Many thanks to Imperialis on the Discord for coming up with this.
The intent of this ongoing article series is for the community to highlight those forgotten, overlooked, weird, zany games that hold a place in their heart. We’re talking games like Eador Genesis, Rise of Legends and Remnants of the Precursors.
If you have a 4X, grand strategy, rts (yes, even rts!) or tactics game that you absolutely adore, that few people know about, email explorminate@gmail.com
So, first up:
Age of Wonders 1, the original, by me!
As a young man, struggling with puberty, spots, general geekiness etc, I walked into a newsagent. For those not in the UK, a newsagent is basically a small kiosk or convenience store, usually where you would get cigarettes etc.
I was wandering the shop, and I chanced upon an obscure magazine called PCGamer. Obviously that publication never amounted to anything. At that time, they used to have cds on the front cover full of demos and game patches and driver updates.
Yeah yeah, I know, how quaint. Remember this was the era where dial up internet was still common, broadband was a luxury, and Napster was causing moral panic.
Anyway, those cds put me onto the path of computer geekdom, by introducing me to Pharaoh, Battlezone, Oddworld:Abe’s Odyssey, Thief and… Age of Wonders.
This latter for my attention because I had just finished re-reading Lord of The Rings, and this was like a game version of that epic.
Age of Wonders 1 was my favourite of these initial games (Although I did play a tonne of Pharaoh, and finished Battlezone 3 times. There is a redone version of Battlezone, which has humiliated me in my attempts to beat it.) I was hooked. I played both campaigns, every single map, thought I was a Master, and then went online and met…Jomungur and Agamemnon. That did not end well. But I had a blast! If you play it, you can catch glimpses of the various elements that have become popular now in the current, most recent entry in the series, Age of Wonders 4.
You have:
- Customisable heroes,
- a campaign story that still holds up and is imho better than anything the sequels have done
- resizable UI elements
- Very large battlefields
- magic that feels very powerful
- the debut of the Kharagh (geek points if you know what their favourite pass time is)
- cities that take up multiple hexes
- a unit enchantment system that is BETTER than that of Age of Wonders 4 (I will fight you on this)
- an inbuilt music player
- wonderfully designed maps and decent asymmetry (beware the Air Galleys, they will destroy you if you are not careful),
- charming unit descriptions (what happened to those Triumph?!) To be fair, the Shadow Magic, AoW3 and Planetfall descriptions are also very good.
- an obnoxiously large game box
- a manual (ok boomer, wtf is a manual?!)
- Oh, did I mention the nudity?
If you like Age of Wonders 4, then you owe it to yourself to revisit the original, where it all began. Beware that you might have to engage in some arcane wizardry to get it working right on modern systems.
Purchase it on Steam or on GoG.
Also known as BBB in many places, Andy is well known for his love of strategy games of all types, especially the Age of Wonders series.
What an incredible demo disc this was. So many classics-to-be. I adored Battlezone.