Top 50 Video Games: Number 6

#6: Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings
System: PC
Publisher: Ensemble Studios
Released: 1999
Players: 1-8

A large scale siege is about to go down here.

Realtime Strategy has been one of my favorite genres over the years. I got my start with Warcraft II on the Playstation and Myth on the Mac. The game where I really learned the ropes and fell in love with RTS was Age of Empires II. AoE2 is simply everything an RTS should be. It is well balanced, great for multiplayer, nice looking visually and has a pleasant soundtrack. I used to find myself bopping along to the music during the slower parts of the game.


Age of Empires II is historically based, allowing the player to control civilizations such as The Japanese, the Britons, the Saracens and more. The game's excellent expansion pack, The Conquerers, brings the total number of playable civs to 18. The civs play enough alike that one always feels at home with any of them, but they have enough differences to lend a unique strategy to each. Some civs harvest lumber more quickly, some produce better archers or
cavalry, some get faster labor from their villagers and so on. Each one also has a unique military unit, such as Longbow Archers, Teutonic Knights or Samurai.

Put me on a land-locked map and I'll kick your ass. Put me on a map where I have to engage in naval warfare and I'm hosed.

The game didn't really bring anything new to the genre, what it did was take the established RTS themes and perfect them. Jimbob and I have spent countless hours playing this game together, occasionally pitching up a few of our hilarious custom sound bytes into the game. We always played together as a team; the one time we tried going head to head, we called a truce after a couple of hours - we were in a deadlock. Some of my favorite gaming memories came from this game.

Those who know me know I'm not one for trash talking. If you're better at a game than me, go ahead and talk - it's your right and it comes with the territory, it's just not my way. However, AoE2 is my turf. One time, I was playing a game of AoE2 with my roommate and his brother. There was little action, so I sent a small force to Paul's base just to get a feel for how he was doing. He repelled the attack and proclaimed "Is that all you've got?" I took a deep breath
and replied "No. No, that's not all I've got." I played one of my favorite custom taunts (from the movie Tombstone, where Wyatt says "You called down the thunder, well now YOU'VE GOT IT!") I then proceeded to beat the piss out of him and eliminate him from the game. That's fun stuff. My favorite memory from this game, however, came when Jimbob and I were facing a couple of AI controlled enemies. One of them had built a wonder (the game is over if it isn't destroyed within a certain time limit) and we had to scrape together a force to take it down as the timer was ticking down. We barely broke through the defenses, and all I had were 2 wounded paladins left. "I need siege!" I cried, and Jimbob's lone, badly damaged trebuchet wheeled in and downed the wonder just as the timer was about to expire. That's classic stuff.

Paladins, trebuchets and monks tear a town apart.

I played the hell out of this game in the computer labs in college. We had a group of 5 of us who would finish up our work then spend our downtime playing this game in class (the teacher let us get away with it because we were among the best students in the class.) It was hard to try and keep quiet playing this game. There were many stifled shouts and fists being triumphantly pumped in the air, much to the confusion of the other students. There have been many great RTS games: Starcraft, Warlords Battlecry, Rise of Nations and the original Age of Empires to name a few. No game before or since has brought it all together in one package as well as Age of Empires II. The game has aged well and is still a shitload of fun today.