I could hardly be described as an avid gamer, in fact I have escaped the whole World of Warcraft craze. Still I enjoy playing RTS games from time to time. I just bought Age of Empires Ⅲ for Mac OS X. While I found the graphical quality of the Age of Empires Ⅱ lacking, I quite enjoyed Age of Mythology and Rise of Nations, all written by Microsoft.

I appreciated the straightforward installation process for the game: just drag the program to your local hard drive, no installer, no administrator rights needed, like it should be (the updater to version 1.03 was more stupid, requiring administrative rights, where it probably did not need them). The game feels nice on my laptop (2㎓ Mac Book Pro) at a 1440×900 resolution.

Age of Empires is far from a revolutionary game. It is the third iteration of a game that was itself a clone of the Warcraft games (which in turn were inspired by the original Dune game). You control a nation, gather resources, build cities, develop technologies and fight other civilisations. Some units are your heroes, and have special abilities. Many of the previous game in this series integrated some board-game element, Rise of Nation had a risk like strategical map, this time the strategical game integrates the notion of a deck of cards which gives you stuff you can get from you home city, victories let you select new types of cards, which are technologies. Advancing in the game also unlocks options of customizing the look of your city, which looks nice but has no effect in the game.

The game seems to have the same tongue in cheek tone than Age of Mythology, the campaign follows the Black family from the Ottoman siege of Malta in 1565 to the colonial wars in North America and the rail-road age. The gameplay is smooth and the graphics gorgeous, with a lot of varied settings. I laughed out loud when I realized that the swiss pikeman acknowledged orders in swiss-german. On the other hand the the french unit speak some grammatically mangled langage. As the final bad guy is french, this is somehow annoying. I wonder if this broken french is easier to understand for USians…

As I had a long an tiring week, this game was really a nice way to relax, and while not ground breaking in any way, it is a nice classic that I recommend.