Empire Earth: Time traveling with Satan

I admit I never played Empire Earth the first time around. I was always vaguely aware there was a game called Empire Earth and that it involved commanding armies during the most violent and bloody periods of human history, but I already owned Age of Mythology and saw little reason to expand my real-time strategy repertoire at a time when my gaming budget consisted of birthday money. So I passed it over for a sweet box set of Lucas Arts games. Or maybe that was when I bought the Journeymen Project. I can’t remember. At any rate, I finally scored a copy of Empire Earth around Christmas when a Steam-like website was giving it away for free. Yep. Like Tophat I’m a bit of a penny pincher these days. It was lucky that I came across the deal because I had reached my fun limit for Age of Empires Online, Microsoft’s ill-conceived attempt to bring a RTS MMO to a world that had never considered such a bizarre concept.