I'm a big fan of strategy games, and judging by the sales of such titles as Master of Orion, Warlords II, and Civilization, it seems I'm far from alone. Game publishers seem to know this since they've flooded the market with strategy games. Unfortunately, most of them offer nothing really new to the genre, or to game players, for that matter. Still, once in a while a truly original title will come along. Such was the case about a year and a half ago when Virgin and Westwood Studios got together and released Dune II, which became one of my favorite games in the known universe. Here was a strategic war game with a twist -- real time play. Few war games run in real time, because of the extreme difficulty of giving orders to large amounts of units while the clock is ticking and the enemy is advancing. By its design, Dune II was well-suited for real time play, since its units had a limited amount of artificial intelligence, and the majority of them ended up being grouped into one monstrous army, making them easier to keep track of. Since the release of Dune II, few war games have followed into the realm of real time play, and most of those that have learned to regret it. Now, finally, another high quality real time strategic war game is on the horizon, in the form of Blizzard Entertainment's Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. This game so closely mirrors Dune II's interface and play mechanic that you'd swear it was developed by the same team. Don't get me wrong; I'm not criticizing Warcraft as a knock-off. Quite the opposite, Blizzard should be praised for realizing this type of game's potential and running with a ball everyone else has fumbled. Instead of a science fiction theme, Warcraft is based in a medieval fantasy world. You command either an army of humans or an army of orcs, with the express goal of bashing the opposing tribe's brains in. To accomplish this, you will use spearmen, catapults, knights, wizards, and a host of other warmongering things. First, though, you'll have to build your war machine from the ground up. You start out the game with a few farms and a few peasants. Farms produce more peasants, and that's all they do. Peasants are initially useless for war, since they can't attack, but they can build and repair structures. The most important structure is the barracks, which is needed to train your peasants into soldiers with a lust for blood. A barracks alone will only allow you to create grunts, which aren't that effective except as cannon fodder, so you'll have to employ some of those skills you learned in SimCity and build some more structures. In combination with the basic barracks, these extra buildings will allow you to create more interesting and useful units with which to shatter the enemy's skulls. Adding a lumber mill will allow you to train your peasants as spearmen; although still rather puny, they can strike at a distance, which is nice. A lumber mill and a blacksmith lets you build catapults, which are slow in the making and even slower once they've been told to move, but what they can do to your enemy is just beautiful. The inclusion of kennels gives you the ability to produce knights, the elite fighting cavalry of the game. Human knights are of the typical do-gooder sort, while orcish knights are monstrous figures mounted on wolves. Good attention to detail has given each army type a distinctive look, and human and orc troops differ accordingly in appearance. The interface of Warcraft is very similar to that of Dune II. Left-clicking on a unit or structure makes it the active piece and ready for orders. An information panel on the left side of the screen gives you all the pertinent details about the active unit, including a progress bar if something is being constructed or trained. Movement is a simple affair: Just click on the piece to move and then on its destination. The extremely simple point-and-click interface carries over to building and attacking as well, and makes the game wonderfully simple to operate, even in real time. One improvement over Dune II is the way in which units are grouped and ungrouped. In that previous game, you had to send one unit to another's exact location, and the system didn't work too well. In Warcraft, anyone who can use a mouse with one hand and hit a key with another can easily assemble unified squadrons of pain and carnage. Simply click on one unit, hold down the SHIFT key, and click on all the other units you want to group together. A box will surround each unit to let you know that they are all waiting for a common order. The units can be ungrouped simply by clicking on one of the units and giving it new orders. In the heat of real time battle, this system is bound to gain heaps of praise from all who play the game. To give this game a further edge on its competition, Blizzard has decided to make Warcraft a CD-ROM only game. To take advantage of the extra storage space, they will add extensive between-mission cinematics filled with digitized speech and animation. Digitized speech is also used extensively in the game itself, with each unit giving audible confirmation of your orders. A digital audio soundtrack will also accompany the action, and should add greatly to the tone of the game. If Blizzard adds modem play, we've got a surefire hit here! Any fan of Dune II should go nuts over Warcraft, and its fantasy setting is likely to rope in some neophytes as well. Its graphics and sound are excellent, and they are but garnishes on an excellent game engine. An early glimpse at this product suggests that Blizzard has done nothing but improve upon their influences, and the result should be one of the best strategy games of the year. Expected to ship before Christmas, Warcraft: Orcs and Humans looks to be a fast-paced, addictive strategy offering that should enthrall players for a long time to come.