World of Warcraft (PC Games, 2004)

Like the title says, this is probably the best game ever to date.

You pay ~$50 to buy the game (unless you get it for less on eBay), ~$15/month to play it, and have to get broadband and a decent computer to play. You also have to download a 30GB patch when they improve the game every couple of months. Despite all this, 4.5 MILLION PEOPLE worldwide have played this game. At any given time, a half million people are playing this game. That should tell you something.

I never played an "MMORPG" and didn't even really know what one was prior to this game. For those of you wondering, MMORPG stands for "Massive Multi-player Online Role Playing Game" and I bet they use the acronym because it sounds a lot cooler than what it stands for and people won't look at you like you're a geek or dork from the 80s who used to play D&D.

So how do you play? Players create characters which they play in the online world. When creating a character in World of Warcraft, the player can choose from eight different races and nine different character classes.

From wikipedia:

The races are split into two equally sized factions, the Alliance and the Horde:

The Alliance consists of Humans, Night Elves, Dwarves, and Gnomes.
The Horde consists of Orcs, Tauren, Undead, and Trolls.
Additionally, there are many NPC races such as Goblins, Ogres, High Elves and Murlocs.

The nine available classes are Druid, Hunter, Mage, Paladin, Priest, Rogue, Shaman, Warlock and Warrior. Two of the classes are faction-specific: Paladins for the Alliance and Shamans for the Horde.

Once you choose a character, you go around killing monsters, doing quests, and making "money" in the game to buy better equipment and make your character more powerful. Blizzard has done a great job to make this incredibly addictive.

What's more, Blizzard just revealed that they will be issuing the first expansion pack (timing TBD, but probably sometime in 2006). It will be called World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. It will include an increased level cap (up to 70 from 60), a new crafting profession, and two new races, including blood elves for the Horde!