Age of Empires 2 is the latest game to get the “HD” rerelease treatment, which is a recent and not-entirely-unwelcome trend for older PC games and one which I suspect pleases both the companies that make them and the people who buy them. The developer/publisher gets to sell what had previously been a dead product all over again, and the purchaser gets… well, in theory they get to have an updated version of that old game they loved that actually functions on modern operating systems. If this is what the HD update actually delivers then everyone goes away happy. However, I suspect that Age of Empires 2 HD will be the title that makes a lot of people realise that simply attaching the letters “HD” to a game doesn’t necessarily mean that what you’re getting is going to be an improvement over that physical copy that’s been gathering dust inside its jewel case for the last decade and a bit.

The thing with Age of Empires 2 – indeed, the thing with a lot of these HD remakes – is that the original version does still work. Yes, the resolution is hilariously primitive and the 256 colour limit means you get some of those vivid purple and green hues so familiar to people in the habit of digging out their old games, but you can still install it, load it and play it with a minimum of fuss. Perhaps it’d be different if it was one of those titles that’s notoriously finicky on Windows 7, such as the original two Thief games. Perhaps then simply offering a working version with higher display resolutions would be enough. In the case of a game that already works, though, you need to offer something extra in comparison to the older version in order to justify charging money for it all over again. The Enhanced Edition of Baldur’s Gate did it with a couple of new companions and quest areas¹. The 20^th Anniversary release of Another World has apparently redrawn all the backdrops in such high definition that they take up a staggering 3 gigabytes of disk space (the original game came on two 1.5 megabyte floppy disks, if I recall correctly).  What exactly is Age of Empires 2 HD adding to the experience that will justify the frankly eye-watering pricetag of £15?

To its credit it’s trying to be a little more subtle than the shiny visual improvements of other HD remakes. There’s some new water effects and they’ve redone the farm graphics for some reason, but by and large this HD version of Age of Empires 2 looks very much like the original release of Age of Empires 2 would if you installed one of the high resolution mods available for it. There’s no new single-player content added; you get Age of Kings plus the Conquerors expansion, and that’s it. No, the unique selling point of the HD edition is that it strips out the long-deprecated Microsoft Game Zone multiplayer system and replaces it with full Steamworks functionality. If implemented correctly Steamworks is possibly the single most solid, hassle-free multiplayer interface in PC gaming today, so this should be a welcome improvement that makes playing AoE 2 multiplayer without a virtual LAN setup possible again. Unfortunately, as with most things in life, the reality of that implementation falls some considerable way short of my expectations.

In fairness to the developer responsible for the HD update – Hidden Path² – I do appreciate that totally retooling a fundamental under-the-hood system like multiplayer is not an easy thing to do. It’s going to have teething problems. I don’t begrudge them making the effort at all and I’d much rather they take a crack at this instead of the (relatively) simple task of updating all the graphics and then calling it a day. Maybe they’ll get it working properly in short order, and all my complaints and worries will turn out to be completely unfounded. Right now, though, if you were thinking of buying AoE 2 HD for multiplayer purposes I’d have to recommend you stay away because it quite simply does not work. There are widespread reports of FPS slowdown, connection issues, laggy input problems and out-of-sync errors, and that’s when you can actually get a game started in the first place. My own tale of woe is fairly concise:  our first attempt to start a four player game had to be aborted because one participant had a ping of 500 and the game runs at the speed of the slowest player (remember, this is a fourteen year-old game designed for 56k dial-up running in the age of fibre-optic broadband). After he dropped out the second game ran fine — right up until the point where the hosting player’s game crashed, anyway, provoking sympathetic crashes in the people connected to him and throwing away a fairly interesting forty minutes of play. This was pretty discouraging, and we haven’t tried to play multiplayer again since there’s other stuff we can do that doesn’t run the risk of the software doing a brainfart and wasting a session’s worth of effort.

Now, perhaps it’s just me, but when a game is being sold on the basis that it offers functioning multiplayer for the first time in a decade, and then that multiplayer turns out to be badly broken, it doesn’t exactly endear that game to me. I want to give Hidden Path the benefit of the doubt here (this was technically a prerelease version I was playing, although I doubt they can fix all of these issues in the four days separating prerelease and full release) and I do hope that I’ll be able to try the multiplayer again soon, but if I were a cynical man I’d say that this was a product made with minimal funding during the developer’s off-time and pushed out the door without adequate QA in order to make money. Case in point: the game is started through an obnoxious and unnecessary splash launcher that’s painful enough for me to see every time I load the game, but which apparently doesn’t work at all on Windows XP, an operating system still running on 10% of the computers canvassed during the most recent Steam hardware survey. If you have Windows XP and buy Age of Empires 2 HD the chances are you flat-out won’t be able to play it – at least, not until that bug is fixed. Meanwhile that fourteen year-old copy sitting in its jewel case will run on Windows XP just fine with only a few minor issues. You tell me which one you’d rather play³.

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The post Thoughts: Age of Empires 2 HD. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Cards on the table time: I used to play the original CS mod a lot. Everyone has the game that takes over their life when they’re 15/16 years old and have way too much free time. Counter-Strike was mine. As a result this post may get more than a little bit ranty. But dammit, it’s justified.

I am not going to waste my time talking about what Counter-Strike is. The only reason you could possibly have avoided picking up at least some cursory idea of what it’s about is if you’ve somehow spent the last fifteen years trapped in amber and have only now been awakened by scientists who want to harvest your precious, precious DNA. It’s a multiplayer game where there are terrorists and counterterrorists and everyone shoots each other and has a wonderful time (in theory). Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (or CS:GO) is roughly the same game as the original mod as far as the shooting people bit is concerned; it has a somewhat faster pace that puts even more emphasis on fast reaction times and the ability to get headshots with the AK that makes me a bit sad, but it is recognisably Counter-Strike. That’s fine. If I can into get a good game of CS:GO I have a wonderful time. That’s not the problem. The problem is the number of barriers the developers (Hidden Path, responsible for the excellent Defense Grid) have put in between me and finding that one good game of CS:GO in the first place.

Barrier #1: Matchmaking and game modes.

There is a matchmaking system in CS:GO which the game heavily favours for finding servers¹. This is to be expected given its simultaneous XBLA release and it’s not inherently a bad thing; L4D had matchmaking – or at least an automated server search – and I didn’t hate that. What I do hate, and the thing that seriously makes me question what both Valve and Hidden Path were thinking with this, is the way the matchmaking bounces off the various game modes available. There are four of them, which is approximately three more than in the original CS, and they go something like this:

Arms Race. A literal abomination that should never have been loosed upon this world. It’s CS with all the tactical gameplay, clever thinking and knife-edge tension stripped out. In short, it is Counter-Strike without the things that made Counter-Strike Counter-Strike, instead rolling all of the worst parts of Counter-Strike into one mode full of two-second respawns and twitch-shooting. Arms Race is what would happen if you made a really shitty post-Quake Team Deathmatch mod for the Counter-Strike engine². The worst thing is it’s actually supposed to be like this, and I can tell because there is, no joking, an actual achievement you can get for spawn-camping the enemy start zone. People are supposed to enjoy this. People are supposed to enjoy this. I just can’t get my head around it.

Demolition. Slightly better because it keeps the weapon progression system of Arms Race while stripping out all of the stupid crap: everyone gets one life and there are objectives like plant/defuse the bomb. It at least has a justification for being in the game even if I personally would never play it because of the existence of…

Classic mode. There are actually two of these, Casual and Competitive, and I’ll get into just why this split was a monumentally dumb thing to do in just a second,  but this is the closest thing to the Counter-Strike an old player of the game will know and love, with buy menus and bombs and hostages and so on. Consequently it’s the thing that I’m trying to spend my time in game playing. Unfortunately I keep running up against barrier #2.

Barrier #2: The five player team limit.

While custom servers can have pretty much any number of players per team that they want, the original CS settled on eight players per team as the default. So did CS Source.  CS:GO plumps for reducing that number of players to five for Classic Competitive mode, however. I don’t like this. I think it’s the single biggest act of sabotage against the CS formula present in CS:GO because I can take or leave all the other stuff, but I have this five player limit practically forced on me if I want to play Counter-Strike as I recognise it. It’s not just that I don’t like things that are different, either; here are just a few ways it makes it downright impossible to find a good game of Counter-Strike anywhere on the internet.

Good players distort team skill levels far more than they would otherwise. One good player on a team of eight has far less impact than one good player on a team of five. With less people around to average out the skill levels and less people on the enemy team to chew through before they get rewarded with a win, good players can pretty much just rely on their shooting skills to Rambo their way through the game – and remember, this is the game responsible for the infamous one-shot-kill AWP sniper rifle. If you’re stuck on the other team then there’s pretty much nothing you can do until the map ends and the teams reshuffle slightly, but even this may provide no relief due to the tendency of good players to be backed up by friends communicating over a private VOIP channel.

Fewer players means less player turnover. This means you are almost certain to get matchmade onto a disorganised team currently taking a beating. Nobody wants to stick around to be instakilled every game and rack up loss after loss after loss, which is understandable, but this just creates a situation where one team is constantly having its players quit to be replaced by new ones, and as a result they can never get their act together as a team. Eight players on a team provided something of a cushion against this, as the matches went on longer and the losing team could often feel like they were putting up more of a fight than they actually were, prompting people to stick around and start working together to try and improve on that performance. Certainly I can’t remember many matches in the original that were over in 32 seconds, anyway.

Finding a game as a group is nigh-impossible. Ten potential player slots in a game. A group of three players wants to join the same game, which requires the matchmaking system to find a game that is 30% empty. The rules of internet gaming dictated that they will either be stuck looking at a “searching” dialogue for ten minutes as the system tries to find them this mythical game server, or else they will be dumped onto an empty server populated entirely by bots. Admittedly once they’re in the matchmaking system then throws more people in after them, but they still have to grind out a round or two against mostly bot opposition and I don’t expect that state of affairs to last once the post-release mania dies down a bit.

There’s more, but these are the three factors that result in CS:GO being massively one-sided and unfun if you’re unlucky enough to get stuck on the wrong team. The rationale behind five players per team is that that’s the number commonly used in competitive matches between organised clan teams. There is a world of difference between an organised clan team  and a disparate group of public players, though; eight players is necessary to compensate for that skill difference, because otherwise you wind up with the situation we have now where there are groups of two or three clan players running around shredding the opposition in game after game after game. Fun for them, I’m sure; not so fun for me and my friends who are average at best.

“But Hentzau, “ I hear you cry, “that’s Classic Competitive! If you want a larger player count why not play Classic Casual?” It’s true that Casual has a ten player per team limit, which is a little on the large side but would at least be more tolerable. However, Casual mode also has baby features like free armour and defuse kits, no player collision, no friendly fire and reduced kill rewards, and it’s an all or nothing package. I want to play grown-up Counter-Strike with full-sized teams, not the kiddie version.

Barrier #3: The custom server browser.

Okay, so the combination of the matchmaking system and the game modes makes it nigh-impossible to find a satisfying game of CS:GO that way. What about finding a custom server? Surely that’s what gaming on a PC is all about? Well, I’d love to, but unfortunately CS:GO is still using the archaeological relic released with Half Life 2 back in 2004 as a server browser, and it gives you almost no useful information about the game server you’re joining other than the map and player count. Big changes will be flagged somewhere but small changes won’t, which is why I’ve joined too many servers that looked normal but which had unlimited money or banned weapons or something. Perhaps one day I’ll find a server that replicates CS circa 2001 in every way (and adds the silencer back on to the M4 to boot) but the horrible archaic server browser is putting a definite crimp on that particular search for the moment since I don’t ever know what I’m going to get without physically joining the damn things.

I should stress once again that I have found the occasional game of CS:GO that was good, and I have enjoyed these games immensely. The fundamental gameplay of Classic Competitive may be a tad faster and floatier than I’m used to, but my skills all transfer across both the jump from 1.6 to GO and the intervening decade of time okay and I still do quite well for myself. Get two balanced teams locked into a thirty round game and Counter-Strike is still one of the most engrossing multiplayer experiences out there. It’s just that the way the game is set up now is a curious collection of concessions to new players who have never even seen an FPS before mixed in with “hardcore” modes for the clanners, with no happy middle ground for players like me who just want to play classic CS without being headshotted from across the map the moment I step out of spawn. Prior to CS:GO I wouldn’t have said there was anything particularly unusual about me as a player. Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps CS players really are split into these binary camps of drooling morons and 24/7 clanners who have been playing nothing but 1.6 and Source for the last ten years. I doubt it, though, and judging from what my friends have said I’m definitely not alone in my assessment of CS:GO’s metagame elements. Poor show, Valve. Poor show.

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1. It’s kind of hilarious when you click on the “Community Servers” option and a message pops up which basically says “Are you sure you can handle the PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER of the custom servers?”
2. Yes I know it’s based on the popular Gun Game mod for the originals. I was being ironic.

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