Hello everyone, and welcome to "Hot Keys", a blog series I'll be doing about my love and history with the RTS genre. I've been playing these games for a long time, and I'd like to share with everyone why I thought they were so amazing. Hopefully you'll enjoy it, and please direct all comments, questions, and critcisms to the comments section. And, now I present my first installment on the game that started it all: Age of Empires.

Have you ever played an RTS? If you have, then you know the feeling of constant anxiety, watching your mouse dance across the screen, clicking like mad and pressing buttons to gather resources to pump out units to go kill the other guy, while making sure he doesn't kill you first. Hopefully, like myself, you enjoy playing them. The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat, the little unit icons and the dialogue they produce when clicked! All are part of the wonderful dance of death played online (or the versus AI, that's fine too) against some 5 year old Korean who will Zerg rush you into oblivion. I don't actually play on the Korean SCII servers, but I know this would happen.

Well, I love them so much I wanted to write about them, and reexamine my history of playing games. I play StarCraft II and Dawn of War II mostly nowadays, but looking back, I have played a ton of these games, starting with Ensemble Studios' groundbreaking title, Age of Empires. I remember first playing Age of Empires at my Uncle's house either in 1998 or 1999, and I remember the start screen, staring an indecipherable menus. I must have played with the menu alone for 10 minutes trying to play the game. Eventually, I clicked a button that put me in a game, and all I remember after that is asking to borrow the game to play at home, I loved it so much.

Age of Empires plays like a "normal" RTS. You have a town center to make villagers who can gather resources to build structures like barracks, a siege workshop, etc. to build units out of. One thing I remember liking a lot was that there were 4 art styles for the different factions (Egyptian, Asian, Greek, and Babylonian), and each style had 3 factions. My personal favorite was the Phoenicians, because they could train hoplite troops that upgraded into Phalanxes that looked so awesome, with their cool armor and lances, and they could make war elephants. That's right, WAR ELEPHANTS. They also had awesome galleons that could just wreck anything that came in their path. I would even just play the game just to look at all the different models, or would only build one type of unit (usually the aforementioned WAR ELEPHANTS) and try to win. The ballistas were also cool, since they were just autonomous crossbows of death that also made a great "whoosh" noise when they fired.

Another fun thing about Age of Empires is that, like most RTS's, had a unit cap. In this game is was capped at 50 units, including workers. However, if a unit was in the process of being trained when you hit the cap, it would just read 51/50 and you couldn't build any more units until it went under 50 again. This meant that if one were to say, oh, I don't know, try to train 15 extra catapults before the supply cap went from 49 to 50, one would end up with 15 catapults over the unit cap. Eventually, I started racing to see how many extra units I could pump out before I passed the cap, which meant that I had to click like crazy on all my buildings to build those extra units.

To add further intrigue, buildings could only queue up one unit at a time, and you had to re-click the building to build another unit! So I built like 50 stables or siege workshops in huge lines, trying to click on all of them before time ran out. This was before I knew what mouse sensitivity or hot keys were, so just imagine an eight year old kid mashing the left mouse button on a slow trackball mouse, trying to make that extra catapult to kill the enemies that barely built any defenses because back then AI was kinda crap. I had so much fun just turtling up and crushing non existent threats to my global domination, taking over all island maps, feeling like I was some heroic conqueror of the ancient world.

Age of Empires was my first foray into the RTS genre, and I continued along happily, until I somehow discovered that there was an Age of Empires II. No joke, the first time I ever found Wikipedia (back in like 2001), the first thing I looked up was Age of Empires, and I found that there was a second one. But that's a post for another day. Well, thanks for reading, and I hope I've made you understand just a little bit why this was such a great game. See you next time, where I will analyze the sequel: Age of Empires II: Age of Kings.