Genre: Real-time Strategy
Year: 1995
Developed by: Blizzard Entertainment
Published by: Davidson & Associated
Platforms: PC, Mac, Sega Saturn, PSX
#84
Feeling Like: Your sound card works perfectly!
A complete reversal from entry #85. With Super Mario Bros. 3, I didn’t have any specific moment that stood out, but the gameplay was so timeless that my lingering opinion is nothing but positive. Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness, on the other hand, hasn’t stood the test of time. The quality of life additions that have mercifully been added to the Real Time Strategy genre as a whole are absent here. There’s a monstrous amount of micro-managing, particularly during combat. Future Warcrafts and Starcrafts are undeniably better.
But none of that matters, because when Eric and I managed online play for the first time in our lives, we could have been playing Parcheesi and it would have ended up in my top 100.
I have no earthly idea how my computer ran this game. We had a 486 that barely accepted a CD-ROM drive. It took minutes to boot up. The internet, such as it was, wasn’t available. I’m mostly positive I had to boot Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness from the DOS menu. But it worked.
Playing games on the computer back then was very special. It wasn’t like today where you frequently see console and PC games being available on multiple platforms. Usually the PC crowd was a PC crowd and fiercely identified with their platform. You’d also see different kinds of games entirely; you didn’t see a lot of Mario type games on the PC and you certainly didn’t see many Real Time Strategies on the Super Nintendo, or Sega Genesis. It was like a high school dance, but with nerds.
Going from something like Hocus Pocus to this felt like I’d found a time machine. I couldn’t believe it. It was running! And the framerate…ok, well the framerate wasn’t a silky smooth 60 frames but it did the job. I could play both campaigns, anytime I wanted to. And I often did – the only danger was when Alexandra and Emily started needing the computer for their school projects. I can’t tell what we squabbled over more, the computer or the car. This is probably why mom and dad ended up getting two cars and two computers. Anything to cast a diplomacy blanket over a house filled with hormones and angst.
Eric, one of my newer buddies (now one of my oldest buddies) also enjoyed computer games. We got on like a house on fire, right away. don’t remember our first interaction, but I can only assume it took us 11 seconds before we started rattling off our mutual enjoyed activities. It didn’t take long before we were swapping stories featuring Orcs and Humans.
The Multiplayer option was always there, but we had no clue on how to make it work. Local Area Network wasn’t in our vocabulary yet. There was zero chance our parents would let us lug our entire rig to each other’s homes (that would come later, when we could drive ourselves). So that left something called IPX Network as our only hope.
We had to manually type in the IP Address and fandangle a few settings, but the biggest challenge lay outside of the game. Since we didn’t have internet, it meant when we were playing we were clogging up the entire phone line. No calls out, no calls in. So, imagine trying to negotiate your way through FOUR other people who needed the computer at some point and was possibly expecting a call from their friend while trying to answer “how long are you going to be?” with an honest-sounding lie of “oh about 15-20 minutes, tops.”
The obstacles continued. Our phone cable was not long enough to reach from the wall to the computer, which meant I had to drag the entire desk into the middle of the room for it to fit. Yes, the entire desk. The one with the printer that rattled like a bucket of wrenches in a car with no suspension? Yes, that printer. The stacks of papers and magazines? Yup, those had to come off. So in order to play a single match with Eric, I had to create my inner project manager to withstand familial complaints of not being able to use the phone AND remove about 15 pounds of office supplies from the desk, slide it unceremoniously over to where the cord could reach, and pray the connection worked. And move it all back when we were done.
I’m not much of a “back in my day!” or lament how much easier kids have it today, but fuck that; when it comes to playing online games with your friends, kids have it so much easier today! Back in my day….
When we finally did connect, we lost our minds. There was a rudimentary chat; it was just one bar of text that would show what you were typing in real time. If you wanted to send a new comment, you had to delete your existing text and start all over. There was a lot of
HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT
DELETE DELETE DELETE
OK WHAT DO WE DO? HOW DO WE PLAY CO-OPERATIVELY?
DELETE DELETE DELETE
You could not have made me happier in that moment if you’d told me I’d won the lottery. The concept of chatting with Eric “online” seemed like a technological impossibility and we figured it out all on our own. This was a year or two before ICQ and widespread connectivity in households. It was a big deal.
The matches we played were fun, but not exactly deep in terms of strategy or tactics. Once we discovered the computer would not attack walls, we just walled off our area of the map until we were ready to overwhelm them with our combined forces. It did start to feel like we were playing the same match over and over, but for a while it was the most glorious thing imaginable. This was my very first “online” experience and it shifted something in me. I wanted this. More of this, please. All of it. If only 12 year old Henry knew what was to come!
Eventually we tried competing against each other and if you know me, you wouldn’t exactly say I have a killer instinct. I can be competitive, but I’d rather everybody have a good time regardless of who won or who lost. I’ve been accused of holding back many times in my life and that’s sort of true…or it would be if I was actually good at competitive sports/video games/board games. I’ll bite that I’m ok at Racing Demon, Mystic Vale, typing, free for all mode in NHL 2005 and being loud, but beyond that I’m a fair-weather competitor. Eric, on the other hand, is not. I think I was lucky in that he’d let me win about 1 in 5 matches. It was he who told me if you chop wood twice, THEN build your town hall, you’d get an extra amount of resources so you could quickly build a farm immediately after. Thankfully, future Blizzard games would have your main base built already, cutting down on needless idle time.
The expansion Beyond the Dark Portal really beefed up the challenge for the campaigns and it was met with uncontrollable glee by Eric and I. So many of the foundations of what I enjoy in a Real Time Strategy were built here – the notion of fog of war was entirely new to me, and meant I never knew what was lurking around the corner. Colorful personalities and funny voice dialogue when selecting units was now a requirement, and we often would quip the peasants upon finishing a homework assignment. “Job’s done!” Or respond in a sheepish voice to our parent’s request to tidy our room – “Yes m’lord!”
You could record audio samples to have your own sound effects in the game. Aslam recorded himself saying “Chop! Chop! Chop-chop!” to replace the noise of the peon’s axes hitting wood. You’d think that would get old after a few seconds, but I still chuckle at the memory.
It’s overly colorful and cartoony, but this animated looking war simulator has teeth. Blood everywhere, death and destruction of your enemies are the only goal. Later stages in the expansion required masterful maneuvers and perfect micro managing. Spamming watch towers won’t cut it. You can’t just select your entire army and attack+move. There IS no attack+move! You better tell your battalion of Paladins what to do, because their first instincts aren’t Patton-esque, let’s say.
I don’t think it’s held up. Blizzard learned a lot of lessons from Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness, and with hardware improvements coming fast, future titles from them would easily eclipse it. But when it comes to a personal connection, Warcraft 2 deserves a spot this high. I doubt I will ever replicate the feeling of finally getting to play with Eric, sitting in his living room miles away, for the first time. That feeling is valuable, even if the game itself is not.
The 500 