Rediscovering Age of Kings

About a year ago, I decided it’d been long enough since I last wasted significant amounts of time playing computer games that I could buy a gaming machine and play for a sensible amount of time and not impact other demands for my time. I looked at all of the current generation consoles and to be honest I was put off by the price of the games. I’m aware of the Steam sale and considering it’s been a decade since I played anything seriously (I still miss you, Left 4 Dead 2) my plan was to quickly recoup the extra cost of a gaming PC by sticking to the best games of a few years ago.

Other than obsessively 100 percenting a handful of Lego games (Lego Spider- man! Lego Quasar!) I’ve not really played anything new, instead I have an overly powerful, at least for its current usage, machine that is essentially now for Age of Empires II. I had fond memories of the game from when I was a kid and after looking a few things about it up I discovered that there’s actually a seriously skilled community keeping the game alive.

I’m only a passive observer, I played one online game and my god was it embarrassing, but there’s an amazing amount of Twitch content from a number of community games and even sponsored competitions. Most of the material I’ve seen has been cast by Zero Empires or T-90Official and there is currently the Escape Champions League tournament (with a 60k USD prize) that’s show casing some amazing team play. It’s great to see such an awesome old game still going strong.