To its credit it’s trying to be a little more subtle than the shiny visual improvements of other HD remakes. What exactly is Age of Empires 2 HD adding to the experience that will justify the frankly eye-watering pricetag of £15? The 20 th Anniversary release of Another World has apparently redrawn all the backdrops in such high definition that they take up a staggering 3 gigabytes of disk space (the original game came on two 1.5 megabyte floppy disks, if I recall correctly). The Enhanced Edition of Baldur’s Gate did it with a couple of new companions and quest areas 1. In the case of a game that already works, though, you need to offer something extra in comparison to the older version in order to justify charging money for it all over again. Perhaps then simply offering a working version with higher display resolutions would be enough. Perhaps it’d be different if it was one of those titles that’s notoriously finicky on Windows 7, such as the original two Thief games. Yes, the resolution is hilariously primitive and the 256 colour limit means you get some of those vivid purple and green hues so familiar to people in the habit of digging out their old games, but you can still install it, load it and play it with a minimum of fuss. The thing with Age of Empires 2 – indeed, the thing with a lot of these HD remakes – is that the original version does still work. However, I suspect that Age of Empires 2 HD will be the title that makes a lot of people realise that simply attaching the letters “HD” to a game doesn’t necessarily mean that what you’re getting is going to be an improvement over that physical copy that’s been gathering dust inside its jewel case for the last decade and a bit. If this is what the HD update actually delivers then everyone goes away happy.

The developer/publisher gets to sell what had previously been a dead product all over again, and the purchaser gets… well, in theory they get to have an updated version of that old game they loved that actually functions on modern operating systems. Age of Empires 2 is the latest game to get the “HD” rerelease treatment, which is a recent and not-entirely-unwelcome trend for older PC games and one which I suspect pleases both the companies that make them and the people who buy them.

Age of empires 2 change resolution