Age of Empires 3 Stands the Test of Time (Ironic?)

These days people just seem to get excited for the latest graphics when combined with a gun and as much as I see an appeal I don't indulge in that longing. There are two main types of game that really hit the spot for me; racing and strategy games. Oh and Zombie Highway and Paper Toss on the iPhone. But looking through the older parts of my game collection I stumbled across two which brought back enough nostalgia to install and play. Those two game were Age of Empires 3 and Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth 2. Or for the latter more specifically (take a deep breath); The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth 2 - The Rise of the Witchking expansion pack. Possibly the smallest font I've ever seen on the side of a games box.

For anyone that hasn't heard of the Age of Empires series, it was a third person strategy game where a player starts a new colony and works their way through the ages through development and battles. At the time the graphics were pretty jaw dropping and as far an I'm concerned it still has one of the best damage models of any game ever. Possible exception being Empire Total War which is a similar game just which improved graphics. For me, it's the right combination of fun, simplicity and variability. The sheer range of different styles of gameplay and strategies you can use means that it never gets boring, and that's just in single player skirmishes and the extensive campaign mode. Once you start playing this with other people, especially over LAN, that's where the fun really begins. Not only because when they get things wrong you can just shout at them but because when you screw things up there is the power of another brain to make sure that you don't lose. 

So take that game and throw in The Lord of the Rings theming into it and I'm in the palm of your hand. I managed to get it working just a few days ago after patching and tweaking in order for it to play nice with Windows 7 and fell in love with it all over again. Remembering that once you have fully upgraded elvish archers you cannot lose I chose a map against the goblins and got going. This time building walls across the bridges so they only had on method to attack further down the river. The battles which followed were the most fun I've had in a long time, with my triple wall defense and arrow towers everywhere. Completely immersed in the world for a few hours whilst the Apocalypse, not being able to make it's previous schedule of Friday the 14th of October, was surrounding me.