For these past few days, I sort of feel sorry for myself, but for the most part, screw it, I don’t; I just spend day and night playing this game released back in November last year, Arx Fatalis. It’s basically a dungeon crawl game where you play in the first person perspective and fight using a hand-gesture spell system (now that I think about it, Ronin is almost based ENTIRELY on the game concepts from Arx Fatalis!).
To make a long story short, I was randomly browsing through games on gamespot.com and, realizing that there’s no good RPG coming out for awhile, I tried to look up old RPGs (probably inspired by a short FFX session that I watched Kevin play) for some old fashioned fun, and then all of a sudden I was struck by this random game demo that I downloaded and went obsessed with for awhile. The only reason I didn’t buy the game right when I played its demo was because the product wasn’t really out yet – and I was distracted by Neverwinter Nights shortly after, so I buried the brilliant game ideas presented in the game deep inside my mind, thinking it’s some sort of dream about my ultimate game.
When Ronin went into full production, all these ideas came out from my subconscious and I suddenly had all the ideas to make a great hack and slash RPG, unbeknownst that they’re all experiences that I had from playing that tiny Arx Fatalis demo. So here I am, two months after Ronin made a name for itself, and all of a sudden all these great experiences with the game flashed back to me. I didn’t even remember the name – all I remembered was that I got it randomly off fileplanet – much help that gives me – so I basically searched the entire fileplanet RPG database until I hit the game intro screen for Arx Fatalis, which struck home immediately. So then I searched frantically for a copy of the game; and believe it or not, I found it at a cozy game store inside Westminster Mall, off in some abandoned shelves with other old and forgotten goodies (there’s 2 copies left, fortunately).
I’m not sure if I should go along describing what’s so good about the game (it will take another page of text because it’s just overloaded with goodness), but man, I’ve had the worst experience of time warp since the night Enemy Territory came out, and this recurred for like a week straight. You don’t know what addiction is until you wake up at 3 in the afternoon and the first thing you do is fire up that same game and start playing again.
In other news, after about half a year, the PS-USB coverter finally came back to my brother’s hands, so after getting hooked on Arx Fatalis I’m going straight into playing songs from all 3 Tournamixes from ddrei.com; I should apologize to Justin… I’m not working at all these last week or so. I’m having way too much fun.