Age of Empires

The Good
This game is addictive as hell. Nice historical premise. Lots of units. Great tech tree system. The net play is really good over Microsoft's MSN Zone. Matching up is easy. Smooth fluid graphics all the way through with detailed units and character animations.

The Bad
The AI should have been worked on longer. I don't know how many times I lost a group of men to a ravenous bunch of trees. Obviously, the pathfinding is horrible. Also, a really didn't like the scale of thing. It gets a little annoying seeing villagers tower over houses. Also, a lot of idiots on the net who host games say that the game has cheats disabled, then you find out they were lying when two minutes into the game you are being attacked by sportscars. Oh, well.

The Bottom Line
One of the better historical RTS games that could have been a classic ( a la its sequel) if the developers had put a little more thought into some things.