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I'm gonna be honest with you, when I actually start thinking about Age of Empires, I mean when, for whatever reason, I look back and start seriously thinking about the time I spent with Age of Empires... I tend to get a bit teary eyed. Hell, I'm starting to just now. If there was a franchise that impacted my development more than any other, it was this. I'll probably save it for a blog post, but Age of Empires really is something special to me, and that all started with the original Age of Empires. I was probably playing this game at the age of 6, it was the beginning of a lot of things to come. From the first AoE I remember collecting artifacts, island hopping and the Yamato single player scenario. I also remember that AoE was actually where I was first introduced to Arnold's famous line "I'll be back", as it was the name of one of the chapters in singleplayer.
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Rise of Rome is the continuation of my love of the original Age of Empires. How much do I actually remember of these original games? Probably not a lot. I do remember the ruins you could explore in the early game, I remember the armored war elephants that I thought were the fucking best, and the fire triremes. Hell yes the fire triremes.
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I remembered watching my dad play Warcraft II before I even started playing Age of Empires, and I remember I played a good deal of it as well. Warcraft II was a game I came back to a lot, but never really got into like I did with Age of Empires. I remember having a huge amount of difficulty beating the campaign, which I'm sure I'd find to be much, much easier now.
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I grew up a bit and got Age of Kings on Christmas.
You have no idea how happy I was that day.
I couldn't tell you enough about Age of Kings, or the later expansion, the Conquerors. I have no memories of when I was 6 years old when I played AoE 1 and I can still tell you the names of the missions, the sounds and types of the units and other random garbage. Just imagine, then, how much I could tell you about AoE 2, a game I loved even more, a game I played at an age I actually have memories of? AoE 2 is my favorite game of all time.
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Aside from all these RTS games, I played a bunch of other games too. Master of Orion, Unreal, Half Life, Myth... Warlords. It was originally a TBS game, but the third one, Battlecry, went the RTS route. It was a good game, a game I enjoyed quite a lot. It was also a game that I never went back to. I went back to Warlords II, the TBS, but never III.
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Ironically, that same Christmas I got AoE 2 I also got Starcraft. Like Warcraft II... Starcraft was something I came back to from time to time, I beat the campaign, but again I never got INTO Starcraft. AoE was RTS to me, and while I enjoyed Starcraft a TON, I just never felt like booting it up over AoE. Over time I grew to love the game, but at the time it was completely overshadowed by...
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The Conquerors.
Man.
Jaguar warriors.
I don't know how many times I've played through the Aztec campaign, I really don't. A lot, I'll tell you that much. I used to go into the map editor and make maps. I wouldn't even play them, they didn't even make sense. All I'd do is make really big armies and make them fight each other. I'd play around with the scripting to make really dopey sequences happen. I remember I had a blast though. More than a blast
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Did you know if you just sat at the title screen of Cossacks, eventually it would start a loop where it would play out major engagements, all in formation etc.? They were great. Cossacks had a lot of ideas, and a lot of them pretty much worked. Units used up amunition, and they also ate food (unless they were mercenaries, in which case they took gold upkeep), you'd have to mine for coal, iron and gold, as well as mine stone, farm, and harvest lumber. Formation mattered a lot in unit engagements, and cannons absolutely massacred shit. If a cannonball hit a horse, there wasn't any "hitpoint" shit. The horse was dead. End of story.
I still play it, actually, from time to time. I wouldn't mind a new, graphically updated Cossacks.
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Press enter type in WUV WOO. What happens?
Flying purple hippopotamus that shoots hearts.
I liked Age of Mythology so much I wrote short stories about the games I played. I would play a game on the Nile map and make up shit about the nations and what was going down.
While I was never as into Age of Mythology as the original AoE games, it's definitely one of my more favorite games.
I remember, though, that I didn't care too much for the singleplayer. I thought it wasn't enough like the older Age of Empires games, where they were largely historical. I didn't care much about that little bitch Arkantos. I thought it'd be way cooler if they had you relive certain myths, but I was dumb and a kid and what I thought was cool was rarely possible.
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Yeah, that's right. I played Red Alert 2 after I played Age of Mythology.
Sue me.
There's actually a reason for this. I'm Russian, so my parents didn't really want me to play Red Alert.
A friend gave it to me for my birthday, though, so what were they going to do? I played it. I thought it was fun. By this point though I had already played games that... well... were better. I did like the humor, though. And I liked how Apocalypse Tanks absolutely wrecked shit.
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