Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness

This doesn't look like Kingdom Hearts

Ok, so I didn't finish Birth by Sleep, and my excuse is that someone in the family wanted to watch the Tour de France... and this is why Wii U:s tablet is the best gaming device ever. Instead I looked through my game collection and caught Warcraft II and since the movie just came around I got a sudden urge to play it... or rather I started to try getting it to work since Mac can't handle this game anymore due to the changing OS. So what to do? I knew it worked for DOSBox so getting the DOS files and the game starts running. Everything seems to work except movies and the voice over during the briefing. Which is half the fun of this game listening to the human campaigns briefings and the pronunciation of all these places. So I backtracked a bit, I assumed it wouldn't work due to not recognising the CD (a pack of other files caused that problem) so hey, why not through it through Wine. Apparently that doesn't work since it can't execute the files, and later I figured it wouldn't matter since apparently Wine really have a problem with videos overall (which I should have guessed  due to my Legacy of Time playthrough) so I shouldn't have bothered. And to compensate I listened through and watched the cinematic on youtube instead. Saves me the trouble and frankly I can skip playing as the opposing side (in this case orcs) since the maps are pretty much the same mission to mission.

Enough of talk, time to slaughter some orcs!

Basically the game tells the story of you, a human or orc commander taking orders from the top brass and conduct battle operations against the opposing side. Beginner levels are build this structure, save these troops and destroy the enemy base. And that is pretty much the beginning, then they give you escort mission of one of the leading officers in the army and have to quell a rebellion within your ranks. For the humans it's against the nation of Alterac and for the orcs the Shaman Gul'dan. And frankly, only the Gul'dan mission have any impact on later stories since its plot crucial in the Warcraft III expansion. The humans on the other hand have the loss of Lothar, the commander of the Alliance forces and a survivor of the first game and sets you up as the new commander. A pity he isn't mentioned much more in the following game. Although, if I would make a guess its due to Blizzard really pushing the orcs as "main players" to counter every other fantasy game where humans are the defacto good guys. The human campaign ends with a destruction of a dark portal which is where the orcs arrived from the beginning. Basically they are aliens. And you could make an argument for that you begin as the orcs and push the invasion and the human counters and push them back. Or you play it one by one, first orc, then human and so on. The reason is that the humans are the canonical winners of the second war, which is pretty much established in the expansion which starts right were the human campaign ended, but that I will talk about some other time.

Lothar, the greatest human commander in Azeroth, sadly backstabbed under a parley

Now, I played this game as kid with my best friend. He had a demo of the first three missions I believe, and then the neighbour older kid got the game so I borrowed it and played through it with cheats since I sucked at quick reactions. I actually played most of it without cheating, only the final three levels I cheated on since, frankly, the keyboard of the MacBook Air isn't the best and I would really like a mouse for this. I'm astonished I got that far actually. Also, I don't know if its the keyboard or the game itself, but I couldn't get the shortcuts to work for quick switch between different groups which made organising pincer attacks on the enemy or quickly change between, artillery, melee or ballistas rather problematic. Or maybe that wasn't a feature until the third game?

So why did I like this as a kid? The fantasy elements. This was pretty much one of the first games I played that could emulate things like grand scale wars like lord of the rings. You had elves, dwarves and orcs and even dragons. I didn't get much of the story though, not until I was at my cousins house and he actually had the manual that described the whole Warcraft saga from I to II and the tale was simply amazing. A wizard corrupted by a demon, a half-orc assassin, Lothar and the fall of the human kingdom, followed by the Alliance forming between humans, elves and dwarfs to combat this new threat and push them back. Meanwhile the internal struggles of the horde as Ogrim Doomhammer takes over as war-chief from the one starting the war in Warcraft I, followed by Gul'dan trying to raise the Tomb of Sargeras and defying Doomhammer. Ultimately they loose the war, but then we had the expansion... and let us just see how far I can get before the game kicks me to the curb.