Age of Empires: Empire of Annoyance

As I’ve mentioned before, we’ve played Starcraft into the ground, and then some. In an attempt to keep the LAN parties, fresh, fun, and exciting, we decided a good idea would be to try to get Age of Empires running. Mike, one of the regulars, had previously burned a copy of both AOE2 and its expansion from a mounted copy on his HDD.

It’s at this point I should probably point out to all people in a position of authority, that I in no way practice in or support pirating music, software, or any other form of copyrighted material. Anything said in this blog that may indicate otherwise is strictly for the purposes of great hyperbolization and spellbinding storytelling. Honestly, I wouldn’t know anything about .exe cracks or using bittorrent or Soulseek to easily and efficiently download gig after gig of music, television, and software. And my ISP most certainly has NOT blocked all but one of the standard bittorrent ports for me due to my excessive and unrelenting downloading. And I most definitely do not have nearly a TB of 700MB/40 minutes video on scores of DVD+Rs and HDDs, no siree. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Ok, back to the story. I use aforementioned discs to install AOE on Galileo, and when I try to run the program, I am told that I need to insert the AOE disc to continue. Annoying to be sure. Even more annoying, I still have the AOE disc I used to install in my computer. I call up Mike and ask him what gives, but he’s not a clue, as he’s never had this problem.

Fast forward to the next LAN party. We spend a good two hours looking for a crack for AOE so we could get it to run. Finally we find a crack for the version we have, and we install it on three computers to test it out. The game runs on all of them, and we’re excited about this prospect. We weren’t so excited about what occurred next though.

Vincent, who was using Tesla, set up a LAN game for us to join. We join and hit ready. Vincent hits the button to start the game and we are greeted by a message kindly informing us that we must all have the same version before we can start a game. This puzzles us, as all three computers installed off the exact same discs, used the exact same crack, and in all other ways were identical so far as the AOE software was concerned.

We try it again, using a different computer of the three to start the game. Same problem. Eventually, we discover the problem. When we all join the game, everyone appears to have version 4c. However, as soon as the “Start Game” button is pressed, something causes whatever the host computer is to randomly decide that instead of version 4c, it’s instead running version 4d. This obviously causes the version incompatibility message, and prevents us from playing AOE.

This all occurred about a month ago. We’ve still yet to find the root cause of the problem, or a solution. At this point Starcraft is no longer played into the ground, but has actually been played deep into the Earth’s iron core. Let’s just hope we can figure this out soon.