Planet Bob - Warcraft - Orcs & Humans

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Hi there!

 

Interplaying Warcraft - Orcs & Humans (1994):

 

http://home.arcor.de/cybergoth/xype/warcraft.gif

 

Okay, featuring this one within Interplaying is debatable, but Interplay did publish this one originally

 

After a series of SNES games (Lost Vikings, Rock'n'Roll Racing, ...), Blizzards first totally PC centric development helped establishing the RTS genre which was kickstarted by Herzog 2 and further advanced by Dune 2 before.

 

Laying foundation to the fantasy universe that should evolve into "World of Warcraft" a decade down the road, this was the first game playing in the world Azeroth, with players taking part in an epic battle between humans and orcs.

 

It already shares a lot of features with later installments of the series: The game is divided into a human and an orc campaign, you're building settlements in order to feed & train troops and to forge & upgrade weapons, all powered by harvested wood and gold. Even the magic users and their spells are already in th game.

 

I never played this one back in the day, entering the series with Warcraft 2 already, so it's really surprising to see how much of it is already there in Orcs & Humans and how familiar it looks and feels. Mostly the movies are missing and the story is told with plain text briefings between missions.

 

This time I did most of my homework first, so I had the game already setup and running when starting tonight. So it's not too surprisng that I managed to play the first 5 missions of the Orc campaign already. Four of them were regular base building missions, the other was some kind of vendetta, where I had to locate and kill a rogue orc daughter.

 

Version Played: Abandonware, from "Home of the Underdogs".

How to Run: I'm using DOSBox on max speed, mostly for convenience and to avoid music problems.

IP Status: Wholly owned by Blizzard certainly.

 

Greetings,

Manuel

 

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