We will soon see who was more fortunate - Ensemble, creators of AoE, or ION Storm, programmers of Dominion Storm. The matches will take place on the Internet Gaming Zone (MSIE only) in the "Victorious room" at 5 pm PST.
| January 15 |
Ensemble vs ION Storm match today
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Even though only 25 out of 98 people (25 %) voted for ION Storm in the poll about the AoE tournament, all ION Storm people are still confident that they can "crack them open" (John Romero).
We will soon see who was more fortunate - Ensemble, creators of AoE, or ION Storm, programmers of Dominion Storm. The matches will take place on the Internet Gaming Zone (MSIE only) in the "Victorious room" at 5 pm PST. |
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| ION Storm | Ensemble Studios |
New scenario
A new single player fun scenario is now available at that page.
New link
I have added a new link to a page that is entirely written in German - if you understand you should check it out :)
| January 14 |
Ensemble vs ION Storm match coming
The poll will close in a few hours, and the match between the RTS programmers will begin. The odds are very much in favor of Ensemble, but ION Storm has nothing to lose :)
Age of Empires was the top selling software in December
According to PC professional (a German PC magazine), Age of Empires was the best selling CD ROM in December '97 - it was even better than all applications! During the first half of January, it seems like Quarterdeck's Clean Sweep has gained back the top position; Age of Empires is currently at the second place and the only game in the top five.
More info about Mordor
The server has been running all the time; the fact that it was not available was due to a failure from a router, so it was not the fault of Mordor or my ISP. The site is now running again and will hopefully keep running :)
| January 13 |
Mordor down!
Due to a crappy router between here and Zurich, the European server "Mordor" (www.mordor.ch) has been unavailable for nearly 24 hours, and so was the mirror page and counter. Please resend any emails from January 12.
Unfortunately Netlink, my ISP, was also affected, so I could not receive or send mails anymore. For more information, please look at the message board. It was my last resort (I could access it from a different account) :) I still cannot send email so please be partient when waiting for a response.
Last day of the poll
The poll about the AoE tournament is closing tomorrow, make sure to cast your vote! You can read more about the match of Ensemble Studios vs. ION Storm below.
"Your mother was a hamster ... " - Monty Python taunts
Even though the ISP is down, I have managed to upload a compilation of Monty Python taunts. They are hilarious and a lot more fun to use than all the standard taunts that we have heard over and over again. The taunts listings are now printable, so you do no longer have to memorize the numbers ;) I have also made a listing of all taunts that I have collected, together with their numbers. Enjoy!
| January 12 |
New scenarios
Two new single player scenarios have been added to that section, get them if you are ready for a challenge :)
| January 10 |
French taunts
Smog has assembled a collection of the French AoE taunts. They will have the numbers 26 to 50, so you can use them together with the English taunts if you like.
Use your right to vote :)
The poll about the AoE tournament is coming along nicely, yet there could be more votes for ION Storm ;)
The ION Storm team will consist of programmers of the game Dominion Storm, which means they are all experienced RTS players. Of course the defeat a month ago has not strengthened their self-confidence ...
| January 9 |
Poll is up!
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Finally, the poll about the AoE tournament is up.
Who will win the AoE tournament? Ensemble, the creators of the game, or ION Storm, programmers of Dominion Storm (a new RTS game) and Daikatana (3D action)? Choose wisely before you cast your vote. The poll will be updated immediately then. |
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| ION Storm | Ensemble Studios |
Man, we created the game, there is nothing that we aren't completely prepared for :} If anything, we will just use the tactics we were holding back from last time.
Basically, we wanted the villagers to have their own "language", and we wanted to sound Latin-ish. So, with that in mind, I just started rattling off Latin sounding words (or at least what sound like Latin to my ears). As the project moved along, we needed more and more words, so I started getting a little more creative. Some of the words that you hear are actually names of friends and family of mine. I won't tell you which ones; you'll just have to guess. So to summarize, the words really don't mean a lot, but they seem to fit the feel of the game.
| January 8 |
ION Storm challenges Ensemble again!
In a week, ION Storm will try again to beat the creators of AoE:
But this time we have a much better game plan.. we've learned lots since the last match. Lets hope they've learned something too, otherwise It'll be a big ION beatdown :)
We've been playing some of the best guys off the net and are really ready for anything they might try.
OGR chooses game of the year 1997
And the winner is ... Fallout! Read at OGR's best of 97 page why they have chosen Interplay's Diablo-like RPG.
This is alone indeed very surprising, and the RTS throne at OGR.com belongs to Total Annihilation - even though most reviews have been in favor of Age of Empires.
Age of Empires got an entry under "Honorable mentions", though:
Age of Empires from Microsoft managed to successfully combine real-time strategy with a historically-accurate backdrop of ancient human civilizations. Equal parts WarCraft and Civilization, AOE is one of the best games to ever bear the Microsoft label, and it serves as a stunning example of what developer Ensemble Studios is capable of.
Empty personality ... ;)
Brian Chau has sent me an empty personality file (9 K) - its aim is not to make the computer feel hollow but to provide you an easy way to create your own .per file :) Just fill in the numbers and delete a few unwanted lines, and you are done!
DirectX troubleshooting
I have added a DirectX section to the troubleshooting page that should help you finding the reason of spontaneous crashes of the game, in case you still have problems running it. Fortunately, the game runs fine on most systems.
New scenario
Brian has made a single player fun scenario where you can learn how to evade shots from Heavy Catapults with Ballistics. New players will learn how this upgrade works.
New link
I have added a new page to my links page. It has a very large scenario collection. (I do not want to have a large scenario collection at this page, but a collection of the best ones. If I wanted a large collection, I could simply reuse the software of my Warcraft 2 page and build up the largest fully searchable collection of the net. That reminds me, I will of course add a search engine, but likely use a different script for it.)
Smog's contest
Smog's page has a contest where his 50,000th visitor will win. You can win the beta CD or a signed lithograph. I would take the litho since the beta has expired ;)
| January 7 |
"Sea strategies" page coming soon
I have now finished more than 50% of the page about naval strategies. It will not only cover important battle tactics, but also important changes about how to develop your civilization in sea maps (as opposed to land maps). I will post a version that covers everything except the Iron Age and ship to ship battles as soon as I can.
Question of the day
"Habadacus, Flurvis, Ewatonee, Itan" - what do these words mean? KJC has asked. Well, I think Chris Rippy is the only one who understands AoE speech. Maybe we can find a babel fish ;)
| January 6 |
Gaming trends of 1997
Gamesmania has an article about the trends of 1997 in the computer games sector. There is also a section about Age of Empires, check it out!
New sound editor
Dave has written a new sound editor for AoE. It is not in Visual Basic, but still in the Alpha stage. All important functions are implemented, though, and if there is enough feedback, he will finish his "Daboo" sound editor.
New campaign and new scenario
There is a new campaign consisting of five maps and new single player scenario.
| January 5 |
ICQ list: credits and more info
Thanks to Omer who came up with this idea some time ago, people can now find players to play with over TCP/IP without having to use the Zone or Kali. If you want to set up an ICQ list dedicated to any topic, go to Mirabilis' page. They have all the info you need. Also thanks to Matt for his free CGI script.
If you want to be removed from the list or change your entry, just send me a mail. You can also tell me if someone abuses this list for spamming, which will hopefully not be the case.
I am now looking for a program that can sort the list after a certain category or two (processing the listing or a database in ASCII format in real time). Contact me if you can write such a program or know one.
| January 4 |
ICQ contact list
Finally, I have set up an ICQ contact list that works fully automatically. You can sign up there and find people to play Age of Empires with easily. ICQ is the world's largest internet online communication network, © by Mirabilis. I wanted to set up the script long ago, but finding a bug in my modifications the script has delayed the project.
New scenario
There is a new single player fun scenario at my scenario section.
| January 3 |
New year, new layout :)
You have certainly noticed the new menu bar. I have replaced the nice looking but large font by Verdana, and I have used the space that I have gained for adding more links to the most popular sub sections of that page. I hope you appreciate the new layout and find your information faster now.
| January 2 |
.SLP graphics file list updated
The new version (12 K) of the description contains now a document in Winword 95 and ASCII format, so everyone with Windows (Wordpad) or a text editor can use it. Thanks to Brian for his work.
New link
I have added a new link to my links page and removed a broken one.
| January 1 |
Happy new year!
Due to time constraints, I have to keep today's update rather short - I will update the downloads section as soon as can, until then, you will have to grab the newest files from the main page.
Random setting generator
"After playing AoE for quite a while with some friends, we began to get stuck in a rut while using quite similar tribes on certain games. So I built up a simple Excel 97 spreadsheet to generate random settings for games to 'force' people to use different teams and make things more challenging and competitive."
.SLP graphics file list
I've recently completed a list of decriptions for all the .SLP graphic files contained within the GRAPHICS.DRS file. The files were extracted using Stoyan Ratchev's DRSBUILD utility. The zip file contains the following :(1) Age of Empires .SLP Files .doc - a Word 97 document containing the descriptions (2) Age of Empires .SLP Files ReadMe .txt - a Notepad ReadMe file
Updated FAQ - "patch" section
I have made a "patch" section in the FAQ page, it should answer the questions about the patch.
| September - December '97 |
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