ESRB Rating: Teen (13+) - Animated Blood, Animated Violence
System Requirements: 120 MHz 604 processor, 150 MHz 603 processor, or any G3, 32 MB RAM, 70 MB HD space, CD-ROM drive; For network play: 28.8 Kbps modem, open transport, 150 MHz 604 processor highly recommended.
 
Build an Empire and Rule the Ancient World
About 12,000 years ago, the frozen earth from the last ice age thawed, allowing for the first great human civilizations to be born. In Age of Empires, you begin with the ancestors of the great empires of the ancient world and lead them from stone-age tribes to their destiny as a great society… in theory anyway. There are plenty of other fledgling civilizations who would just love to take your place in history.
Age of Empires, at http://www.wizworks.com/macsoft/aoe/aoe.html , a game originally created by Microsoft and Ensemble Studios and brought to the Macintosh by MacSoft, at http://www.wizworks.com/macsoft/ , is a highly detailed simulation featuring 12 of the important cultures of the past. Your job is to help the tribe survive and thrive as you develop technology, culture, and military prowess to protect your allies and obliterate your foes.
 
Gameplay
The game screen in Age of Empires consists of a main window with menu bar and bottom tasks window. The main window is where all of the action takes place and uses up about 80% of the screen. The bottom window shows information and all of the possible actions and tasks that can be taken with or by the selected object. The top menu shows what technological age you are in and gives options to pull up a diplomatic screen (used to determine your feelings toward the other civilizations in the game) and a settings screen.
You begin the game with a certain amount of resources, including food, wood, stone, gold, villagers, soldiers, and buildings. Every advancement uses resources. For example, creating another villager costs you 50 units of food. Unlike other games, resources are only used when creating, building, healing, or repairing, so that villager you've just created will never eat again. The initial investment was all you need to make. Don't you wish raising children were like that?
 
A villager may chop down trees, hunt and gather food, mine, or harvest a field. You make villagers do this merely by selecting the villager and selecting the object on or in which he is to work, such as a forest or a deer. In order to build, you select a villager and choose the building type from the tasks menu, then click on the location you wish the building to be constructed. Other people can be manipulated in the same way, and even grouped so that you may change their tasks without having to select each villager individually.
Overall, the game concept is simple and you pick up on what you can and cannot do fairly quickly. The only frustrating part of learning the game is the artificial intelligence which controls your villagers once you've set a task for them. I'll go into more detail on the artificial intelligence later.
 
The game can be won in several ways. In scenarios, you're given specific goals, such as "destroy the Hittite guard towers or advance to the bronze age." You can also play games with a goal of achieving a certain number of points, determined by technology, military might, economy, and your effect on other tribes. The object of each game can vary quite a bit, and that keeps the game from being too repetitive.
 
Controls
For the most part, Age of Empires is a mouse-controlled game, but players are offered two options: keyboard and mouse or mouse only. With the keyboard option, you select people and buildings, choose tasks, then command-click on the destination and everything goes. A mouse-only method involves the same clicking for selection but also involves a second click at the destination. The second method confused me at first, and I was constantly trying to click away to deselect a builder, but instead ended up telling him to go there.
 
Graphics and Sound
Audio and visual effects are rather hit and miss in Age of Empires. Overall, the graphics are excellent. There are obvious distinctions between different technologies and cultures from around the world. You'll never confuse different buildings for the wrong thing and the different characters within the game are all unique. Different grades of archers stand apart so you know who you're clicking and what he can accomplish. Even the trees stand out as different species.
Video effects were very inconsistent. The beginning of each scenario has a 30-second video to detail the civilization. Some of them looked great and well-planned while others were vague, confusing, and utterly useless. The main problem was that the videos were too dark. The entire Age of Empires CD only contains 35 MB of video… and 15 is devoted to the intro movie. I can't figure out why they went through all of the trouble of making the videos without using a bright, full-screen mode to show them off. If you've got an entire CD, fill it!
Unlike the videos, the sound effects were well-done. They aren't in-your-face or annoying. They sort of hide in the background, adding to the effect without drowning it out… and isn't that what sound effects are supposed to do?
I don't know what to say about the music. The creators of this game opted to go for standard CD tracks featuring about 30 minutes of music, played and looped during the game. All of the tracks seemed to feature a generic tribal-style beat which fits with all of the scenarios, no matter the culture. While the music was varied enough to fit and not get on my nerves after a few hours of gameplay, I was sort of bummed that the music has such an electronic feel to it. None of the sounds feel authentic, and a more organic sound would have worked well in this game.
 
Manual/Tutorial
The manual for Age of Empires is both concise and detailed. By that, I mean that they seem to touch on all possible topics without dragging on for several pages. While it is about 100 pages long — quit hefty — it includes information on all 12 civilizations so that you can learn the strengths and weaknesses of each. This helps you develop a strategy without as much trial and error as other games require.
Age of Empires also has one of the best tutorials I've ever seen. It's not so much a tutorial as a scenario specifically designed to introduce you to how the game is played. Ascent of Egypt is both a tutorial on how the game is played and a tutorial on how all scenarios will be drawn out.
 
A Few Loose Ends
Age of Empires has a few things worth noting but not necessarily worthy of their own section:
A multiplayer option is available so that you can play your friends or enemies in several campaigns. Unfortunately, this only works with other Mac users. For some reason, they couldn't make it work cross-platform.
There is also an editor so that you can create your own landscape and civilizations with goals and limits that you set. I found the editor a little hard to get used to, and in some cases, couldn't find a way to undo a mistake in my landscape design.
 
Bugs and Flaws
Also of importance to me are problems that I noticed with Age of Empires. Some are minor annoyances, while others really detract heavily from the game.
Sometimes, I would get confused as to who I was playing against. In one scenario, there were four cultures including mine, each with a name and a civilization type. Once I was playing a tribe called the Hittites, who were Babylonians while the Canaanites were Hittite. This kind of bothered me since one was supposed to be an ally and the other was an enemy.
Age of Empires is another game where the old "right-click" issue arose. In one of the help screens, it instructed me to right-click for an action… which is not the default setting on the Mac version.
The last and probably  
biggest thing that irked
me was the artificial
intelligence. The AI in
Age of Empires has to
be the worst I've ever
played. Two villagers
might walk into one
another and take a
minute to figure out
how to get around
each other. In the
graphic to the right,
four soldiers were sent
to fight one enemy clubman, but three of them couldn't figure out how to walk between two buildings! They were incapable of deciding an order for the three to pass so they just stood there. The awful design of the AI detracted from this game so much. Several times, I would lose a campaign or face a major setback because I couldn't get everyone to do what I wanted them to do.
 
How Many Simulations Can One Market Withstand?
With the resurgence of the Mac gaming market, there are more games than ever to choose from. Age of Empires has the advantage of being a well-known PC game, but can it live up to the hype? I find it hard to believe that they put so much effort into designing a game and then let it be rendered virtually useless by a bad artificial intelligence, but I've heard from players of the original Windows version that it had the same problem. A well-thought-out game with a major flaw is difficult to judge but Age of Empires has earned 3 out of 5 stars. Unfortunately, no demo is available from MacSoft, so you'll have to find a friend with a copy and try out their's to see whether you notice the problem or not.
