I know there are some press here who have the game already, and for the rest of you it’s shipping really soon, so:
Go to “custom game”, which is basically skirmish mode, and look inside the “Scenarios” folder in the map select.
There are two things there, and they’re both pretty damn cool. Particularly the thing that’s sorta like Gauntlet.
Some guy on the Gone Gold boards bought a copy yesterday at Best Buy. Some manager put them out early, I guess.
My roommate works at Fry’s and he said that they’ve been selling it to people who ask for it. Interesingly enough they (and a number of other Fry’s stores) are staying open until 1:30am so they can put the game on sale at midnight. Crazy, you’d think the game is a movie premier or something.
With alleged multiple million preorders, it’s the closest thing to a big hollywood movie premiere that computer gaming’s gonna see for a while.
Yeah, Blizzard releases really have become events. I guess some videogame releases in Japan are similar, but over there really isn’t anything quite like it.
I think Final Fantasy or Mario or Zelda would be pretty big in Japan… probably even bigger than anything Blizzard releases… except in Korea. I think its mandated in Korean law that you buy everthing Blizzard makes!
etc
I’ll admit-- I was very skeptical about this game, but it’s proved to be far more than the 3D rehash of Warcraft II that I expected it to be.
You can think of WC3 as the summation of everything Blizzard has learned about the RTS genre in WC2 and StarCraft, plus a bunch of good concepts stolen from other popular RTS titles. Sure, it’s only evolutionary, but you have to admire the way this game manages to claw its way to the top of the food chain.
One thing that’s bugging me. What the hell is up with the crappy lip-synching on the character portraits? The muppets were more realistic than this. And the worst one of all is that prophet guy-- he looks like his entire lower jaw was shot full of novocaine. It’s downright creepy.
Yeah, I’m kind of disapointed that there’s no lip-synching on those. I mean it’s not bad - it’s not there! They just have the portraits play a “talking” animation and it doesn’t match up with anything. It supports the half-cartoonish sort of look, but it just feels way off to me.
If by “similar” you mean that the Warcraft 3 release is like the early Dragon Warrior releases where so many schoolkids cut class the day it was released (to go buy and play the game) that they had to shut school down and declare the day a national holiday, I wholeheartedly agree.
Not to call your credibility into question, Brian, but that sounds like an urban legend. Japan declared the day of the release of a Dragon Warrior game a national holiday? Where did you hear this?
-TomI was lucky enough to find my source without much digging…
http://www.gamespy.com/halloffame/february02/dw/index2.shtm
I got my facts wrong, although the meaning was pretty much equivalent…
(From William Cassidy’s Gamespy Article)…
“The Dragon Quest series was so popular in Japan that people refused to go to work or school on the days that new games were released. This became such a problem that the Japanese legislature passed a law requiring Enix to release new Dragon Quest games only on Sundays or holidays.”
This sort of thing does NOT happen in the United States, which was my point. And it can’t simply be accounted for by a more hands-off policy of government and business in the US ;).
This sort of thing does NOT happen in the United States, which was my point.
Fair enough. I knew gaming was a more widely accepted pursuit in Japan and Korea, but I was a bit skeptical about it being linked to a national holiday.
The Fry’s Electronics up the street from me (Burbank) is going to be open from 11pm to 1am tomorrow to sell Warcraft III. I think I’m going to be there to see what kind of freaks show up. Besides me, I mean.
-Tom