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Warcraft 1 and 2 are on GOG today

Orcellent!

Oh gee oh gee oh gee oh gee - Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and Warcraft 2 are now available on GOG.com!

Warcraft 1 is $6, Warcraft 2 is $10, and the latter includes both the Tides of Darkness base game and the Dark Portal expansion.

GOG hasn't done much to Warcraft 1 beyond make it work on today's operating systems, but it has given Warcraft 2 similar treatment to the recently released Diablo 1. So, there are two modes for playing Warcraft 2: one with higher resolutions but only LAN play, the other with SVGA graphics but classic Battle.net support.

Warcraft 1 came out all the way back in 1994 (in the US) - the same year Friends aired on TV. Imagine it - a time when Friends was new! Back then, real-time strategy games were all the rage, and canny Blizzard sniffed an opportunity to release an RTS before Westwood dropped Command & Conquer.

Warcraft was a very different beast back then. I've just been playing it and oh my golly gosh it's antiquated. It's so dark! And stilted. And you can't use controls like you want to. It even has an MS-DOS boot-up screen.

Story? Some amusingly voiced codswallop, on a still screen before each mission, is all you're getting.

Warcraft 2 is much more the ticket, although, remember, the series didn't properly thicken with stories and heroes until Warcraft 3. But Warcraft 2 is much brighter and more in the chunky colourful Blizzard style we're used to today. Units mutter when you order them, pigs oink in farms, and the pace of play increases significantly.

Warcraft 3, remember, is currently undergoing the remaster treatment at Blizzard. The gameplay isn't being touched (it needs to be compatible with the existing game for multiplayer purposes) but the graphics are, and all the cut-scenes are being completely redone. I played around with Warcraft 3: Reforged at BlizzCon 2018.

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