Age of Empires 1 HD
The first time I fell in love with a computer game (computer specifically, not video game) was age of empires. I remember in the fifth grade the class computer had it installed, and I could just not keep away from it. Todays blog post is about that game, how to make it play in 1080p and will be of no benefit to anyone except myself.
Did you expect the first blog post of the year to be useful? If you would like to learn something, read this post on attacking awsgoat from my hacking homie.. It is very good. Look for parts 2 and 3 in the future.
It’s worth mentioning that “the fifth grade” for me was actually 2002. Yes, that means I got hooked on this game half a decade after it was released! Half a decade after release, plus an expansion, a fucking SEQUEL AND ITS OWN EXPANSION PACK had come out when I found this game! Which back then, with how fast entire genres moved, I think is a testament to just how fucking good this series is. The following May, I got AOE2 for my birthday and never looked back. From that point on basically no other RTS ever came close to being as good as AOE2, and unfortunately I have played A LOT of them.
Little did I know that the school computer was hosting a cracked no disk version, no doubt installed by the IT guy who barely would have been old enough to have graduated high school. It would be many years before I understood why that computer didnt need the disk to play it, and my one at home always needed the disk.
Hours and fucking hours did I spend on this game whilst somehow never actually getting any better. Limited intelligence I suspect. To be honest playing it in a vacuum probably didnt help either. I wouldnt get the internet at home until 2009, the school computers in 2002 blocked any gaming sites and I had no knowledge of how to bypass or use proxies, all of my friends at that point were obsessed with Resident Evil (a strange trend which continues to this day as one of my best mates considers it the pinnacle of gaming), and only ever reading stratergy guides at the newsagent to try and cram cheats into my brain as we were too poor to buy them lol. Despite being particularly awful at it, it grabbed my attention and took hold. It was an intersection of my two favourite interests; history and making little men bash other little men in a simple 2.5D version of paper scissors rock.
I would come to learn later on that the “history” aspects of the game were extremely liberal and a lot of my “learning” was stretching the truth barriers quite a bit. This perhaps explains part of the strange chain of events that led to me becoming an offensive security consultant, some of which starts with my exceptionally poor school results. Age of empires is not a historical source on what went down in Egypt.
No matter, I played the absolute shit out of it once me and my parents made a Friday arvo trip to the shops and I picked it up from EB by asking very nicely. Very soon after this it would come for free inside boxes of Nutri grain lmao. Oh well.
The year is now 2023. This game is 26 years old. It looks like shattered shit pushing an 800x600 res on my 1080p screen. It is also missing a LOT of “"”standard””” QOL gameplay features I have taken for granted since AOE2 (and especially in the HD version which received even more QOL. Also the fact that HD version of aoe2 is now A DECADE OLD is mind bending. Absolutley fucking bonkers.). Being able to double press the group key number and have the camera snap to the unit. Having the population count on screen. Having the minimap alert where you’re being attacked, as just the battle trumpet alerting isn’t enough information. The idle villager button. Having an easy way to replenish farms. A million other little things I can’t even think of at this point.
So the question is why am I insisting on playing aoe1 when aoe2 is objectively a better game? Quite simply. the campaigns. My fucking god, some of the scenarios in the original AOE campaigns I still think about to this day. They are just amazingly designed scenarios that are fun. Some of them really took the “hero” concept places I had never seen in any games before; Tiberiun Sun was the only other RTS I think I had played prior to AOE and those “hero” missions just never gelled with me the way they do in aoe.
“Holy Man” in particular, is the single greatest campaign mission in the entire series; starting a new campaign with literally nothing except one priest and enough wood to build a town centre and NOTHING ELSE, with the entire scenario dictating you use this SINGLE PRIEST to slowly convert enough enemy units to start your own special religion colony is the most fun, stress inducing and replayable mission type. I would use this as a basis for any custom maps I generated in AOE2, it was just that great.
That is it, thats everything you start with. g fucking g fucko, get ready for lots of re. There is a LOT of online bitching about this mission, especially with the new DE version, but this is PEAK gameplay. Start from 0 in the middle of a fucking war and conquer your enemies.
Or the Yamato assassins mission; very reminiscant of the Joan of Arc campaign opening mission, in that you have to navigate your “heroes” across trecherous terrain to a particular spot on the map, but these aint hero units; its just a bunch of dudes you need to move very meticlously across a literaly danger zone to shank some guy.
Turns out there’s actually a way to play this game and not have it absolutely ruin your vision, and no I don’t mean that absolute dumpster fire that is DE. I’m sure it has an audience, I guess, but it’s not me and from what I’m seeing around the community it’s not other OG players either. And with AOE4 being..kinda sorta the same thing as the DE versions, it makes one wonder why on earth was 4 even made?
That was the original plan for aoe 4 and 5, and it is interesting it never happened. I suppose it wasn’t the vision anymore, after the lead designer left and made empire earth, which covered the modern era. MS then did rise of nations, and I think the two showcased there wasn’t actually as much appetite for modern era RTS as everyone at first thought. The successful ones seem to be RTT, like the commando series. I must say though, the risk-like mechanic within rise of nations was very well done and a hell of a lot of fun. Honestly I find it more enjoyable than the ACTUAL game of risk.
Anyway it’s rather simple to upgrade aoe1, because I think this game shows the true superiority of Windows as an OS and why it’s lasted this long and will never be usurped; their INSANE legacy support. This game, with zero mods, zero OS work required, zero hacks, workarounds, registry keys, etc etc installs and runs on windows 10 from a boxed 1997 copy of this game. IT. JUST. WORKS. Literally all we need to do is install it, and then download this patch. This will apply the HDification, as well as a slew of other things that I haven’t even looked into.
And that is seriously it. That is ALL it takes to play the original aoe in hd. Install the thing and apply the patch. I have spent the entire day putting off my OSED studies in order to play with one of the rise of Rome campaigns. I never played the expansion as a kid, so I was always slightly upset that the ROR cheats wouldn’t work on my base game. Since it turns out I’m actually STILL shit at the game, I just popped the Medusa cheat to turn my villagers into demon riders when they expire. Worked a treat.
Stay tuned for the next episode of my pointless ranting and raving where I might even post about something useful. For now check out the C.A.P.S.U.L.E.S project. Oh and I passed my CRTO.
