So once again I'm playing way too much Warcraft 2. I sit down to play for a little while and a few hours later I realize I need to get back to work. I'm playing so much that my hand is starting to hurt, a sure sign of mouse-itis.

I have a fair number of computer games, although I don't buy many. They've just accumulated over the years. And every year or two I seem to restart and go back to all the old games that are still fun. No fancy graphics or multimedia effects, just good gameplay.

One thing I'm trying to do now -- to sort of keep myself moving -- is to play all of my games and finish them all. Heck, there are quite a few games I've bought and never played, or only played for a day or two. So I figure that I should play them eventually.

For Warcraft, I'm just trying to win all of the scenarios. Then I can save the levels and store them somewhere, so I remember that I've actually already played this game to its conclusion. I'm playing the "Beyond the Dark Portal" expansion set, having already finished the regular Warcraft 2 scenarios.

Warcraft was a fun game, Warcraft 2 is better. Blizzard improved the graphics, screen area, unit types, and gameplay. I'm not too sure about Warcraft 3 though, which will be released soon. 3d fighting a la Bungie's Myth seems a little too much. Game publishers need to make each sequel better than the last, but sometimes you get featuritis -- too much emphasis on a checklist of features, not enough on usability and gameplay.

Anyway, the BDE scenarios are harder than the base Warcraft 2 levels. The levels are better designed such as the computer has a lot of resources and just keeps attacking. A lot of levels have the computer focused on aerial units, which is one of its weaknesses.

I'm playing the humans and my general strategy is to get eight peasants so I collect a lot of resources. Then I build up quickly. The objective is to get good archers and knights to fight the dragons. Once the knights become paladins then I can heal units and I stop losing them. Another goal is to get wizards with polymorph and ice storm, polymorph to quickly kill dragons and ice storm because it has a longer range than catapults.

Find the next gold mine you'll need to exploit before you drain your current gold mine. In general, you need to find it early and get some units there to hold it. A lot of times the computer uses up its gold mines and starts sending its peasants to exploit your gold mines. With a few archers guarding, I can kill the computer peasants and slowly drain his built up stockpile of resources.

Basic strategy for orcs differs slightly. Find the gold mines, still. Concentrate on Ogre Magi with bezerk. Trolls to defend against aerial units, no death knights as I don't like their spells. A group of bezerk Ogre Magi can do an amazing amount of damage. With the orcs you do need to attack since you don't really have any healing.