Back in the olden days there was this guy called John Romero. He was famous for making the original Doom game, and on the strength of this he was for some time in the mid-90s referred to as the rockstar of the gaming industry. He drove a Ferrari, he had long hair, and rumour had it he had even made it with a girl! Around this time he split with id software (the developers of Doom), and started up his own company called Ion Storm.
Ion Storms flagship game was called Daikatana, and after years and years of development, and numerous engine changes, the game was finally released to critical scorn and popular mockery (all I remember about it myself is that the black dude was called Superfly Johnson). Not long after that they got closed down by their parent company. They're still around, but with basically a whole new bunch of people running the show. The new incarnation has made a few good releases, most notably Thief 3, which is a damn fine game in my opinion.
The original incarnation of the company is famous for just one game, Deus Ex, which did pretty well for itself. One of their other releases, Anachronox, was just as good (actually better in my opinion) but has sadly faded into obscurity while Deus Ex has gone on to spawn one sequel already with another in development.
Anachronox is a Final Fantasy style RPG created for the PC with a western audience in mind. It fixes two of the common flaws in Japanese style RPGs, which are the constant random battles and the incomprehensible storylines. It's powered by a heavily modified version of the Quake 2 engine (which was ancient even when this game was released), so it looks pretty terrible by todays standards. Even so the art design is very good and makes up for the old technology behind it (plus it's a real relief to play a game that doesn't take half an hour to load). After playing it for a little while, you don't even notice the blocky graphics anymore, except when trying to figure out what kind of emotions the characters distorted features are trying to convey.
The gameplay is OK, but not great. It's modeled on the Final Fantasy games, but lacks a lot of the behind the scenes complexity of those games, and also has a very small game world when compared to them (there's a reason for that, which I'll mention in a minute). Having said that, it's still a decent effort and pretty enjoyable to play, if you bear in mind that RPGs of all shape and form inevitably require at least a small amount of tedious dungeon crawling.
Where it really shines is the writing. It has an original plot (still suffering a tiny bit from Final Fantasy Nonsense syndrome, but never mind), a well designed world with a gritty, noirish mood, and plenty of interesting, well thought out characters (a bit of a rarity in games of any genre). It's also damn funny (also a rare attribute for a game).
What makes it fall down is that it was never really finished. The original game was very buggy, but a few patches have been released to fix most of them, the most recent being 'unofficial', i.e. done by the programmers in their own time after the product had been discontinued by the publisher, proving that a lot of genuine care and attention went into making this game. The other problem is that the programmers decided the game was too big for them to finish it all in time (maybe they knew their company was destined for failure), so they made half the game and planned to release a sequel, Anachronox Prime, that would complete the story. Sadly, the sequel was never started and will now never be made, leaving us with a cool story that ends on a massive cliffhanger, a bunch of character arcs suspended in midair, and a whole lot of unanswered mysteries that we'll never get the answers to.
But it's a pretty cool game despite all that, one that deserves to be better remembered than it is. It took me a bloody long time to finish it, even with (or perhaps because of) the big arsed walkthrough that pointed out every little detail hidden in the game. Now that it's over with I can get out of my moderately old-school gaming binge and get back to finishing some of the other more recent games I bought and never finished. Wait... what's that... over on the other side of my desk... it looks like... an old second hand copy of Arcanum!?! No... NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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