While not perfect, AOEII contains no sharp-stick-in-the-eye game busters or fatal flaws that suddenly leap at you after hours of play. This brings me back to the subject of this review, Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings, a game that incorporates the best features of the real-time strategy genre and manages to avoid the numerous pitfalls that often lessen a gamers experience. In light of this discouraging and dismaying trend, the release of a RTS game free of any major problems is a significant event. Unfortunately, with this increased capability comes the logical downside, a necessary evil of modern-day gaming - the obligatory patch or patches that soon follow on the heels of the original game release, usually fed by fan feedback through on-line forums, e-mails, news groups and so forth.

Who can blame the designers for trying to take advantage of every new possibility as they forge games with more and more capabilities and scramble to pack their products with the latest enhancements and technology of game design? This might be expected, though not excused, due to the complexity inherent in most new titles as the limits of computer gaming technology expand in ever widening increments. Far more the exception than the rule, this happy event occurs much too seldom in practice considering the tremendous number of computer games released each month (circa 1999). Every so often a game comes along that manifests itself as a reviewer's delight.

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