Snapturtle

Nearly a year after Age Of Mythology shipped for the PC to “critical acclaim”:http://avault.com/reviews/review_temp.asp?game=aomyth, the Macintosh version is now available. Being the huge RTS (Real Time Strategy) fan that I am, I picked up the “Mac version”:http://www.apple.com/games/articles/2003/09/ageofmythology/ the day it showed up at my local Mac retailer.

Gleefully opening the game box, careful of course not rip or tear anything (I collect these things), I proceed to install the game onto my recently upgraded G4 tower in order to experience the game in all it’s 3D glory. Instead what I got was an ugly reminder that all Mac ports are not created equal. “Initialization Failed” in the rude message I receive as the game drops me back into the desktop. Hrmf.

Swinging my chair around, I install it on my iBook. Not a single problem there. The game even appears to run rather well on the old 700mhz G3 machine. Looks like a good choice for some portable gaming.

I attempted to re-install the game on the G4 with no luck. I called MacSoft last Friday and explained my problem. Apparently I wasn’t the first person to report this problem, nor am I the only one experiencing this problem according to what is reflected on “VersionTracker”:http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/21611. Tech support walked me through yet another re-install to no avail. Attempted to reset permissions to everyone on the games folder with no luck.

Being the dedicated gamer that I am, I re-installed the game just one more time over the weekend just to be sure. Before I did I was sure to remove any reference to the game ever existing on my system, including the two AoM preference files located in the /Library (perform a search in the Finder for “aom” to find them). Don’t forget to empty the trash! I proceeded to install the game on a non-system partition that was marked as “Ignore permissions on this volume” via the Get Info (command-I) option. This appeared to do the trick as the game now loads correctly and plays beautifully.

I must say that the AoM port is a good one, the engine is silky smooth, even on the iBook. I’m very impressed with the overall graphic quality of the game and I’m sure I’ll get sucked into playing this game way too much a la “Warcraft III”:http://www.blizzard.com/wc3/. Like all other RTS games there are “cheats available”:http://www.apple.com/games/articles/2003/09/ageofmythology/index2.html#cheats for those that feel the need.

One other problem that I’ve found with this game is the internet play is very finicky. If you have any sort of firewall or router be sure to read the included “Read Me” file as it explains what you’ll need to do if you plan on playing via “GameRanger”:http://www.gameranger.com/. If you don’t do all the steps, it’s not going to work, trust me. I spent more than two hours getting it work and I don’t think I can even host my own games yet. What makes this even more frustrating is that a lot of people aren’t aware of this little “issue” and think they can just jump on to GameRanger and play a quick game. Nope. To make matters worse, they don’t even know how to configure said firewall or router causing me to have to kick them from the game… ah… I like playing the bad guy