Mar 08 2013
Age of Empires 2 Goes High Def
I was pretty surprised when I heard the news that Age of Empires 2 was getting a facelift. The engine is reportedly getting some tweaks to bring it up to a 1080p resolution.
After watching the new trailer, I can’t say I was blown away by anything I saw. I wonder how well the original version still plays. Do you need to use the XP compatibility mode in Windows 7? It makes me wonder.
As much fun as I had playing Age of Empires 2, I can’t see myself buying the HD version. I don’t feel it would be worth the cost. It’s not like they are completely overhauling the game. The game definitely looks dated.
That being said, listening to the music again brought back some good memories of those old AoE days. If they were to ever bring out a totally new Age of Empires game, I’d probably buy it. I’m not interested in Age of Empires Online. It’s the business model that I don’t like for that particular franchise. Free-to-play with some premium content doesn’t work for every game. Age of Empires turned out to be one of them.
That was a surprise for sure. $20 seems too expensive for such an old game, especially if you already own the game. They changed the resolution, and it does seem to look better on modern monitors, but they could have just made a patch for that.
I think the main problem is the game engine was limited to 256 colors, if I remember correctly. So they probably won’t be able to do much about that. They have done some work on the multilayer mode as well, but again, a patch would have sufficed.
Age of Empires runs fine on Windows 7 as is.