The Video Game Revue

Age of Empires III

I picked up my copy of AoE III from EB Games yesterday. The funny thing about it is, when I ordered the game a month ago, I decided to go for the "special edition." Why not? Imagine my surprise when the clerk at EB reaches behind the counter and pulls out a mammoth-sized box. For a second, I thought that I might have ordered an Age of Empires board game by accident; it certainly weighed enough to contain a board and ~100 minatures. I'm tempted to take a picture of the box and post it here just so you can clearly see what I'm talking about.

As for the game itself, I played for a few hours--a couple of single-player campaign missions and then a few handful of multiplayer games. AoE III is alright; I will definitely continue to play it. But it didn't exactly shatter the RTS mold, and I wasn't blown away by it. It's solid, but nothing more than that, in my opinion.

Of course, I have to qualify that opinion with a plethora of little factoids. First off, my PC isn't good enough to run AoE III in its full glory. With everything turned down so that it runs nice and smoothly, the game actually looks less graphically impressive than Rise of Nations or even WarCraft III. But I do understand that when I buy a new gaming PC (hopefully in the new year), AoE III is going to be spectacular.

Secondly, and more importantly, I'm not a massive RTS fan. I played WarCraft II and StarCraft back in the day, although not a whole lot. I've played other "fringe" RTSes like Z and Highway to the Reich, and I like those games a lot. I play WarCraft III and Rise of Nations and get a kick out of them. But I do not play any of these games competitively (in fact, I'm barely competent at them), and I'm not a seasoned enough RTS fan to really distinguish between the likes of WC3, RoN, and AoE III. Oh, and let's not also forget that I didn't play AoE, AoE II, or Age of Mythology. AoE III is the first of the series that I've actually played.

So now you can understand what I mean when I say that AoE III is fun for me, but I don't really feel qualified to say if its a great game or not. Maybe it is great and I just can't appreciate its true glory, or maybe it's a dog and my taste just isn't discerning enough. I'm a casual RTS player, at best. Leave me to my TBS and RPG titles. Not that I won't continue to play and enjoy the occasional RTS, which is what AoE III is to me.

I'm continuing to make steady progress on Digital Devil Saga, having hit the six hour mark. I thought it would be tougher to concentrate on it given all of the other games that are distracting me, but DDS is such a purely addictive game that it remains in the fore of my mind at all times, although I am definitely pacing myself with it. One potential weakness with DDS is that the dungeons have a very repetitive look, so playing too heavily over several days might get to be hard on the eyes, but in short spurts it is very entertaining.

As for Lunar: Dragon Song, I'm getting frustrated with the slow pace of the game. I cannot believe what a terrible design decision it was for them to force the player to choose between gaining either experience points or items in battles; the end result is that money is extremely tight in Lunar DS because you aren't gaining any while you're levelling up your characters. Items are expensive and completing "jobs" to earn cash is a real pain even though the idea behind it is fun in theory. I'm also finding that battles are slow paced even when using the R button to speed them up. The "fast" speed, activated with R, is the pace that battles should progress at normally, and the R button should speed battles up to double that pace.

If battles in Lunar DS awarded both experience points and items every time, and if the pace of battle was sped up a great deal, then I think it would be a game that I could live with. It still wouldn't be an excellent game, though; for that they'd need to step up the story development a notch and not have the player revisit the same areas nearly so often. An extra helping of Lunar-style charm wouldn't hurt either.

posted by Parappa @ 2:53 PM