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Most of my memories of Warcraft 2 fall somewhere on a spectrum between the fond and the ridiculous, very often featuring elements of both. It was the first game that gave me the opportunity to win a protracted battle of minds with another person; my first multiplayer victory in something that wasn't a five minute action or sports game, set up on a rudimentary home network typical of the mid 90s. We only had one CD, but that was fine. Warcraft 2 allowed you to share your copy for the purpose of multiplayer. Blizzard were a permissive bunch.It was the first game that I remember introducing ridiculous barks, those acknowledgements whenever you selected a unit or issued an order. A whole generation of PC gamers still has many of those memorised and we all knew that persistent clicking made our armies angrier and angrier. Two headed ogres began to argue. "Are you still touching me?" exclaimed frustrated soldiers. "You're making me seasick," insisted ships' captains, before the sound of relatively high-fidelity vomiting came through your speakers. The thing that you need to understand is that this never got old. To this day, "Your sound card works perfectly!" remains a phrase as popular as it is plainly declarative.
Similar repetitive clicking also made the game's sheep explode. I still don't know why these neutral units were walking about the map or what purpose they served, so perhaps they really did only exist to blow up for the amusement of puerile teenagers like myself. That was fine, we thought it was great.
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