Age of Empires : Gold Edition

For those not in the know, the original Age of Empires took the RTS (real-time strategy) format out of strategy geekdom and, thanks to excellent presentation, made it a bestseller amongst the casual gamers.

In your average RTS game you control 'units' (people, animals etc. that belong to you) that can build, fight or gather resources. Biuldings are generally of three types; unit generators (barracks, stables), research buildings (libraries etc.) or defensive structures (walls, towers). Each type of unit (villager, soldier etc.) has a set of statistics associated with it that decide its fate should it get into battle. Some units also have particular abilities that a dd variety to the gameplay.

In AoE, you are responsible for developing a race of ancients all the way to the iron age. Wich civilisation you play (Egytian, Babylonian, Sumerian, Assyrian) effects the availability and abilities of your units and research, giving each race certain istorically appropriate characteristics (Assyrians, for example, are particularly good at archery, ther archers therefore have a 'bonus', allowing them to do more damage and fire more arrows).

At the time of its inseption, AoE offered very few innovations to the genre, in fact it was even critisized for ommitting certain 'standard' features, pincipally the ability to group military units into combat formations, wich, combined with poor unit AI, lead to some critisism from reviewers.

What saved AoE was its presentation. OK so the (somewhat minimal) cut scenes look pretty dated, and the 'Campaigns' (groups of missions supposedly following a coherent storyline) were always a little uninspriring, but the game engine is still looking good.

The graphics on AoE are fantastic; the scenery and buildings are clearly drawn and very easy on the eye and the units move around with a quality of animation that (oddly) puts the sequel 'Age of Kings' to shame. The interface is intuative and instantly accessable even to those never having played this type of game before. The lack of complexity for which AoE was originally critisised reduces confusion cosiderably and maximises the fun element, probably the very reason it did so well!

The 'Gold Edition' includes the 'Rise of Rome' expansion. The expansion adds a few more units, more campaigns, a scenario builder, and irons out various gameplay and AI glitches in found in the original. The ammendments are also applied to the original AoE, wich is good because you wonder how on *earth* people managed without some of the improvements, like 'build queues'; the ability to pre-order a chosen number of units from a unit production building, wich was not possible in the original game!

As well as playing the campaigns, you can also play a 'random map', taking your civilisation from scratch to rule the entire map. This is a much better idea generally. For a start, the gameplay seems designed for this type of 'open ended' scenario, rather than a fixed storyline (wich is probably why the Campaigns don't work so well).. there are also so many options regarding map size, terrain type, number of opponents etc., that add an infinate amount of variety.

Compared with subsequent RTS games, including its own sequel, AoE still offers a superb gaming experience. The graphics are, in many cases, better than those of conteporary RTS games (so much so it makes you wonder what happened), and the gameplay, although not very 'realistic', is fun and intuitive.. just dont expect much high brow strategy.