This is the seventh post in our Game of the Day series.
I eluded to this game in my memorandum of Populous (incidentally, I just saw on Slashdot that EA plans a remake of the big P). The second installment of Blizzard's Warcraft series is hands down my favorite strategy game of all time, a looming love of lounging peasantry and invading green men.
I bought it, before I owned a computer capable of playing it, while I was on a vacation at my brother's apartment in Kent (Washington State). We bought cheap Totino's pizza, the kind you can fold into a gnarly, greasy taco. We drank 2 liter bottles of Mountain Dew and maybe Josta (memories overlap, perhaps?). I played all day when he went to work (one time I had left the oven on nearly all day and he came home to me in sweaty undies, still pouring intently over the brilliant SVGA sprites as they waged war). We talked endlessly about the awesomeness of it all and vocally created our own version in tandem, something we'd call Savage Lands (again, memories might be overlapping).
Later at home, I just kept playing it. It's one of the few games I beat fair and square, one of the few I played through to the end. I downloaded custom maps off the Macintosh LC's at school, copied the files to my network share, and then nabbed them from the Windows 3.1 PC's to get the home. I created my own maps: mazes, one-player hero adventures, and impossible resource-starving sieges. I took screenshots, posted them online (gone now, long gone), and zipped up my worlds for others to download.
I even tried to play it online against other people via Kali which proved disastrous to my ego. Everything you come up with to combat the computer is useless against a human opponent; and there are tricks I had never imagined. I clearly remember the first time I used the Footman Rush against another "noob". His chat revealed a stunned kid as I had once been, and I gently explained how the tactic worked. I didn't stay long in the multi-player arena; too many jerks and that was something I got enough of at school.
Last year I went back and played through all the campaigns again, even the expansion which I did not have back in the day. It was just as fun as I remembered it! That is quite a shocking feat, something many games are simply not timeless enough to provide. The 2D sprite-based graphics and voices are still just as colorful (and not sickly green as they ended up being on my Packard Bell monitor which went bad), the gathering and building just as addictive, and the feeling of crushing a computerized foe just as sweet.
With the ubiquity of Flash and HTML5 just around the corner, it seems like the perfect time for a web-based incarnation of this game!
