What is this game??

I bought the game brand new in 2001. I've got that beautiful box up on my shelf but I never got a cloth map.

However, my quick keys card is a foldable, and the map occurs on the inside (I assume yours is the same rroyo).

 

Yep. It's been opened and in a sheet protector for so long the fold has almost disappeared. Hence, the map is on the back.

 

I miss the old dos days before gaming really caught on and most companies were still small and naive enough to take chances on good game design over sales and flashy graphics, knowing that the game may or may not sell well.

Well I guess the writing was on the wall all along. Just watch their animated intro logo and you can see they willingly sacrificed code (read: Bug-killing) and art (read: Flashy Graphics) for game design, which is the most important IMO. Too bad those of us who appriciate that the most are also the ones to suffer the most.

Oh god that sounded way too emo.

 

Ahh, old dos games and earlier. I remember way back when Infocom would put 'feelies' in with their games to add to the atmosphere.

Like the classic text adventure 'Ballyhoo!'

Just look at these goodies! http://gallery.guetech.org/ballyhoo/ballyhoo.html

 

Now that's creative packaging. Publishers and developers just have no imagination these days. One of my favorites was the old letter in the box Star Tropics came in for Nintendo. You had to actually refer to the letter to get past one part of the game. In the days before walkthroughs and GameFAQS.com, if you didn't have that letter, you had better have a friend that did or you weren't finishing your game.

 

My mom squashed our Arcanum box in the garage; next time I'm home I'll check for the map.

I never played too many puzzle games. I went from Commander Keen to Treasurecove to Tombraider to Diablo I to Half-life to Everquest to Diablo II to Arcanum to Wow.

For some reason these games have touched me in ways that would take forever to explain. Something about a good portion of my childhood and my dreams being wrapped up in these complete fantasy worlds. Just switching gears briefly, I generally think these games really stimulated my sense of imagination, dramatically.

In Commander Keen 4 if you bothered yahooing the lingo (back in the early nineties) they sometimes reveled shortcuts through the levels =).