Bethesda's Arena

The dungeon masters from Bethesda Softworks indeed inscribed themselves into the pantheon of high caliber role playing game developers among the best.

Too bad they didn't fix the main problem of Arena even in Daggerfall, but at least there is progress. Hookers of Daggerfall are naked at least.

Their Elder Scrolls series consists of multiple titles, that unfold typical Tolkien'esque high fantasy, but the interactivity and freedom proposed by developers is the key feature making even the most cliche story about another hero saving the kingdom - a worthy adventure to be proudly remembered and cherished. The fictional world of Tamriel itself is a marvelous place that deserves to be explored. The yellow sunsets of Hammerfell are capable of rendering a worthy magnificent father replacement even for Solaire, but unlike Dark Souls - where you just shove a disk into your hard earned PlayStation 3 console and immediately dive into the game - Arena proposes a different approach, proving that the glorious PC master race existed even in 1994. 

 

Skyrim is very optimized for the old PC's. That's how it looks on GeForce 2 MX440

 

That being said, if you were prepared to immediately occupy yourself with thievery after the installation process, behold, because first of all you must pass through the rite of passage called the troubleshooting process, which means - why the hell your game doesn't work and who to blame. Traditionally all the blame goes directly to mister Bill Gates, but you at least thank the holy Andraste that you don't have to dance around the pentagram in search of rape by Satan for your game to start working like it should. All you have to do is plug a cable into your neck and roam some grade-a nineties cyberpunk fantasies. These sickening experiences include all sorts of MS-DOS tinkering. The most popular is Arena's healthy memory appetite of destruction. The game wants so bad to fit it's fat behind into your 640 KB of base memory that you start questioning Bethesda's sanity, but being already exposed to personal computing you decide to not hold anything personal against Bethesda itself and just prepare your nanoangstroms of hate to resolve peacefully the situation regarding your system caching programs and utilities that already claimed the place as their own because apparently Arena doesn't possess enough guts to wonder into the unknown of your 4 MB of conventional memory.

 

Artwork for the new album by Cauldron Born

 

All of a sudden you realise that this is your first dungeon, a rite of passage for the worthy chosen ones that couldn't play Stygian Abyss because it was too damn hard and their school curriculum didn't include the lizardmen language, but the beam of hope illuminated their path into the land of dumbed down mechanics and hardened like Duke Nukem's balls installation processes and troubleshootings. You enter the dungeon. It is dark, hot and smells of burnt CRT monitors. It is the domain of config.sys, autoexec.bat and mscdex. Creating a boot disk is no easy task, worthy only of a real champion whose got fire in his eyes. Using your only weapon, which is a mechanical keyboard, you type in some esoteric gibberish that you took from a guy whose nickname was The Mad Arab and somehow succeeded in creating this alien artefact that is capable of loading your system drivers above the conventional memory. You raise up your hopes, use the unholy contraption you just summoned and pray to Lord British to at last end your science fiction adventures and give you the opportunity to dive into the world of magic, because that's what you paid for, but all you see in front of you is your pitch black screen that looks like it just faced cybernetic oblivion. Now you can only wish that whoever bought System Shock for his sci-fi affection was forced to read The Wheel of Time in it's entirety before earning his right to play the damn System Shock. In complete darkness of your room, or rather cave, you meditate, trying to recall your actions from similar situations you had a couple of times before. Your experienced imagination skill is trying to puncture the fabric of space itself, to show you the solution. And suddenly, you see something, but what is it? White foggy symbols look Cthulhan and frightening. While your memory is clearing the imagizer you realise that you're looking at some machine communicating runes. IO ADDRESS, DMA, IRQ. You certainly weren't wrong before when you felt horror cursing through your knees. Transfixed with fear and fascination, you reset your personalized computing system, which brightens the room a little with a flickering MS-DOS 5.0 command prompt and type install.exe to change your sound device settings. In your mind you recall the numbers you used to configure Darklands, Fantasy General and Master of Magic, and just use them to finally fire up your sound blaster.