Arena

[A Black Falcon]

No, you did that later. First you complained about Morrowind, and since you've never played it yourself you posted an article from the very dumb people at Gamespy about why the game is overrated. Very sad, very juvenile.

Please. Before you make such assertions, look at the posts. In this case, please look at the first post in this thread. It's mine. What do I do there? I talk mostly about Arena and a little about Daggerfall. Not about Morrowind at all in fact. The only way it could connect to Morrowind is the way I explained later -- 'what about these things in Arena I am describing is still true in Morrowind and what isn't?'... I was thinking it from the start. Maybe I didn't state it immediately, but I did before too long. And anyway, I was talking about Arena! Arena! NOT MORROWIND!

If you thought that the first post was about Morrowind, then all it'd do is prove my assertion that the games are inherently similar in theme (though I know some aspects of what I discussed have changed).

What I was trying to do was exactly as I stated early in this post. Say that now I understand how the series works a whole lot better and can comment a lot better on it. So I was talking about Arena and hoping that someone would say which aspects were right for Morrowind and which weren't -- ie, in what ways the series had improved over time and in what ways the things I identified in the first game were still there... not to directly talk about Morrowind myself but to hope that someone else would!

GTA is the exact same. You're given specific mission objectives but can choose to just run around and have fun. And the whole world is never open at first, you have to unlock it. And while you can't go back to previous time periods later on in the game, each world is larger than Vice City and GTA 3 combined, so it's no big deal. I know very well how open-ended the game is because I have it. You have only played a few minutes of it, so you have no right to debate this with me.

Actually, I have it too... got it this summer. As I said, I've played it for a couple of hours. Sure, I haven't gotten too far -- only beaten the first half of the first mission (that is, two of the four stages of Greece) -- but enough to know what the game is like and certainly more than "a couple of minuites".

As for GTA(3), that one I really haven't played more than a very small amount so I didn't really know that. Maybe it is a decent comparison then, though GTA obviously has a whole lot more to do as you wander around... in Body Harvest your options are somewhat limited.

I absolutely hated the combat system, and it had nothing else that interested me.

Action-based RPG combat isn't the best, but some of the time it works okay... I definitely prefer strategic, but action-based isn't always horrible. Diablo's was better than average, I'd say, because of the great variety of skills... that was a great strategic element in the game.

That didn't make any sense.

As in despite how most of my posts about it were negative, Arena really is enjoyable. Though not so much so that I'll spend lots of hours in it... but enough so that I'd say that it's a decent game, and a good one in plenty of respects.