Retro Games Beaten

It's still impressive to me in that instance. It took considerable SGW effort and clever programming to make those visuals possible. And the game still looks good today, both technically and aesthetically. It's colorful yet moody, cartoonish yet sullen.

Yeah, at a minimum I know Land is new content, but with similar themes. The Color, of course, got an actual port instead. I haven't actually played that one, though.

Warcraft 2 Beyond the Dark Portal is HARD. AS far as I can tell it’s mostly the same game engine, units, sound effects, etc. as Tides of Darkness, but they take the kid gloves off and mercilessly ramp up the difficulty. Personally I felt the 3rd stage in Dark Portal was as difficult as the very final stage in Tides of Darkness (the human campaign for both). In Dark Portal I had to attempt stage 3 over 40 times before I prevailed. It forced me to view the battle space differently and to play mean, using premeditated strategies to poke holes in the computer AI. One such strategy involved building lots and lots guard towers, making this almost like a tower defense game. I also learned to skip straight ahead to the infrastructure necessary to train Paladins capable of casting heal and mages capable of casting blizzard. I couldn’t use this combo on every single map, but the enemy AI couldn’t seem to get the upper hand on me when I employed these two unit types together. I quickly grew to see the upgrade path investments for archers and infantrymen as useless and I stopped wasting my gold on them.

Dark Portal’s gameplay loop reminded me a lot NES gaming, as I had to memorize each map like a finely tuned choreography and die again and again before finally prevailing. Dark Portal was full of “How was I supposed to know that?” moments that I had to just commit to memory in my next attempt. Dark Portal was also challenging to work into my schedule because each successful completion of a stage took a minimum one and a half hours of time. The longest one took over three hours. This made it hard to play on weekday evenings, making me instead play on weekends when my day was more open. This is probably because I would often win by attrition, forcing the enemy AI into a series of conflicts where their losses were more costly than mine. Sustaining this approach over time would cause them to go bankrupt, allowing me to move in take their fortifications. But another reason each stage took so long was my reluctance to save scum. If I had used the save feature more often maybe I could have beaten certain stages over several afternoons. But I wanted to beat them in one uninterrupted take, not “rewind the clock” whenever I messed up.

Dark Portal also drives the point home for me the we lost something precious to the gaming world when Blizzard got more corporate in later years. Aside from brimming with personality and charm, Warcraft 2 has some ineffable quality that makes me want to sit down and play it despite its difficulty and its disregard for my personal time. This is a very special game. I intend to play Warcraft 3 for the first time ever this year and I will probably tackle Warcraft 2: Beyond the Dark Portal’s orc campaign once I’ve had enough of a break from this recent beat.

Congrats getting through that, anayo. It didn't dawn on me that you were playing the expansion - I'm not overly familiar with Warcraft and all its variants. It does, though, make sense that an expansion would take things to 11 on difficulty, though, even if it sometimes feels a bit disingenuous to amp things up that much. But that's what some folks probably wanted out of it, especially if they're the type that thought the original was easy. I'm guessing there were some abusable mechanics in the original game that were almost required for the followup. In some ways, I bet it's also a little like trying to clear a Fire Emblem map without losing characters; you have to know what's coming to minimize your chances of losing a character. Although I'd expect the real-time nature of this makes playing "cautiously" less a concern, and more playing "efficiently".