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View Full Version : Conquer the world with Age of Empires


Philip Colmer
08-13-2004, 05:00 PM
<img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/colmer-aoe.gif" /> <br /><br /><b>Product Category:</b> Strategy game<br /><b>Manufacturer:</b> <a href="http://www.gomdm.com/">MDM</a><br /><b>Where to Buy:</b> <a href="http://www.handango.com/brainstore/PlatformProductDetail.jsp?siteId=311&productId=87303">Handango (affiliate)</a><br /><b>Price:</b> $29.99 USD<br /><b>System Requirements:</b> 10MB of free program memory; Pocket PC 2002 and higher with SD/MMC expansion slot.<br /><br /><b>Pros:</b><li>Excellent conversion of a classic game;<br /><li>Supplied on a storage card, so no wasted memory;<br /><li>Wealth of game options to extend the lifetime of this game.<b>Cons:</b><li>No copy of the tech tree included;<br /><li>Music quality is on the poor side.<b>Summary:</b><br />Age of Empires is a classic real-time strategy game. MDM have brought both the original and the Rise of Rome Expansion to the Pocket PC all on one storage card.<br /><br />Read on for the full review!<!><br /><PAGEBREAK><br /><span><b>Game Scenario</b></span><br />For anyone who hasn't come across Age of Empires before, here is a brief rundown of the game. The theme is the rise of the first great civilisations over the 12,000 years that followed the last Ice Age. Your goal is to build your tribe into a mighty civilisation that can vie for world dominance, i.e. game victory. As you move your tribesmen over the map, you reveal different terrain types and locate sources of food, wood, stone and gold which villagers gather by hunting, fishing, foraging, farming, chopping trees and mining. Constructing buildings lets you train military units and boats to defend your civilization or attack enemy civilizations on land or at sea. Constructing buildings also lets you research technologies that benefit your civilization, such as increasing the resources you can gather or the strength of your military units. As you advance through the ages, you can build new buildings, create new boats and military units, and research new technologies. You can establish alliances with other civilizations, exchange tribute, and establish trade routes. Other civilizations are controlled by computer players. The winner of a game is determined by the victory conditions of the scenarios. You can play a variety of pre-designed single player campaigns, as well as single player random maps or scenarios.<br /><br /><span><b>PC Versus Pocket PC</b></span><br />"Age of Empires: Pocket PC Edition" is supplied on a flash memory card or it can be purchased as a download. Both cost the same amount of money but the storage card option is far and away the better choice if you've got an SD/MMC slot in your Pocket PC. If you opt for the download, you have to choose which bits of the game to install, depending on how much memory you've got available. With the storage card version, you need 10MB free to play the game and saved games get stored on the card automatically.<br /><br />Either way, you get a conversion of the Gold Edition PC version. It retains most of the features and functionality of that version and incorporates both the original "Age of Empires" elements and the "Rise of Rome" expansion enhancements. There are some features, though, that have not been carried over in the conversion:<li> No support for more than one human player;<br /><li> No support for "huge" or "humongous" map sizes;<br /><li> No campaign editor. However, if you have the PC version of the game, you can use the PC campaign editor to create games and download them onto your Pocket PC.All in all, then, a very faithful conversion. If you buy the memory card version, slotting the card into your Pocket PC causes the game to run automatically. It can also be started from the AoE icon.<br /><br /><span><b>Game Choices</b></span><br /><br /><img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/colmer-aoe-menu.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 1: Game options.</i><br /><br />When you start a new game, you have the following choices, as illustrated in Figure 1:<li> Random map - a game based on a randomly generated world map. You can change the game settings and victory condition.<br /><br /><li> Campaign - a predesigned series of related scenarios that chronicle the rise of one of the mighty civilisations of antiquity.<br /><br /><li> Death match - similar to "Random match" except that you start with stockpiles of 20,000 food, wood, stone and 10,000 gold.<br /><br /><li> Scenario - a predesigned game that is not part of a campaign.For random maps and death matches, there are a number of standard victory conditions: being the first player to control and hold all artefacts, control and hold all ruins, build and hold a Wonder or conquer all the enemy players. All players can pursue any of these conditions to try to win. The first player to be successful wins the game. Alternatively, it is possible to set a time limit for the game. When the time runs out, the civilisation or team with the highest score wins the game.<br /><br />Team-playing is an aspect of the original PC version that sort of works in the Pocket PC version in that you can get some of the computer players to be on your team, but it probably worked better when you had human teams. Unfortunately, since this is not a turn-based game, it isn't possible to hand the Pocket PC around as each player's turn comes up. Unlike similar games of this genre, you just play as hard and as fast as you can, with the full knowledge that the computer players are doing just the same ... and possibly better :-)<br /><br />Another option for ending the game is to define the score that must be achieved. In this mode, the first team that achieves that score or military conquest wins the game. Constructing wonders and owning artefacts &amp; ruins all contribute to the score.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/colmer-aoe-campaign.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 2: Playing a Campaign.</i><br /><br />Electing to play a campaign takes you through a series of related scenarios. You must play the scenarios in sequence using the settings and victory conditions with which each scenario was designed. The list of scenarios varies according to the campaign you pick. Figure 2 shows the scenarios available if you choose the learning campaign - an excellent way to learn how to play the game. If, instead, you pick "Yamato Empire of the Rising Sun", there is only one scenario - the Assassins. Once you pick the scenario, the game goes on to give you your instructions, as shown in Figure 3. Those instructions will give you the background to the scenario along with your victory condition.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/colmer-aoe-assassins.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 3: Scenario instructions.</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/colmer-aoe-scenario.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 4: Picking a scenario.</i><br /><br />If you decide to pick a non-campaign scenario, you will be presented with the list shown in Figure 4. Choosing a scenario then takes you into the screen shown in Figure 5, which is also the screen you get to if you pick Random Map or Death Match.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/colmer-aoe-gamesettings.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 5: Defining the game.</i><br /><br />From here, you can change the game parameters, such as how many players there are, which civilisation they represent, whether they are in teams, or the game settings such as map type, victory condition, resources, etc.<br /><PAGEBREAK><br /><span><b>Playing The Game</b></span><br />However you get started, you will eventually be looking at something like Figure 6. Like similar games, the map only reveals what your players can directly see or those parts of the world that you have either explored or exchanged maps in. Even if you have explored a part of the world, unless you still have a citizen in that area, your knowledge of that part of the world will start to go out of date.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/colmer-aoe-map.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 6: Game map.</i><br /><br />Moving your pieces is very straightforward - tap on a villager and then give them instructions on what to do next. For example, if you want them to cut down wood, you tap on a tree. If you want them to hunt an animal, you tap on any animals that you can see. If you want them to build something, you have to select from their repertoire of available buildings - these become visible in the lower part of the screen once you click on the villager's build icon. When an item is selected, you get a health indicator. When the item is at full health, the bar is completely green. If the item has suffered any damage, part of the bar will be red. The bottom left-hand corner of the screen shows the health in numbers. Buildings can be repaired by villagers and villagers can have their health restored by priests.<br /><br />As you develop a larger civilisation, you may want to form your villagers into groups. This is particularly useful with the military units as you can then collect the units together into a group that is controlled together with a single instruction.<br /><br />With a screen that is the size of a Pocket PC's, there is a limit to how much of the game map can be seen at once. The same is true of the original game, so the lower part of the display incorporates a miniature version of the whole map, and you can see this in Figure 6. Where the map is black, you don't know what that part of the world looks like. You can navigate rapidly around the map by tapping on it. One thing to be careful about, though, is that you must ensure you have deselected all of your villagers first (by clicking on the red X) otherwise you will end up sending any selected villagers to the part of the map you've just tapped on. Of course, this may be what you wanted to do but when I was playing, it often <i>wasn't</i> and required some rapid clicking to restore my villagers back to their previous tasks.<br /><br />As you get deeper into the game, it becomes harder to keep track of what your villagers are up to. Groups come in handy here as it is possible to very quickly switch between the groups by bringing up the "key" strip, as shown on the right-hand side of Figure 7. Numbers 1 to 5 represent groups that you've defined. The other buttons are useful for quick navigation and take you to your (T)own centre, the next (I)dle villager, (C)enter the view on the selected villagers or centre the view on the last game (E)vent. The last button is useful if you've been busy building houses or barracks and the hunting horn suddenly sounds - a definite warning of something happening. Tapping on the E button will take you straight to that event.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/colmer-aoe-hunting.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 7: Using the key strip.</i><br /><br />Researching technology and moving your village through the ages gives you access to bigger and better toys. Unfortunately, the product doesn't come with a printed version of the Technology Tree (or tech tree as the game refers to it) so it is difficult to see how a given research path will pan out and the options it offers up to you. It would be nice if MDM could make the tree available as a downloadable PDF, as they do for the full manual.<br /><br /><span><b>Game Settings</b></span><br />In addition to the plethora of game permutations available, you can also adjust the playability of the game. The game settings are accessed from the menu button and are shown in Figure 8. The music is identical to that played in the PC version of the game and I would rate it as OK. It provides a background distraction, but can get a bit monotonous after a while. The quality of the audio isn't fantastic, but that may be a throwback to the age of the original PC game.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/colmer-aoe-settings.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 8: Game settings.</i><br /><br />The one thing I did wish the game had was a quick exit mode. If you need to get back to your normal Pocket PC, you have to quit the game first. This takes 4 clicks:<br /><br />1 to quit the game.<br />1 to say yes, you are sure.<br />1 to close the achievements summary window.<br />1 to exit from the main menu.<br /><br />It would have been <b>very</b> useful to have had a "save and quit" button.<br /><br /><span><b>Conclusions</b></span><br />It is great to see such an accurate conversion of Age of Empires on the Pocket PC - and for it to include the Rise of Rome expansion as well. Having the game on its own storage card is, for me, an added bonus as it means that the game is readily at hand and doesn't take up valuable storage space.<br /><br />If you've enjoyed Age of Empires on the PC, or you like strategy games, you'll enjoy this game. The game permutations ensure that there is a lot of playability and value for money.

jonathanchoo
08-13-2004, 05:07 PM
What happened to ZiOSoft?

Nice review though. I have been playing this game on my PPC for ages.

sponge
08-13-2004, 05:09 PM
http://ziointeractive.com/
They're barely alive. The MDM version of AoE has a few more things that the Zio version doesn't.

dean_shan
08-13-2004, 05:33 PM
http://ziointeractive.com/
They're barely alive. The MDM version of AoE has a few more things that the Zio version doesn't.

What's the 'more things'? I bought the Zio version when it first came out and what to know what I'm missing.

sponge
08-13-2004, 05:46 PM
Can't remember exactly. I think it was music, an intro video, and something that actually was worth upgrading to.

silver99
08-13-2004, 10:08 PM
Will it play in VGA mode?

sylvangale
08-14-2004, 02:31 AM
This was released in 2003 by MDM... no?

It is downloadable and not limited to a storage card... so you can just install it onto your own storage card.

Storage requirements:
1 — Main game only 9.8MB
2 — Campaigns 5.1MB
3 — Scenarios 1.2MB
4 — User manual 0.3MB
5 — Intro video 4.0MB

Philip Colmer
08-15-2004, 10:57 AM
Will it play in VGA mode?
I'm afraid I don't know the answer to this one. There is a trial download available from a different part of the Handango web site (http://www.handango.com/PlatformProductDetail.jsp?productType=2&optionId=1_2_2&jid=XCD88BE16FCD7A97637E379C2C5FE19A&platformId=2&siteId=1&productId=49440§ionId=0&catalog=30&txtSearch=age+of+empires), so you might want to get that (all 24MB of it!) and try it out.

If you do, please share your findings :wink:

--Philip

Philip Colmer
08-15-2004, 11:00 AM
This was released in 2003 by MDM... no?
Yes.

It is downloadable and not limited to a storage card... so you can just install it onto your own storage card.

Storage requirements:
1 — Main game only 9.8MB
2 — Campaigns 5.1MB
3 — Scenarios 1.2MB
4 — User manual 0.3MB
5 — Intro video 4.0MB
One thing I would say, though, is that the price of the downloadable version is the same as the price of the version on the expansion card. So, if you don't have a memory card, or you don't want to occupy quite a bit of space with this game, the expansion card version is good value for money.

(Goes back to amend negative points about game ...)

--Philip