Waaay back in Blizzard’s past you find this game, in the sense that waaay back in humanity’s past you’ll find dinosaur poo. Nobody’s taking away WC1′s historical significance. For its time, it’s really not bad. But don’t go to great pains to find it unless you’re a collector.

You build a base, collect resources, and kill the enemy. I assure you, this was far from being a cliche in 1994. This was the second real-time strategy game on the PC, and the fantasy theme gave WC1 an enormous edge. For a player back in the day it must have felt really unique, like a strategy game and an adventure game had been merged somehow. Unfortunately, there’s little story. There’s just humans and orcs and they’re fighting. Although there are some characters (like Medivh) who would reappear in later games, and fans of Warcraft III’s story should persevere onwards for little easter eggs like these.

The action is fast and fun. This is a bit speedier than the first RTS game (Dune 2), and a lot easier for a modern strategy gamer to digest. I love how visceral and immediate the game’s asthetics are. In Dune 2 you had these tanks that exploded in little cartoony fireballs. In Warcraft, your soldiers splatter blood when they die. Hardcore!

The game’s problems come in two categories: those that can be defended because of its age, and those that cannot. In the first category you have the annoying UI, the lame pathfinding (sending an army to attack usually entails microtasking all the dumbasses who got lost or confused), and the overall lack of substance and variety. In the second category you have the gay-ass controls, which are far worse than Dune 2′s (to move a single unit you have to click THREE DAMN TIMES), the 4 unit selection limit (loads of fun when you’re getting your ass kicked in a huge battle and your men can only retreat four at a time), and the poor game balance. The orcs and humans are mostly the same, except the orcs get a VERY powerful demon unit that the humans have no answer to.

Ultimately, it’s impossible to play this game without thinking about how much better it was done by games released just a year later. This is one of those cases where, other than historical significance, you have to scrabble to find good points. The game is pretty well designed. And the fantasy theme is cool. And there’s a random map mode, albeit one that gets eaten alive by Age of Empire’s random map mode.

It’s old. It’s crappy in places. Play this to see where the Warcraft series began. I think you’ll find that no matter how beautiful a castle is, usually the foundations are pretty damn ugly.