I have a nasty feeling it’s harder to mine gold than they make it look, though. Hell, if the apocalypse happens – and we shouldn’t discount that – Age of Empires will have taught me all of things a working settlement needs. I didn’t realise it at the time, but everything it was teaching me about both history and real time strategy would serve me well throughout my life, even if it did get in the way of my homework. In our 1997-flavoured family home, and its newly acquired PC (for school work obviously), the original Empires game was king. In the increasingly distant gaming past, the Age of Empires series was the be-all and end-all of PC real time strategy games me.
