Here is something new I'm trying with AoEI, every week I'll have a topic to discuss here, today I chose it on the porting of AoE games. As you may know, The Age Of Kings has already been ported to DS and the same thing is happening to Age Of Mythology. While this was good for DS owners, a handful of fans of the series weren't to happy with it. So what do you think about this, is it a way to bring back game for new players who don't know about it or is it merely another way to make money of a popular series? On a comedic side, I investigated what it would be like if someone ported AoM to a
PSP.
First off, the cover would like a cheap
ripoff of the
original, which is what happened in The Age Of Kings port. If this happened with AoM, it's going to look like this: From the
original, to the weird
knockoff(That's actually ES concept art for AoM.). Next, we have the actual game, to deal with the supposed low quality of ports and the PSP's inability to handle so many graphics, the company will have to make serious cutbacks. So now there are only three buildings, you cannot age up, there are only two myth units, and every civ only has one cavalry and infantry unit type. The resources have also been wrecked, now the only resources you can get are wood and gold, no favor and no food. With all these large gameplay cutbacks, now the civs look horrific, did I mention there aren't even major gods? With the
Greeks, you're getting the two most overused myth units in the AoM series: Cyclops and Minotaur. As
Egyptians, sphinxes and mummies seem to be the only existing myth units in Egyptian mythology for the developers, so they went and put them in without even doing any research on them.
Norse are no better, rather than teaching players about the vast mythologies of the norse, they'd rather just put in a mountain giant and troll. As far as Singleplayer goes, they ever rarely include many map in ports, here you're in for such exciting maps as "DESERT", "SNOWLAND", "MEDITERRANEAN", and "UNDERGROUND", the last one is suppose to be Underworld, but they only know so much about mythology. Then when you actually start playing, all you start out with is a market, from there you store resources and train villagers, after spending all that time finding resources and manage to build a barracks before the Overpowered AI sends their army to destroy your base, you realise you can only train 6 infantry units and 3 cavalry units, by now the owner of the game has already given up and returned the game. But for you gentlemen that are still playing, you find that your resources are depleted! So now you aimlessly wander a poorly-made map with only one floor texture, random cliffs, and trees and small rocks scattered around the map to act as scenery. If you're still here after that horrible match, now you can play the campaign! No crappy port is complete without one. As everything here is, the scenarios you must go through are bland and unoriginal and leaves you wondering why you bought the game in the first place. They'll probably have you doing common objectives like
escorting something,
defending an area except that's too hard because the company was too lazy to put in a watch tower building, or possibly worst of all: you just
walk around a map fighting stuff and trying to stay alive till you reach a certain point, with the
common skirmish with campaign-only units. And of course, every campaign you control a hero you can't play in regular games. Oh and I forgot about water, yeah this game has it, but there aren't any boats to control! All you can do is just stare at a few as they pass you by during a cinematic. This basically sums up what a port of AoM would be like, so if someone asked me if I would like a port of AoM for PSP, I'd punch them, kick them right in the balls, and push him of a very tall cliff. In summary: PORTS TO HANDHELDS ARE ABOMINATIONS!
