I played Warcraft: Orcs VS Humans

The first in the Warcraft line, Warcraft: Orcs Vs Humans is just that. Orcs fighting humans. There is a campaign mode that gives you a story as to what's going on at the moment, but there's not much by way of history, which was later molded by Blizzard into the background known so well by many WOW players.

Beating the game for either side is a quick cinematic and not much by way of story. I get the impression that Blizzard wasn't expecting Warcraft to be the success it was, leading to it's sequel Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness where they filled in lore and really began an ongoing narrative. Still with a binary victory where Orcs or Humans win.

The mechanics haven't changed a great deal over the years, but in Warcraft your base used to be smell effectively restricted by the roads you needed to build to build anything else. Resources were often sank so heavily into roads and defense that the one small base is all you could afford to have. Units were most often mirrors of each other, and clicking to get multiple and funny responses was new. Also spam clicking animals to blow them up. Those animals were such a pain that I greatly enjoyed getting rid of them.

The biggest factor in this game was you. You strategy was more important than your units, and my strategy was overpower through numbers. (Why yes, I do play as Zerg in Starcraft. Why do you ask?) As a real time strategy game, using whatever time you had wisely was vital, and understanding limits of certain units could maximize your income. (Peons/Peasants in the mine when it runs out of gold die, so best to keep that to a minimum.)

Knowing little exploits (brought back in later games as features) could get you a serious edge. Like sending an army of Peons/Peasants to repair a building under construction would get it up in seconds and you could then start pumping out units all the faster.

And then there's the rating. It takes your score and gives you an appropriate rating at the end of the level, especially appropriate if you cheat. From then on your rank is Cheater.

There's not too much to go on about with this game, it's really difficult to run on new computers without DOS Box, so playing it could be difficult for some. But you could just as easily play the other games in the series. Warcraft, while being the start of such a popular franchise, isn't that iconic in and of itself. And was quickly overlooked when Warcraft 2 hit the scene. The most important thing Warcraft has going for it is the introduction of Gul'dan, his pact with the deamons, and his treachery. Seriously, that's kind of it.

While this is a fun game, and definitely a must play for Warcraft fans, it's not got all that much going for it other than being the beginning of the beginning of the series. If you can grab it, give it a play, if not go play Warcraft 2 and Warcraft 3. The stories are better, and they've aged better too.