@~With Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall about to be released, a timely
@~recap of the first game ... Sue

                 The Elder Scrolls - ARENA

                      From Brian Burke

This game first came out when I still had my Amiga. I recall being
extremely envious. Now I have a PC I can see for myself what the
fuss was about.

Problem 1 - Base Memory, or rather, on my WIN95 system, a distinct
lack of it. To date this is the only game I playing with a boot
disk and where I can't get any sound. Not that there's much sound
to speak of (excuse the pun). When I started in the opening
dungeon I played from a WIN95 DOS box with sound. So I had the
trumpet fanfare when gaining a higher level. Once I left this area
my memory problems began.

Problem 2 - I never thought I'd say this BUT the game's too big.
Depending on your boredom threshold you could play this game
forever. There's simply no boundary to the map, it just keeps
generating random areas/dungeons ad-infinitum.

Once out the start dungeon I wandered into a town called Soulkeep
and, having received my first quest from the Queen (got to run
loads of little errands first mind) just exited the town and
looked for the Ghoul. Wrong move. I didn't find him!  A case of
Read The Flipping Manual. I neglected to right mouse click on the
map icon which I eventually did. It took me ages to find my way
back to Soulkeep from the `inner' map.

Despite the negatives I'm ploughing away and am now on the 5th
staff piece thanks to downloading an FAQ off the Internet.  This
lists the places where the quest to find said staff pieces are to
be found and, I guess, is saving literary days of playing time.
With any luck I'll be finished some time in September ready for
the Daggerfall release.

I'm playing off the floppy disk version but I believe there's an
updated CD-ROM version. Maybe Sue knows what the enhancements are?

@~Erm ... not really ... can anyone help with details?

Meantime if you've a month or two to spare and all played up on
RPGs you could do worse than have a go at Arena.

@~Is it bug-free now? ... Sue










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