Let Chaos Reign: time to go down the foxhole and into the Orc Burrow. (The Game Room).

BLIZZARD ENTERTAINMENT IS NEITHER THE LARGEST NOR the most prolific game developer on the planet, but it is one of the most influential. And that's easy to understand: the company's real-time strategy games are fun to play, immersive, and incredibly well produced. Nowhere is Blizzard's commitment to detail--and to the Mac--more evident than in its most recent release, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos.

Orc-Barrel Politics

Warcraft III is the latest installment in the game series that's largely responsible for popularizing the real-time strategy genre. It's the first full Blizzard game that has shipped simultaneously for both Mac OS and Windows (both versions are included on the same CD-ROM). And it sets itself apart from the gaming competition in myriad ways, most impressively by incorporating one of the most fantastically rich and detailed level editors you could ever hope to find, so you can create your own games from scratch.

The game returns you to the war-torn world of Azeroth, a land populated by humans and a menagerie of bizarre and terrible fantasy creatures. Humans have battled mainly with the bellicose and mighty Orcs over the decades (and in the two previous games in the Warcraft series), but these are not the only species now vying for control of the land. Night Elves have also come to the fore, along with a shambling army of horrifying undead creatures collectively called the Scourge.

To master previous installments of Warcraft, and its real-time strategy cousin Blizzard's Starcraft, players have come up with a fairly simple formula for success: harvest as many resources as possible in the shortest amount of time possible, amass troops, and hurl as many of them as possible at the enemy. Starcraft junkies are intimately familiar with "Zerg rushing," as it's called. There's an element of that in Warcraft m, but the game's designers have altered the formula to include what Blizzard calls "role-playing strategy."

Warcraft III's single-player scenario focuses much more on individual troop movements and small skirmishes than on epic battles. You control heroes- advanced warriors with special spell-casting abilities…