Monday, June 8, 2009

Kitties Are Great, Too


- Warcraft III -

I picked up the Warcraft Battle Chest (which now contains WC3 and the expansion) a few days ago. After a few minutes of confusion due to the original game and the expansion being completely separate (I was really expecting it to be an expansion of the first game, rather than a completely separate game made with the same engine), I started playing it.

First of all, I was disappointed that the Battle Chest no longer contains WC2 (as it did the last time I remember seeing it). I was really looking forward to going way back into Warcraft history and actually seeing stuff happen instead of just reading about it. (I'd really like to play the original Warcraft, too, but I'm too lazy to find a place to order it.)

I also feel like I would be enjoying the story a lot more if I'd played it seven years ago. Since I already knew exactly what was going to happen, it didn't surprise or disappoint me at all when Arthas went evil. (I have to stare at his death knighty face almost every time I log into WoW.)


Anyway, I'm a few missions into the Undead campaign by now. I've also done a few of the Maiev missions in the expansion, and I'm working on the little Rexxar campaign thingy as well. It's really a lot more fun than the main game. I can see why people were so excited about WoW after playing it.

As for the game itself, it's pretty great. Every faction is completely different at their core, which I love. At the moment, humans are my favorite, simply because the paladin and mountain king heroes are so ridiculously powerful. Paladins are my favorite hero unit so far, although that's simply because their armor aura is awesome, and they can heal very frequently. Oddly enough, I have yet to use Divine Shield, and I've only used Mass Resurrection once (and only one unit was dead). Those are the two spells that I've heard/read people complaining about being so overpowered, but I haven't seemed to have a use for them. If I ever start doing multiplayer, I'm sure that'll change, though.



The biggest thing I don't like about the game is that it's difficult to use units' special abilities. Especially annoying is the hotkeys they chose for the abilities. Holy Light is T. Healing Wave is E. It seems like it would have been a lot easier to just make all units use the QWER keys for their abilities, and then you just hit the key based on the position of ability in their little grid thingy. The manual said you can redefine hotkeys (although you apparently have to go in and manually edit a file?), but I doubt that extends to units' abilities. Maybe I'll check later.

All-in-all, it's a great game. I'm really looking forward to getting beyond the stage where I suck so I can go and play a few games on battle.net (and get owned... at first). I can definitely see similarities between WC3 and the early patches of WoW. There are still similarities, of course, but I can now see why some of the silly stuff in early WoW was the way it was.

Wednesday, I talk about Web browsers!

-- Pawn --

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