Age of empires 2: is nostalgia poisoning the minds of yesterdays youth?

Age of empires two (aoe2) is a pit of nostalgia for many, hours spent researching heavy plough and doing the things that game otherwise has you do. Like many of you, i didn’t actually play it when i was a kid, sorry. Instead i had an imagination and an education that gave me the, using clever words synonym, I use today to acrticate my Edea’s. Incoherent gibberish aside lets jump into the review.

Age of empires, is a game like any other game. I've not really got a lot to say so i popped a quick question to a friend asking them what their childhood experiences of the game had been like in the full knowledge that they had not played it at that time either. This fellow was however an veteran of interviews: having quite recently being interviewed on a beach my a welsh man asking him about the now cancelled swansea tidal lagoon. The interview went as follows:



Halcyon indeed sweet hypothetical manchild. There is something of a victimhood at play here for the lost children. Those that never had more than terrestrial television to tide over our supple impressionable minds, the forlorn and lost who unable to grapple ourselves to our plain and uneventful pasts are forced to live in a tumultuous present, stripped of our rose tinted spectacles we wander the desert of the real baring down on all we see with incalculable cynicism from our half-formed under stimulated monkey minds.

Note that the fellows linguistic capabilities were improved when he was a version of himself who had played aoe2 as a child. Given this was the only variable at play here, it does make for rather compelling evidence that not playing aoe2 is a source of neurocognitive decline in the development of the child's mind. While the mechanic of such an causation can only be speculated upon, it wouldn’t be all too bold if i suggested that the game beams the historical and social textures of the civilisation directly onto their comparatively softer skulls, wherein lies the brains (sorry not every here played aoe2 as a child and i want us all to be on the same page)

I know some of you are very curious about the welsh man and how he plays into the discussion, well you see the welsh aren't a playable civilisation in aoe2. There is a very good explanation for that… they’re all a bunch of… misrepresented and stereotyped people who bare the eire of their anglican neighbours and by extension their former dominon’s. That fact you were anticipating a cheap jab the welsh on my part just goes to show how pervasive the attitude is, and what low expectations you hold for the man who named his chinese city Sumtingwong.

This however hits at something larger, i unfortunately can’t ignore this grand injustice lacking as i may the advanced fold in the front of my brain needed to understand the necessity of being prejudiced against oppressed peoples. A smarter fellow might be able to explain but alas i must thrash and writhe against a system built upon a assumptive mantle of my having played Aoe2.

The game is a real time strategy. Let's talk about that name for a moment. namely the aspect denoted as “real time” what does that mean? Well it references to things happening concurrently. Which to so some degree is true or rather it was true in 1999 but here in the scifi future with new marvels such as computers, the electric toothbrush or even the Loom (haha we had that one in 1999) Nostalgia is now a player on the board, not the in game board more the bored of this extended ramble about nostalgia board, that is you’re now thinking about bored board boredly in a broad but not like a sword especially one with a nord… word.

The key point here, so muddled in tangent it required a new paragraph to actually get around to it, which now is derailing itself with an aside about it’s own necessity…

Finishing a game of aoe2 can be difficult online because sometimes one person's connection ends up making lag for the rest due to the requirement of every player being connected to every other player. This is often a source of frustration for those of us that don’t pop a prepubescent boner at the sound of villagers chopping wood. A symbolic castration that inevitably turned all the super intelligent ubermensch the game spat out into multifetished perverts. Some i have spoken to have openly expressed and interest in non missionary sex, non procreative sex and extramarital sex; which, deceitfully, is nothing to do with having multiple wives.

Speaking of multiple, this games has multiple mounted units: It’s okay in my books.

Mgs5: No not that one.

Wetwork, to some it means taking a slash on your partner(s) to others it's a life a death struggle to keep the world safe from those that would seek to do ill. I write these lines, equally wet, as i sit stewing in my own sweat after a harsh mid morning jog on what might just be the muggest day in living memory. What connects these three seemingly tangential observations? Well the run was short and bit of a pisser, short i am and so is metal gear 5: ground zeroes which would be taking the piss for the asking price if i’d not got it as part of a larger bundle; That and all three are warm, wet and a bit of a teaser.

The real trick to stealth in the same as “good” writing; hmmm... perhaps something closer to “effective” would be a better term. The word “jackhammer” seemingly plucked at random for use as a non-sequitur might actually fit closer than the other two. Word choice aside i mean to be an exponent for the most effective form of infiltration known to man; in this the modern day: two thousand eighteen anno domini. As i wet my lips to put these words forward i feel the hands of the GCHQ poised to punched my name into a watchlist. My solution: making bomb threats!

Nothing is more effective as a source of fear and confusion than an explosion. Other than shipping anyone one on a watchlist off to guantanamo bay for a light afternoon session of listening the barbie girl while a set of cracking live jump leads become firm and fast friends with your perineum. See the risks i go to for a piece of journalistic excellence like this. PM: Floaty McMay boat wouldn’t hesitate to ignore the context surrounding my assertion if it meant she could send me hurtling over the white cliffs of dover, into a waiting CIA hydroplane, to make the immigration figures look any better for the army of closet racists that have become her new powerbase.

WHY? Why the hatred for the system BVGRONTI? (rolls of the tongue, not a work in progress) well the answer is simple really. At the beginning of the game while witnessing the treatment of the prisoners in the fictional analogue of guantanamo bay (where the game is set) we are serenaded with the song “here’s to you,” a song about anarchists being put to death for crimes many believe they didn’t commit. The people who decided the state was a bad thing and ought to be abolished were really pissy when the stated decided they were a bad thing and ought to be abolished.

A strain of martyrdom makes its way into anarchist writing, praising the complexity of the men pulled into the machine of government and those the hurl themselves in after. Like those valiant souls who's arm’s become lodged in vending machine when trying to snatch a packet of cheese and onion. I’ve not yet developed a taste for that form of political whiskey but it burns my throat all the same. So what you heard a song and now you’re foaming at the mouth? No it think it’s the bombs they put in that little girls chest. Isn’t that some hackpin metaphor for adolescence? Pretty sure it isn’t.

The main crux of my outrage is that the very method i used to distract guards throughout my time roaming the bay was turned against me in the final moments of the game. I’m pretty sure the game agrees with my initial assertion. The explosion is the great leveler; Equity of man and concrete are brought about before its shattering might. it was the tool of my elevation and hence too my collapse, just like the anarchist. Either hideo kojima is a masterful storyteller or i need to reign in my pyretic tendencies.

What about the girl that got blown up?

Good point! I rate this game: better than getting teeth lodged in your skull that make you forget how to speak russian but not really.