Oh, so they have. I dunno what that means precisely. I think I saw they stopped selling the old AoE3 version, but last I checked AoM EE and AoE2HD were still for sale, but deliberately greyed out and renamed to make it clearer that they’re the old versions. Not sure if they’re still for sale or not as of now.

I don’t play a lot of big budget games where this kind of thing tends to happen. Probably the worst experience I’ve had has been thanks to confusion caused by multiple remasters.

Age of Empires 2 released in 1999 with an expansion in 2000. It was rereleased in 2013 as the HD Edition on Steam.

Then it was rereleased again as the Definitive Edition in 2019.

And I have seen people get confused and buy the HD version when they meant to get DE. Not quite the same as the OP because it’s not caused by malicious anti-consumer bullshit. But that’s the closest I’ve been.

I genuinely do love AoE2 and would rate it among my favourite games of all time, but yeah I think it gets a little overrated.

4 is better, IMO, and Myth is just great.

The AoE2 community gets pretty damn toxic if you dare suggest that, though. Or even if they get a whiff that you might be saying good things about other Age games at all.

I’ve heard that Online is actually a pretty good game, once stripped of its monetisation strategy. It seems to have a decent community of loyal followers with Project Celeste.

Different, unrelated franchise. Age of Empires is real-time strategy. Civ is turn-based.

Civ V is my most-played civ though. It was a great game.

It’s a huge improvement over the original. They’ve made a bunch of balance improvements without infringing on the unique identities of each civ (which is unfortunately what happened when they tried to do balance changes to the 2013 Extended Edition). The graphics are all new and now look how the game is in your nostalgia, rather than…how it actually looked. You can build bigger armies, and reuse god powers (for a cost). There’s improvement in quality-of-life features, like modern hotkeys, as well as tools to assist with scouting and eco management, if you’re a lower-skilled player who gets overwhelmed by all the multitasking.

Mobile is undoubtedly the worst. It’s unbearable. Hardly even a game.

I’ve never played the DS game. I might put Age of Empires Online in this spot instead.

It’s unfortunate, to me, that 3 ended up this low. It’s not my favourite, by a long shot, but it’s functional and fun. Which is more than can be said for the DE version of 1. I love the bones of 1, but the DE was terrible. So terrible that they tried releasing it again in the Return to Rome DLC for 2.

Which leaves us with the 3 good games. Being the mod of [email protected], nobody should be surprised that my favourite is Myth. 4 is actually my second favourite, and 2 is only in 3rd place. But Myth still has too many bugs and missing polish features. Even though it’s my #1 favourite, if I was asked to list which I think is the best, I’d put it in 3rd.

Not funny, a deliberate decision by the legislature in order to safeguard it from whoever was going to win the election (since it was set before the election).

ATI

But thanks for the info! Cool to know.

Oh neat, I didn’t know they did that. Do their GPUs have a specific niche, or are they aimed generally at competing with Nvidia and AMD Radeon?

edit: just to be clear what I mean, as an example, Qualcomm makes processors, but they fill the specific niche of mobile device processors, they don’t compete with Intel & AMD’s desktop lines.

Is the GPU business a separate business, even? Or just the integrated graphics on their CPUs?

Were there rumours that they would? I didn’t hear them, but this is a weird news story to report on otherwise.

Of any game? Codenames. Was playing with family when the clock struck midnight.

Of computer games, it was probably Kerbal Space Program, which I’ve just started to get into again over Christmas for the first time in years.

Platforms actually do get more leeway than is usually thought with DMCA takedown requests. If they believe it to be fraudulent, they have every right to disregard it. That’s a fact they conveniently try to downplay because they want people to think they have no responsibility for their actions.

This back and forth from the comments on the article is interesting:

What the article ommits: The youtuber in question has a long history of threatening smaller channels with various actions against them, from brigading to lawyers to copyright strikes, if they do something he doesn’t like and don’t bow to his will. So I’m not surprised to see someone was fed up with him eventually.

Two wrongs don’t make a right as my nan used to say. This YouTuber being a bit of a grunt does not negate the fact YouTube itself is happy taking a hands off approach to a fundamental part of their business model because the ones it affects are not the ones that give them most of the money.

Of course it’s a problem, I just feel 0 sympathy in this case and I find it ironic that it’s him especially that got hit with the same treatment he threatens others with.

Actually, not necessarily. Plagiarism is not interchangeable with copyright infringement. Plagiarism is specifically academic misconduct.

Those videos that upload an entire movie to YouTube and put “no copyright infringement intended” in the description are not committing plagiarism, because they are being honest about how the content they are using is not their own. But they are committing copyright infringement.

Likewise, you can do plagiarism while not doing copyright infringement, if you take something that is public domain and use it in your research paper without explaining where you got it. It’s public domain, so there’s nothing legally wrong there. But it’s academically dishonest.

I think the combination of calling him Charlie, making him a unicorn-like creature, and going to a place called Candy (Kingdom instead of Mountain) makes it a little more than mere friendly homage for my liking. Probably not enough to give rise to a legal claim of copyright or trademark infringement, but enough to be ethically very shaky.

It’s like if that Borderlands sniper was also an anthropomorphised polar bear from the 100 Acre Tundra.

Very interesting. Now I even more want to see what it was.

Anyone got a non-Xitter mirror of the ad?

The Age of Mythology campaign. It starts with you heading to the Trojan War because some pirates stole your statue’s trident…

The thing is, my mobo was, as far as I can tell (based on the release date of the 1.0 version of its firmware), released in 2017. I didn’t go out of my way to avoid TPM 2.0, I just bought recent hardware made by reputable manufacturers, and built a computer out of them. The fact that Microsoft arbitrarily decided a less than 4 year-old computer couldn’t run on their new operating system is pretty galling.

I don’t know what it means to require it since 2016, because I built my PC in late 2017, and I built it overspecced for my needs because I didn’t want to need to build another or upgrade it in just 5 years. My processor, I’ve been told by Microsoft’s tooling, doesn’t support Windows 11.

Al the Age of Empires games, apart from AoE1 DE, are excellent.

In classic Microsoft style, “Xbox” doesn’t necessarily mean the console. It’s also the name of their gaming service and the store you can use to buy games on Windows.

Rumour is it’s literally only there as an olive branch to hardware manufacturers to force people to buy new hardware. There’s literally no technical reasons for it.

Hey Microsoft, if you want me to upgrade to Windows 11, you could start by removing the completely arbitrary requirement to have TPM 2.0.

Witcher 1 is the only game in the franchise I’ve actually played. And I definitely agree, it’s very worth playing. I was really enjoying it. The only reason I never ended up finishing was that at the time I was playing through a Wineskin, and…the damn game was crashing on me every hour at most. Which was pretty appalling considering I was playing on a platform that Steam said was officially supported…

But I have no doubt that if I had been running on Windows at the time I’d have finished it back around 2014 when I was first playing it, because I was really enjoying the story.

This is being reported as a rumour that’s been debunked, but I’m doubtful how true that is. Seems quite likely to me they’ve bowed to pressure.

But I don’t think you need to go from the time when arcades were entirely irrelevant, but merely where they were no longer the main driving force. That’s at most the late '90s with gen 5 consoles and many big popular or influential game franchises like Quake, Pokemon, Age of Empires, Fallout, Diablo, and Grand Theft Auto (that’s '96 and '97 alone).

And you need to go up until at least the time when few of the largest games were available without cancerous monetisation strategies, not merely when a few games had started doing it. So you definitely need to go up to at least the launch of the 7th generation consoles in 2007.

To bring it back to the original point of the conversation, that’s not to say that it isn’t worth preserving games that did have those strategies of course. It just doesn’t detract from the sense of a period when the majority of gamers’ experience was much better.

We’ve been complaining since the 90s. I wasn’t joking earlier, “Ubisoft greedy” today is a carbon copy of “Capcom greedy” in 1997

And EA greedy in 2007. Doesn’t mean that what they were doing then was as bad as what is being done today.

But an arcade game is a physical object. The preservation needs of arcade games are very different to games distributed on cartridge or disk, which is why I suggested that a digital library would be focusing on home game consoles, especially those released at a time when home gaming was the main way gaming got experienced (i.e., after arcades were the most popular way).

[24 years is] too short of a blip to consider a golden age

Assuming that “too short” and reference to a “golden age” was meant in refutation to my claim of the 3rd–6th console generations, which lasted from 1983 until 2007. If that’s the claim, I find it absolutely absurd. When we discuss the golden age of TV we’re talking barely one decade, from the mid-to-late oughts to the late 10s.

If you meant something else by that bit, I’m sorry, please disregard the above paragraph. But I don’t know quite what you do mean.

I don’t think we’re talking about arcade games at this point though. We’re talking to a large extent about 3rd–6th generation home gaming consoles. For Nintendo, that’s the NES to GameCube. Sony entered with the PlayStation in the 5th gen, and Xbox came out in 6th.

I think a lot of people would see this (and to a slightly lesser extent the 7th gen) as the high point where games came out in a completed state and you paid once and the just enjoyed the game.

Fwiw the sequel is supposedly going to have Denuvo in it, which is pretty blatantly an executive meddling decision.

But personally, the phrase “the devs should” never bothers me. It’s pretty transparently referring not to individual developers but to the priorities and decisions of the “developer”: the company in charge of development, as distinct from, say, the publisher or the platform.

I honestly find their “historical accuracy” claims kinda comical. Yeah it’s better than most games for sure, but it still only pays lip service to accuracy in a lot of aspects for the sake of the game’s story. Henry has a completely fantastical rise from blacksmith’s apprentice to de facto military commander.

No, I did really enjoy it. I just don’t spend an enormous amount of time gaming, and the time I do spend is most often in completely different genres that I can play with friends while chatting on Discord, like RTS (Age of Empires mostly) and survival crafters (like Raft and DST).

No it’s not. It’s pretty explicitly not, by the guy who is most famous for talking about piracy as a service problem:

Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.

I just read that Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 has apparently said it’s gonna use Denuvo. It’s the first time a game that’s been on my radar has used it to my knowledge. I saw some comments where people said they’ll just wait a year until it’s removed and then buy it. Fuck that. You screw me over at release and I’ll just pirate it. I still haven’t finished the first game so waiting until it’s cracked is no issue.

Yeah I’m not really sure either. I get the sense that either it got better over its lifetime or over time people came around to it à la the Star Wars prequels. But I don’t really remember it. I played it a little early in its life but don’t remember anything about it.

I had a read over the rest of that review. Damn it was a good read. And sadly very, painfully accurate to my experience.

Was there ever any question it was going to be a soulless cash-grab?

Well, there was certainly question before we found out that Tencent was involved. Back when all we knew about it was that it would be called Age of Empires: Mobile. At a time not long after the AoE2 and AoE4 ports to console & controller had shown to be surprisingly a really good way to play the games we love on a novel input scheme. Back then, yeah I honestly thought the reason this was being done was because they thought they had come up with a good way to get a good RTS experience on a mobile device.

Yeah I find the kind of messaging in the headline here really eye-rolling. No, a new (bad) instalment in a franchise doesn’t make me stop enjoying the older entries. The Star Wars sequels don’t take away from the original hexalogy & Clone Wars.

The review itself here though is really good. The game is really, really bad, and the author of this review absolutely nails the reasons why.

It is genuinely hard to describe just how bad this is. I did the best job I could of my own review over on the official Age of Empires forums. Its worst sin is probably the simple fact that it barely even feels like a game where you make choices. You just click what it tells you to do.

It’s telling that they don’t have an official subforum for this game, although there is one for AoE1, 2, 3, and 4, and Age of Mythology. They do have a Discord, and I recently noticed on there the official devs are desperately calling for people to give more positive reviews.