age of empires - II: the conquerors expansion

This video featuring Age of Empires 2 - The Conquerors is a work of inspiration. It is also a kind of fond remembrance for those all-nighters I did on this amazing game around 2000, 2001 and once again later in 2006 (basically my teenage and post-teenage years).

The screenshot grabs in this video are from 2006 summer, when I played and enjoyed the campaigns night after night in Cairo. During the day I used to volunteer at WFP. One morning in a train to Maadi (in barely-slept mood after one such all-nighter with the game), I thought of creating a video using in-game cinematic. Instead of using the saved screen grabs, I had planned to use actual gameplay footage. The original idea was to capture the screen recording of the gameplay, interpolate the frames to around 30fps (I still had to figure out how), and upscale the video resolution to 720p, the go-to resolution of the time.

It simply seemed too ambitious with the machine I had with me.

At that time, I had a desktop computer with NVIDIA's 128 Mb graphic card, Intel Pentium 4 with Hyper-threading, 512 Mb of RAM and a 7200 rpm hard drive - but it was at home back in Kathmandu. Instead, the machine I had with me in Cairo was Acer TravelMate 2410 with 40 Gb 5400 rpm hard drive, 256 Mb of RAM, and 1.2 GHz processor - the system using which I planned to create this video.

Somehow, if I had really made the planned video back then, I guess it'd have taken me at least three months for a 1-minute video (given that I did successfully interpolate and upscale the in-game video frame-by-frame). But it didn't happen. And in time, the screen-grabs got stowed away and forgotten in a folder somewhere.

Until today.

Today, I used a very common machine with 2.9 GHz Dual-core Intel i5 processor, 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB solid state drive – to create this video. I didn't use in-game cinematic as originally planned, and also decided to go with those saved screen grabs instead – doing which, today, I was able to complete this video in less than 8 hours.

Also, it'll be relevant to know that Age of Empires-II: Definitive Edition has already been released - with 4K resolution, enhanced graphics, better AI, better video frame-rates and more expansive experience.

It's definitely time for better gameplay!

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