Recently Microsoft re-released AOE 2 as “Age of Empires 2 HD” on steam, taking the opportunity to fix up the above issues and port the game to newer DirectX versions and adding in Steam support providing better multiplayer support.
Whilst AOE 2 still ran on modern Windows, the game was showing it’s age with issues like hard coded resolutions (800×600 or 1024×768 anyone?), assumption of an optical media drive for the music to be loaded from and dated multiplayer functions. I started playing it back as a young noobling on Windows 98 with a Celeron 433mhz machine and loved the perfect balance the game achieved between simplicity and flexibility.ĪOE 2 offered a large number of different civilisations with different research options, yet once you learnt the basics, it was quick and easy to pick up the rest and run with it – generally it made for a very fun game, both against the AI but also against friends multiplayer over a 10mbit LAN. It’s been a few years since I’d last played it, but Age of Empires is still one of my all time favourite games.
