Waging campaigns of chaos and terror from your desktop
Unless you've been living in a remote cave for the past few years, you've at least heard of wargames, particularly RTS (Real-Time Strategy) ones. In this charming little genre of time-wasters, the player assumes control of a military-type force, and proceeds to invade, pummel, and otherwise annihilate his (or occasionally even her) opponents. While said opponents can be computerized, the best wargame experience is always to be obtained by taking on other carbon-based life (generally humans) over the internet and playing head to head. Here you'll find some stuff on my favorites in this genre...
Warcraft II
My Warcraft II Pages - An older section of my site on a fairly good game that helped to popularize the genre. Check it out for various maps, bits of humor, and other junk.
Myth: The Fallen Lords is the latest offering from Bungie, makers of the ever-awesome series of Marathon games (same genre as Doom/Quake, but with a plot, story, atmosphere, and (*gasp*) originality), comes Myth, a new paradigm in wargames. Myth features actual 3D terrain and troops (including a realistic physics model and severed body parts that can be kicked around and even picked up), with a camera that can be rotated a full 360 degrees and flown over the landscape, wickedly cool units that avoid old cliches, great networking from a technical (speed) viewpoint, and a wide variety of game options, from Capture the Flag to Last Man on the Hill and more. I was lucky enough to beta-test this one, and it was beyond incredible. If you get no other wargame, get this one!
PlayMyth.net - Patches for all the games in the Myth series and a multi-player hosting service.
StarCraft was the much-delayed and over-hyped follow-up to WarCraft II. While it has some nice features, such as three seperate races (instead of the standard two), each with unique abilites and completely different systems of advancement, it's nothing groundbreaking.
