Old-School Games: Warcraft 2

Oh, the sweet embrace of an emulator, an old-school, punishingly-hard strategy game and a free afternoon. Of course, getting there was the stuff of legends itself.
On a nostalgia trip bought and paid for by an errant curiosity and WoWiki (if you don’t know what that is, please get off the internet, gran), I made the bold spot decision to get my hands on Warcraft 2, which, if my failing memory serves, was the first game I actually paid for (back when R300 was more than the price of my ten-year-old body on the slave market). Downloading it from two separate sources, for luck and then knowledge that one of them would fail, I plucked the jewel from the Black Morass that is the web, and held it, aloft, in my carpal-tunneled hands. Then, I made the mistake of trying to play it.

Dear reader, let me take you back to a day, some 7 years ago, when I last tried to install Warcraft 2. I got a new computer, and figuring I was now wiser (taller) and more patient (just no) I decided to give Warcraft 2 a crack again. I tried to install it on ‘98, a platform a few of us are old enough to remember.

Oh, the pain, the pain when my soundcard, itself hewn straight from a mine of Fail, from a particularly pure seam, when it refused to cooperate and the game would not install. I shed pubescent tears over that terrible, terrible loading screen, until gnashing my teeth and rending my hair, I cast it aside and ran, screaming, into the darkness. Now, seven years from that fateful day, I discovered that screen resolutions too can fail one. Shouting vile blasphemies at my screen, I trolled the internet in more ways than one, searching for one of the 3 literate people on it, and after wading through a pile of genitals, curses and anonymous threats of physical violence and/or breast enlargement...

To cut a long story short, I bargained with two imps, a cacodemon, and a confused A&T telemarketer and acquired DosBox, that wonderful portal back to the misty games of yore, with their punishing difficulty curves and their ‘fuck players’ mentality. My enthusiasm managed to sustain me all the way till finishing the original game, and onto the expansion, before surrendering to the pleasures of the comically-easy modern games.

So, hats-off, I guess, to DosBox, vintage Blizzard games before the company sold out to World of Warcraft, and the internet for providing dose after dose of good old fashioned intoxication. Tonight, the yells of ogres and the warcries of enraged grunts will sing me into insomnia.