Monkey Boy just got Warcraft 3. We just played. I just beat him.

This is a rather odd occurrence, and not one that will likely be soon repeated.

He’s consistently better than I at StarCraft. Always was. First-person shooters, too. I just don’t have the reflexes to compete.

In a week or so, once he’s got the hang of W3, he’ll be schooling me without breaking a sweat.

I miss Warcraft 2. The game was slow, slow to the point where it became boring at times, but as a result it was a much different game. In StarCraft or Warcraft 3, manual dexterity plays a large and central role - being able to micro-manage your units and buildings allow you to produce more productively, and thus crush your opponent more… crushingly.

Warcraft 2 had much less frantic clicking involved, and as a result there was more room for strategy. I would routinely kill Monkey Boy, often by sailing around him and building a camp right behind his main town. It was funny, and it was fun, and it was possible because the management aspects of the game were sufficiently simplistic that I could devote the majority of my efforts to strategic planning and troop movements, rather than making sure my peons were chopping down trees appropriately.

I’ll say it again: I miss Warcraft 2.

In many ways it’s similar to the argument I had with Chum on CSMGA about the Clan Lord user interface several years back; my position is that the game should be modified to counteract the failings of the human-computer interface. His position was that those failings are a part of the game, and are an intentional attempt at increasing the difficulty. He’s still wrong. Clan Lord doesn’t want to be Quake, it wants to be chess. So does Warcraft.

Do you really think that me being stronger or faster has anything to do with my muscles, in this place?