The original Warcraft never managed to become a classic like Dune II or its own sequel Warcraft II. There are reasons for that. Dune is an excellent franchise and can give a game a unique atmosphere. Besides, its artists handled the limitations of VGA graphics better than the guys at Blizzard. Warcraft II, on the other hand, had SVGA graphics (which really make a lot of difference for strategy games, more than for most other genres) and vastly expanded gameplay, adding flying machines and battle on water, and, most important, the ability to select multiple units.

There is, however one usually overlooked aspect where Warcraft outshines both contrahends: in giving the player a different experience depending on the race he or she chooses. If you read a Warcraft II strategy guide, you will find that most buildings and units differ only in name and graphic. Only very late in the game there are actual differences. In Dune II, differences are mostly some special units for each family. They, too, make a difference mainly in the later missions. In Warcraft, on the other hand, you will encounter the differences early. Humans, for example, can have clerics capable of healing their units, while orcs can have necromancers raising the fallen of both sides to short-lived cauldron warriors for the orcish cause.

Warcraft runs on a 386, but feels a little slow. On a fast computer (fast, in this context, is any Pentium computer) it is playable, only the water animation gives away not very sound coding practices.

On the Mac

Though it came out two years later, when the PC version of Warcraft II was already out, and though it retained the crappy original graphics, Mac gamers generally liked Warcraft. It seems to be more popular among them then it is on the PC. It did run somewhat smoother, had additional movies, and was network compatible with the PC version.

Official system requirements are a 68030/68040 or PowerMac with 8MB RAM and System 7.0. The strange wording seems to indicate you'd better have a PowerMac.

• Colin on Game Revolution gave it an A–
• Scott's Addictions

The Series

A short overview of the Warcraft series (links lead to Blizzard's official or strategy pages). Demos for both systems can still be downloaded from Blizzard.