Age Of Empires

IAT 210 Digital Game Analysis (15%)

Name: Sheung Yau Chung
Student Number: 301236546

1. Age of Empires II: The Conquerors, published by Microsoft in 2000, is the second game in the Age of Empires series.
2. My favorite definition of a game written by Greg Costikyan: “A game is a form of art in which players make decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in pursuit of a goal”. His definition of a game directly applies to Age of Empires II because player’s decisions in manipulating tokens (the game tokens here would be all units such as villager, monk, king; and the resources would be wood, goal, stone, and food) and managing resources is the key to achieving goal in this game, that is, to conquer the world. Resources management
5. When Age of Empires was released over a decade ago, it ran perfectly in 256MB VGA and 512 RAM. So most PC/Mac that is currently available on the market today will definitely meets the minimum system requirement of the game and that includes my PC as well. And since the game was designed to run on Microsoft Windows and Macintosh operating systems platform, and play with a mouse and keyboard, the hardware I used to play this game is well suited to the requirements of the game.
6. Sunny is a 12-years-old school boy, youngest of three boys in the household. Sunny don’t get to watch a lot of TV in the house, but that’s OK, Sunny thinks computers are really

fun and actually prefers the PC to the TV. Sunny likes to spend a lot of time playing video games with his brothers after school whether it be Command & Conquer or
StarCraft. Since his dad likes to play board games such as Chess and Checkers, he sometimes plays those with him. Sunny likes Chess but his favorite broad game is
Battleship. Sunny occasionally build physical models such as tanks and battleships
The fact that most of the games he played and models he built are related to military tells us that Sunny is creative and likes battles.
8. One of the gameplay gestalts that I observed when playing this game would be to create an army consists of all Knights (Cavalier, Paladin). I find the knights to be very effective in launching surprise attacks as well as learning new information about my enemies. That is not to say I cannot use them for face-to-face attack or defend. With its high attack, HP, and natural armor, Knights can easily stand up again most opposition. Because the quicker I can protect my kingdom, the more villagers and buildings I can save, I always choose Franks to be my country.
9. It is possible for a player to control everything in the game with a mouse so if I were to teach a friend how to play this game, I would simplify the rules by saying: Your goal in
Age of Empires is to conquer your opponents in a given map. For that you need an army, to build an army you will spend time gathering resources such as food and gold, as well as building training camps that will enable you to recruit and train soldiers. You will