I’ve been replaying Age of Mythology in my lunch breaks recently. It’s a cracking game, and if you like strategy games even slightly, you owe it to yourself to give it a bash (unless you’re one of these freaks who prefers the C&C series to Age of Empires, in which case it’ll probably just annoy you).
Thing is, though, there’s an inherent problem in replaying an RTS. On the early levels, you always spend hours and hours building up your base, researching new tech and churning out thousands of military units, only to send your monster army off into battle and discover that your enemy is three donkeys and some guy holding a toothpick. And you can’t help feeling slightly disappointed when the titanic battle you’d hoped for ends in slightly less than 3 seconds when one of your monster iron-plated siege units accidentally rolls over the top of the entire opposing army: it’s just not as satisfying as watching then kick the crap out of each other for half an hour.
That said, this will doubtless soon come to an end once the difficulty level starts to rise and I find myself staring at a screen full of burning buildings and fleeing villagers before I’ve even built my military academy. Ah well.