Among the popular decks that played in the rush-tastic tournament were Shadow Priest and Balance Druid decks. These decks sported heavy-hitting Horde allies and key abilities that served as catalysts for furious beats.

The games feature a hero building system which preceded Warcraft III's own one and combine real time strategy elements with roleplaying elements (hero development stats and skills) thus making its creator labelling the series as 'roleplaying strategy' games.

Blizzard gave us quite a pleasant surprise this evening when the company announced that the highly anticipated beta test of World of Warcraft was imminent. World of Warcraft has been on legions of gamers' most-wanted lists since it was announced back in 2001.Fortunately, we managed to download the massive file without incident and zealously installed and dove right into the game to quickly check out as much of the game world as possible to report back to you with our findings.

Hopefully sometime soon, developer Blizzard Entertainment will launch World of Warcraft, its massively multiplayer online role-playing game set in the fantasy-themed world in which the developer's strategy games take place. Like other massively multiplayer games, World of Warcraft will let you play as a single character from a specific race (like a human or a fantasy archetype, such as an elf, a dwarf, or an orc), and then it will let you venture in to an online world to fight monsters, perform quests, and acquire treasure and experience levels with other like-minded players.

Though a few features, such as talent trees for the paladin and hunter classes, have yet to be implemented, Blizzard has clearly moved into the polishing phase of its World of Warcraft beta test.

World of Warcraft wasn't a performance monster when Blizzard first released the game in late 2004. Players with modest and even mediocre systems could all get passable frame rates in Azeroth. Blizzard has stated that World of Warcraft will eventually get graphical improvements to keep the game up to date, but those changes aren't coming in the game's first expansion pack, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. With 8 million subscribers and growing, you don't need to push out advanced graphics and raise hardware requirements just yet.

With more than 7 million active worldwide subscribers, World of Warcraft continues to be a phenomenon. A lot's changed in the land of Azeroth since we at GameSpot named World of Warcraft our 2004 Game of the Year, but only now is developer Blizzard Entertainment readying a full-on retail expansion pack.

It's been a long two years since Blizzard unleashed World of Warcraft on a gaming world that was apparently primed to receive it. While some massively multiplayer games had done well before WoW hit store shelves in November of 2004, none had achieved anything like the unprecedented success of Warcraft. As one of the biggest smash hits in PC gaming history, whether online or off, World of Warcraft has taken on a life of its own, increasing its worldwide subscriber rolls to eight million players in the last two years.

Blizzard's highly anticipated massively multiplayer game World of Warcraft is about to launch. When it does, players will finally be able to create a single character from one of eight fantasy races, step into the highly popular world in which the Warcraft strategy series takes place, and then go off on adventures with thousands of other players.

World of Warcraft Content Updated Impressions - The Dungeon of Zul'Aman We take a sneak peek at some upcoming content for one of the most popular online games in the world.