The Kingdom of Azeroth was relatively peaceful and ruled by King Llane. That was until a powerful mage named Medivh commanded forces that opened up a portal in the Swamp of Sorrow, leading to another world. This ushered in the Age of Chaos, as Orcs were summoned to this world and attempted to establish an empire. As the Orcish hordes swarmed from the portal, they met with the Humans of Azeroth and battles ensured. Peaceful co-existence is not an option. Only one race will attain dominance over the land.
Warcraft: Orcs & Humans is the first real-time fantasy strategy game from Blizzard Entertainment. By playing either the Humans or the Orcs in this saga, two separate story lines evolve with 12 scenarios per side telling the tale of the battle for Azeroth. Players must mine gold and chop wood in order to construct buildings and create new units. From swords to sorcery, all the elements of classic fantasy are here to explore: rich forests, dark dungeons and bubbling swamps await the stalwart troops amassed to fight for dominance. Command many unique armies and creatures including Knights, Archers, Clerics, Warlocks, Daemons, Elementals, and Necromancers who are able to raise the dead.
The multiplayer aspects of the game allow 2 players to challenge one another on over 20 custom maps and determine who is the supreme warlord. Head to head play is supported over modem, serial link, and IPX networks, and works cross-platform between the IBM-PC and Macintosh versions.
Which game needs no introduction? Which game's known by all? Which game is legendary? ... No, not Monopoly. It's Warcraft. This one is the very first one from the famous series where orcs and humans battle it out over Azeroth.
The game begins with the choice that will change the world. Will you command the orcs or the humans? Depending on this choice, the entire campaign is different. Your troops, buildings, upgrades and spells are of an entirely different order as well. You either build a medieval village or an encampment of adobes, go raid and pillage villages or ride out to prevent this from happening.
There's a wide variety of missions you will receive. Some are to build a camp of a specific force, others are to collect a certain amount of resources or to take out some villages, while yet others set you up with a relatively small amount of troops, no ability to build anything and have to rescue key characters.
Although it all might seem as simple as quickly building up a vast army to clobber anything that moves, the game is actually far more challenging. You need to balance offense and defense out carefully, plan your resource in- and outcome carefully, see which upgrades're needed faster than others, all together with exploring, both for finding new resources in case the ones you have at the moment are exhausted, and to know where the enemy resides. An all-out offensive strategy, for example, will leave your encampment unguarded, meaning it will only take one enemy troop that sneaks past your troops in order to have to retreat in all haste, hoping you still have peasants left, or the ability to make another one, as they're as important as, if not more important than your offensive troops.
Graphics of this game are nice. The mission briefings are extremely well drawn and the ingame action is clean and smoothly drawn. The intro, although some animations in it are a bit choppy, it is quickly looked over ,especially since the rest of its quality is superb to the standards of its time.
Music and sound are terrific for its time as well. Music is of top-notch quality, even to today's standards. Same goes for the speech and sound effects. It might not be surround, but the stereo sound certainly doesn't take down on the atmosphere of the game.
A few downers for Warcraft are obviously known by Blizzard, as they fixed those in Warcraft II, but it feels slightly odd in number I. To move a unit, you always have to select the Move icon before moving it. The few seconds this takes can be decisive for the outcome of your mission. Another thing is that you can't select more than four troops in a group, so attacking with large groups will take alot of time, as you'll need to select each small group of four, give them the same order as before and hope the troups before will manage until enough others have arrived. These reduce the gameplay slightly, but not so much anybody with some strategic insight can't overcome these slight problems. At the end, it adds to the challenge.
Any gamer can't be a true gamer without having played Warcraft, so if you concider yourself a gamer, grab this game. If you already have played it, you'll know why. Otherwise, you're not a true gamer and need to get it in order to get closer to becoming one.
Warcraft: Orcs & Humans is the first real-time fantasy strategy game from Blizzard Entertainment. Two separate story lines (Orcs and Humans) evolve with 12 scenarios per side telling the tale of the battle for the Kingdom of Azeroth. Players must mine gold and chop wood in order to construct buildings and create units. Each side tries to destroy the other by collecting resources and creating an army.
Warcraft 1 is one of the classic RTS (Real Time Strategy) games. Warcraft 1 is about two waring sides, the Humans and the Orcs. Like many of the older RTS games the only real difference between the units is the graphics and the sounds, your magic units may have some different spells but the differences end there. Warcraft 1 is still an ok game though, it has varied missions from the build a base and destroy the enemy, to the tough missions where you take a small troop of units to rescue someone. If you have recently played a RTS game you will catch onto Warcraft 1 quickly, with the basic collecting of resources, creating units and buildings and upgrading units. When I first played the Demo of Warcraft 1 many years ago I thought it was average, I did enjoy Warcraft 2 though. So if you have played Warcraft 2 you might want to give the first one a go.
One of those games that made the realtime-strategy-genre big. Set in a fantasy world you either take over the role of a human soldier rising up to be an important leader trying to stop an orc-incasion or you take the counterpart and lead the orcs against the humans. An excellent game-engine with great graphics and nice sound-effects (try clicking several time on an orc who's already activated - very funny to hear him get angry...). The difficulty of the game grows with every level, the scenarios get more complex. In the end you have to build cities to be able to build armies strong enough to defeat your enemies. In the course of the game you get advanced units like the Necromancer (a powerful mage that is able to turn dead soldiers of either side into undead fighters) or the catapult, a simple but very effective weapon. The kind of spells human and orc-mages can cast are different, while human priests can heal their units that is not possible for the orcs - you have to fight different, but on the other hand your necromancers can raise slain humans and let them face their former comrades.
Especially in the later levels you will need both good strategy as well as fast thinking and reacting on the computer-played opponents. You can also play against a friend over modem or directlink. This is a game I really enjoyed playing and it stays on my harddisk now for quite some years.
One of the true classics. Like Command & Conquer, Warcraft helped forming one of the largest fan groups for the strategy genre. With its unique and exciting gameplay Warcraft showed how well dome a game could be developed and no other game was near what the developers had achieved with Warcraft. The game is taking place in a fantasy world with orcs and humans fighting each other. Depending on whom you decide to play as you will have to defeat your opponent during several different missions and of course it gets harder and harder for every mission.
In the first mission you only start with very little units but by mining gold and collection wood you can fast expand your base and when you feel you are protected enough its time to start searching for the enemy. In each mission the game will only end once you have defeated and destroyed all enemy units and buildings which is a bit annoying when you play some of the last missions as there might be a little farm located somewhere that you first have to fund even when the enemy doesn't have more units left. But this is a minor thing in the game and it's easy to ignore when you consider the rest of the gameplay in Warcraft.
There are several different units included although they are pretty much the same whether you are playing as the humans or the orcs so it doesn't matter that much. It would have been great if the differences were more but Blizzard made up for that in Warcraft 2 so I will forgive them this time. The game is played in real-time but at a speed where you have time to reach when you are attacked unexpected (and that will happen eventually). When you find a goldmine it will only contain a specified amount of gold and that offers a great aspect to the game since every gold piece can be important to buy that single unit that can mean the victory in some of the smaller scenarios. Warcraft is one hell of a game and for the strategy fan this is a game that you just have to play.
How to run this game on modern Windows PC?
People who downloaded Warcraft: Orcs & Humans have also downloaded:
Warcraft 2, Lords of The Realm 2, Command & Conquer, Civilization 2, Lords of Magic: Special Edition, Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos, Dune 2000, UFO: Enemy Unknown Collector's Edition
©2013 San Pedro Software Inc. Contact: 
, done in 0.018 seconds.