I had the demo in my hands over ten years ago, I slipped the CD inside and installed it during the Christmas holidays where I had all the time of the world to devote to it. The demo came from a magazine and after reading the contents, my eyes were ready to spot the 'Launch' button on the screen.
The images printed were large and detailed on the 6 pages features of the upcoming title 'Age Of Empires 2', which meant a history jump from the Greeks, Fenicians and Romans all the way through the dark ages. The graphic was way better than the first edition, the u
nits had more historical details and the name of every unit was so accurate that deserved extra playing time.
AOE2 was a title that set the milestone in historical RTS games, Microsoft was also publishing strategy-war games titles like "Close Combat" in the middle of the 90s; until the crowd of faithful players saw that the direction taken by the gaming departments of Bill Gates was right.
Somehow the American gaming industry was leading the charts with great titles that few could compete with. The historical constest was high and when Microsoft published 'Age of Mythology', giving itself an upperscale image of knowledge of the RTS field.
This title blew my mind! Ensemble Studios, the manufacturer of the title, had a game where history and myth would mix with centaurs, gods, legends and cyclopes battleing in campains on existing land.
But the extra boosting feature that both titles had, was the editor program that allowed you to create maps, missions and campains of any size and difficulty with a range of costumizations that is hard to find now. This games gave PC and Mac users a huge kick into the future with exclusive contents that console games cannot have.
I truly wish that game developers can look back at AOE2 and its similars, to understand that there is a player base that is old and intelligent enough to play with these types of titles still.
The single-player era is slowly fading because in front of the global connectivity that gamers are evolving into; MMOs are the latest and hottest titles that shadowed the rest. But at a cost: the single player game had that direct contact with the player and a direct feedback that would envolve the quality of game type and software. Now MMOs are doing the opposite: diverting the real software issues that can affect game quality for multiplayer drama that real life wouldn't even coinceive. Developers seems to be confused over what is the real deal between costumer/player and softwatre quality. The "experience" is the tool that developers and publisher uses to distract from many bugs and errors made in their software, making the game a commercial strategy rather than a satisfing product.
