Warcraft II

Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (usually simply called Warcraft II; sometimes abbreviated to WCII or WC2) is a sequel to the popular real-time strategy game Warcraft, published by Blizzard Entertainment in December 1995. Users play either orcs or humans in a fantasy medieval world full of magic and swords. It was originally written for the MS-DOS operating system, though it had a MS Windows launch screen and played well under Windows 95. In addition, there was a Macintosh version of the game. Blizzard also released an expansion pack for Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness known as Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal. Blizzard made a new version of WarCraft II in 1999, called WarCraft II: Battle.net Edition. Changes made for this release included removing MS-DOS code so that it would work on all Windows versions, a few minor bugs were fixed, and multiplayer support for Blizzard's online service Battle.net was added.

Warcraft 2

Users may play each other online (via LAN or the Internet) using existing maps or ones they create. Users may also play the game solo, taking them through a story in which orcs and humans are at war.

Characters in the game, as in most Blizzard games, will say different things on being clicked repeatedly. (Clicking on a sheep long enough will cause it to blow up!)

Conversions

Some time after Warcraft II's release, a college student by the name of Alexander Cech created a program called Wardraft which led, inexorably, to the widespread creation of utilities to edit and alter the WC2 datafiles. The spawn of extensive alterations became known as "Total Conversions", and a great many projects were in motion for a good long while. Some of the more prominent were "DeathCraft: Twilight of Demons" by Dirk "The Guardian" Richartz, "War of the Ring" by Gurthaur, "Editor's Total Conversion" by Fronzel Neekburn and the whole of the Warclan, and the noteworthy "Rituals of Rebirth" spearheaded by Kalindor, Kosmous, and Commoner.

There was also a free software game inspired by Warcraft II called Freecraft. Althought it uses no art or code from Warcraft II, the project received a threatening cease-and-desist letter from Blizzard with forced the project to be dropped.

Many of the utilities and conversions have faded into the depths of obscurity.

Quotations

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations by or about Warcraft II.

One of the features of Warcraft II (and III) are the unit quotes. If a single unit was clicked several times in a row, the unit's voice samples would change. The unit would start getting angry at the player, or start saying silly things in reference to movies, games, or other things. For example, a peasant might say, "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" — a quote from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

See also

• Warcraft Universe

External links

• Official Warcraft II Battle.net edition site (http://www.blizzard.com/war2bne/)
• MobyGames entry on WarCraft II (http://www.mobygames.com/game/sheet/gameId,1339/)
• Warcraft II for Linux (http://wargus.sourceforge.net/)