Underneath that funny veneer of quotable characters was a game with a great deal of depth. Towns ended up becoming sprawling, complicated affairs toward the latter stages of a match. Most of all, though, the game oozed personality due to its rousing orchestral soundtrack, voice acting, and sound effects, which remain memorable and recognizable to fans of the game. Lots of fans actually played Warcraft II online back then, thanks to a third-party network-hack application called Kali, which allowed for online play of Warcraft II at a time when Internet connectivity wasn't nearly as widespread as it is today. Warcraft II had it all-from a cinematic and compelling single-player campaign with memorable characters to a flexible and addictive multiplayer component that really set the game apart from the competition. Like Westwood's military-style game, however, Blizzard's Warcraft II vaulted the genre to the forefront of PC gaming, alongside first-person shooters. Dune II was already three years old, but Command & Conquer had just been released, so the full potential of the genre wasn't widely known. When Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness was released in late 1995, the real-time strategy genre was in its infancy. The service still exists today, but with every online game offering server browsers and matchmaking (even a rerelease of Warcraft II that works over ), there's not much reason to use it, other than for certain old DOS games that don't have online capability. With the release of Diablo, however, every Blizzard game thereafter included online matchmaking out of the box through its own service, which marginalized the value of Kali. Still, there were enough people playing Warcraft II online that, in many ways, Kali truly was before there was a. Since the community was so small, it tended to be very cliquish, making it difficult to gain respect with the longtime veterans if you were a relative newcomer.

Kali worked for other IPX-only games as well, but Warcraft II was definitely one of the most popular games that worked with the software. You had to pay a one-time fee for the software but had unlimited use of the service, allowing you to join chat rooms and link up with other Warcraft II players. Kali is a network hack that tricks a computer into thinking it's looking for LAN opponents over IPX, when it's actually connecting to opponents across the Internet. How was this possible? The answer was a third-party application called Kali. Yet the game was still enjoyed by thousands of players online. LAN play was possible through either a null modem connection or the IPX protocol, which allowed for up to eight-player action. The original Warcraft II did not ship with online multiplayer capability.

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