Rave Reviews

The store manager pinned a thick stack of preorders beneath the cash register and directed the clerks to stack the newly arrived game boxes on the most conspicuous shelf.

The line had split into two groups as clearly divided as the Jing and Wei rivers.

One group was veteran players in old T-shirts, holding the manual for the DOS version of Black Tide.

They had come for the expansion, Dark Portal.

The expansion required the original game to run.

"I just cleared the original orc campaign again yesterday," a young man said to the companion in front of him. "I heard this expansion lets you fight all the way to the orcs' homeland, Draenor. You can even control Khadgar."

"I'm looking forward to the new heroes more." His companion rubbed his hands together. "The magazine reviews said if a hero dies, the mission fails. That setup is hardcore enough."

The other group were new users who had just bought Windows 95 computers.

They headed straight for the Windows 95 version of Warcraft II: Black Tide on the shelf.

For these new players, the tedious command-line inputs of the DOS era had nothing to do with them. They had only started using computers to play games after Windows 95 was released.

What they needed was a high-quality game that could run by inserting the CD and clicking the desktop icon.

Warcraft I, on the strength of the extremely high word of mouth it had built up in gaming magazines, became their first choice for testing the performance of their new computers.

The high-resolution SVGA graphics ran exceptionally smoothly under the Windows 95 system that supported DirectDraw.

The ripples on the water, the two-headed animations of the ogres, and the flames spewed by the wyverns displayed an extremely high artistic standard on