Analysis of a Post 1994 Game: Warcraft II

I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Blizzard games. The level of detail in the cinematics, gameplay, and characters has always astounded me. The first Blizzard game I remember playing was also one of the first games I ever played on PC. Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness was a huge step forward from it's predecessor Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. The warcraft franchise is largely considered the forerunner of the RTS genre, games that revolve around resource collecting and army building. Warcraft II featured land, sea, and air units; over 30 in all.

As a kid, I think my favorite part about playing Warcraft was how every unit had it's own personality and voice-overs. Clicking on or moving a unit would play a random voice-over, but the best part was after clicking on a particular unit several times in a row, the character would usually get more agitated and say funnier and funnier lines. Every time I would unlock a new unit, you could be sure the first thing I'd do was click on him repeatedly to hear the rare voice-overs. In all, the game had 291 unique voice-over lines. Pretty huge for a game released in 1995. Here's a video featuring every single spoken line of dialogue.

In addition to spoken word, every character had unique sound effects for their attacks, spells and death animations. The soundtrack for the game was also epic and extensive. To say Warcraft had a massive amount of sounds for it's time is an understatement. In addition to in-game sounds, Warcraft II like many Blizzard games featured brilliant cinematic sequences between levels and at the start of the game; each with music and story-driven dialogue voice-overs. Just rewatching some of the videos on this game on youtube bring back huge amounts of nostalgia, Warcraft II in my opinion was way ahead of it's time, and will always have its place among my favorite games of all time.