I can’t deny it – I’ve used a lot of different excuses for delayed columns before, including everything from a lack of sleep to having simply way too much other work to get done, and even the sudden, I Need to Sit on a Beach in Florida NOW Excuse once. All in the same, I’ve never pinned the blame on anything in the video game genre, until now. Sure, I was a huge Nintendo geek in my younger years and many a summer passed without me ever seeing the light of day, but I outgrew that phase, or at least I thought I did! Nevertheless, it was all brought back so quickly when I got my hands on a copy of the latest craze and I soon knew that it was time to adjust my priorities a little…

Although I don’t want this to sound completely like a game review, I must say that all of the rave commentaries you’ve heard this far are absolutely true – Warcraft 3 is an amazing entertainment creation which should stand proudly amongst anyone’s gaming collection, even if they don’t have one! Admittedly, I was a bit leery when I saw my first looks of this game – I have loved the first two installments in the series and even took to the space-age hit Starcraft, but I quickly got bored with Blizzard’s other major hit, Diablo, simply because I wasn’t fond of the single hero-based interface, and I had noticed that the third chapter of the Warcraft series boasted this same feature. Nevertheless, I was extremely happy to find that the single hero jig has been kept to a minimum, allowing me to continue the trend of amassing a gigantic army of peons to crush my opponent…

As far as the multimedia features are concerned, I was pretty much blown away by the presentation and I’m still working my way through the bulk of the game! I do most of my playing on my laptop, so it’s hard to grasp the wow-factor of the audio soundtrack, but man, the graphics certainly make up for it! The layers involved with the multitude of effects throughout this experience are simply too numerous to count and the scenery does just about everything it can to push your system to its limit! I’m not even running the graphics options at their maximum right now (because I don’t know if my system can handle it…), but the depth of detail in the rainstorm that I’m seeing now is definitely enough to keep me inside for the afternoon – add in a surround sound system and I can assume that you’d feel like you’re right in the middle of it. Even the cinematic breaks that used to run in a tiny 2”x2” window now are run at nearly full screen in feature-film quality, at least for animation, that is. Granted, I’ve been out of the gaming scene for a little while and perhaps full-sized videos are the norm now, but I was nonetheless pleased to be presented with a plot director that I didn’t have to squint at in order to understand it! Don’t get me wrong, though – this game is certainly anything but easy on your computer – I’m running it on a 1 Ghz/256 MB RAM/GeForce2 system and there’s not a lick of multitasking going on during my game…but if I’m gaming, what else should I really be running anyways, right?

So what exactly makes this one so intriguing, you may ask? Well, other than the dazzling bells and whistles, which have been amusing my kind for quite some time, this game is simply very playable for me. I would have loved to say that it does a wonderful job at fueling my hatred for orcs, because I really don’t care for those fellows, but the opening scene actually put me in an orc’s shoes, or whatever orcs wear on their feet, so it made it a bit difficult to hate the very creatures which I was attempting to bring to victory! Yep, I cried as I heard the first death-cry as we marched upon the humans’ homeland, but then bloodlust set in and I was pretty much content with killing things in general…except for the bunnies! Unless they start chasing my soldiers with blood-soaked fangs in a Python-esque manner, I just can’t kill the bunnies…

Well, there it is – my completely humor-less humor column about Warcraft 3. I had been somewhat hoping that I might stumble across a hint of amusing orc-related material here or there, but I think I’m really just rambling on to fill my word-count so that I can get back to the game…that oughta just about do it!

Buy Warcraft 3 today…it brought me back into the world of gaming after far too many years, so stock up the mini-fridge, lock the doors and prepare to completely destroy whatever little social life you may already have…now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some orcs to slay!