaign. These are far more difficult, but also very creative. They even incorporate some RPG elements along the way. And for those that just want to jump into a quick game, there are dozens of generic scenarios that will allow you to play right away.

The interface for Warcraft 2 is extremely simple to use. You build units simply by clicking on the building that houses them and selecting from the many options you have. When sending your units to war, a simple drag, click, and point routine makes it very easy to target your attacks. Clicking on the handy minimap will immediately take you to any part of the battlefield. When attacked, you get a handy voice warning ("We are under attack!"), which repeats until the attack is stopped.

Warcraft 2 is certainly not a perfect game. A chief problem is the computer AI, not only for your computer opponent, but also for the individual units. Sometimes it can be extremely difficult to get your units to talk the way you want them to, especially when you need them to navigate a path with many turns. In these cases, you will need to point and click to get them to each turn, which can become very tiresome. The computer opponent is not very challenging. It is only able to orchestrate repetitive attacks, usually in the same area, which are easily fended off on most levels.

One thing I love about this game is the numerous small touches that give it so much personality. When clicking on any unit, you hear them speak to you, asking for their orders. Each unit has a different voice and different manner in which they communicate to you. The knights say "Yes, my lord" while the mages irritated shout, "What is it!” You can also have some fun by repeatedly clicking on a unit and it will cycle through a series of different sayings, each one more annoyed than the previous. If you do this with the ships, you will make the captains sick, and if you do it to the mages they will strike you down. The game also comes complete with a map editor. I remember spending countless hours designing complex maps and my own mini-campaigns.

The main reason for the Battle.net edition of the game was to utilize an easy method of multiplayer gaming. With this edition, it is very easy for even the least computer savvy person to immediately connect to the in game website and find an opponent. Back in its heyday, there were hundreds of people online and a competitive ladder system pitted the very best gamers against one another. Today it is much more difficult to find an opponent, but it is still very easy for you and a friend to both connect to the website and immediately start a game together.

When playing older games, one problem that you often run into is compatibility with newer operating system. Warcraft 2 is a remarkable game for its flexibility in this area. When I first played the game (an earlier edition), I ran it without any problems on a Windows 3.1 system 16mb of RAM. Today, Warcraft 2 runs exactly the same on my Windows XP system with 512MB RAM. It’s a pleasure to revisit an old classic every now and then. And even with outdated graphics and poor AI, Warcraft 2 remains more entertaining than most of todays far more advanced games.