Age of Empires 2 [AoE2] multi player mini-review

I am slightly ill, so I decided to spend some hours dressed in my hot robe, playing AoE2 with my girlfriend, against 2, 3, 4 and 6 computer players.

Even better than AoE, AoE2 delivers the best multi player experience I know of! If your multi player experiences never got beyond Quake, you really have no idea of how defying strategy games can be.

Any AoE2 multi player session allows up to 8 players, with random or selected races, in a scenery of definable dimensions, of definable resources, with each population allowed to grow to 200 units or less, having all the tech tree all available or not, and with many other tweaks made possible, via the easiest interface!

Players can only join prior to someone launching the game, and their ping is shown, making it possible to apply some network criterion to select the human participants.

This mini-review of mine is about a game with two humans, together as a team, against six AI rivals... or should I write that "this mini-review was to be about such kind of game"? The truth is that I found it is simply impossible to beat six computer players, in the hard and hardest difficulty settings! The PC players start @ a more advanced tech level, and they gather resources much, much faster than you will ever manage to do, meaning that in a very short time, your dark age people will suffer the ruthless attacks of huge, better equipped, armies! NO CHANCE! Absolutely NO CHANCE! Have no doubts about that! Two against the "hardest" six is impossible... Prove me wrong!

More: we - the humans - never managed to win a "hard" game, but @ that difficulty setting we did last a few minutes more [than @ "hardest"]... AoE2 is clearly balanced and, as expected, two civilizations aren't supposed to be dominant over other six, that, at worst, start with exactly the same conditions. However, we really didn't wait for the computer to destroy all our stuff, meaning that we surely could have provoked a very slow AI victory, as when players run away with a single unit and hide it somewhere, thus resisting hours & hours, doing nothing... All our defeats were "quits".

So this mini-review is about games played @ "moderate" difficulty. For now, I will only write that you will still have to sweat a LOT before your first win... and that win will not happen against the six computer players... which seem, again, unbeatable when together as a team.

Try AoE2 multi player in a 2 x 3 or 2 x 2 session, in order to fight a fair war. That way you might win, if you are good / very good player...

Tomorrow, be alert to my tactics.

Buggy Driver

Driver feels not very solid, but only when trying to accomplish my 3rd job, I found undeniable evidence of the big bugs... The game just hanged after a three parts effort to pick a dude, ram a van, and drive another dude somewhere else... A hard mission, I must confess!, so the happening was highly frustrating...

I also can't understand what the USA Driver patch is for... the readme.txt doesn't explain the patch effects, and the GT Interactive site doesn't link to the file...

Yet, despite all, Driver is really cool, IF your hardware can handle high frame rates... It has been a long time since I played a so much fps sensitive title... Very high frame rates, can really transform Driver into a much richer experience.

Expect some replays of mine, soon. For your information, I can complete the very first Driver test, in less than 45 seconds...