“His Legend Would Live on through the Ages.”
“One day, a King will come, and the Sword will rise… again.”
Mighty artwork by @ihaveeczema.
“Don’t play this game.” ~ Andrew Seyoon Park, GameSpot PC Editor
Sometimes, four words are all you need to tell a whole story. In the early-to-mid 2000’s, standards and practices on the gaming news and review site GameSpot required that written reviews be of some minimum length. However, there was less regulation on the content of their video reviews at the time, allowing reviewers the creative freedom to present these games however they pleased (more or less). And so, when dealing with the absolute bottom of the barrel, sometimes four simple words were all they needed to get their point across: “Don’t Play This Game.”
The first game to receive the DPTG treatment on GameSpot will also be the subject of the first in our own series revisiting this collection of games: 2002’s Arthur’s Quest: Battle for the Kingdom, as published under THQ’s ValuSoft label. It is only one of two games known to be developed by 3LV Games, alongside their other 2002 release Mini Golf Master 2 (they didn’t even have a hand in the first Mini Golf Master). The publisher ValuSoft was infamous for publishing straight-to-bargain-bin games, not beholden to the same level of quality control as THQ’s in-house developments. We are sure to see more of their products in the future of this website.
While four words may very well be more than enough to review this game, we’re going to delve a bit deeper, and give Arthur’s Quest its day in King Arthur’s court. Buckle up your bucklers and shine your swords, folks: Today, we venture into a land of low-budget fantasy.
“Filthy Creatures, Them Dark Dwarves, and No Love of Fine Mead Neither!”
“The Dark Dwarves are growing bolder and more aggressive.”
North American box art.
The titular Arthur of Arthur’s Quest is none other than the soon-to-be King Arthur. Battle for the Kingdom serves as an origin story of sorts, re-telling the tale of Arthur’s ascent to the throne of Great Britain. Of course, there are already many variations on the Arthurian Legend, each with their own unique distinctions that make many of them largely completely incompatible with one another. As such, some of you Arthurian scholars out there may be asking, “does this game source more from the ‘Prose Tristan’ or ‘Post-Vulgate’ cycle of Arthurian literature?” The answer to that question is, I’m pretty sure the developers had just seen The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, and then one of them was like “hey didn’t that King Arthur guy have a sword too?” The game practically writes itself with such a strong premise as that.
In this version of the Arthurian Legend, Arthur is a young boy living in a small village populated entirely by sets of identical brothers and identical sisters. One day, their quaint little commune is attacked by a band of “Dark Dwarves,” who Arthur proceeds to single-handedly fell. One of the identical brothers tells Arthur he needs to seek out the wizard Merlin, who they hope will have the answers as to how to solve this dwarven dilemma. After making his way through several forests, Arthur eventually happens upon a town of friendly non-dark dwarves, who offer Arthur a bloody mace in return for saving a handful of captured villagers imprisoned in a nearby volcanic cave. From this point forward, Arthur must now also contend with werewolves and dark fairies and also some ghosts I guess? In case you didn’t know, none of these non-human creatures ever featured in any classic version of Arthurian lore.
Upon meeting Merlin – who lives behind a stack of logs in a cave somewhere – Arthur is told that he needs to kill a woman named Morgan LeFay, and is given a quiver of magical arrows before being sent on his way with no real direction again. After stumbling through a few more non-descript forests, a woman at the bottom of a lake hands him a magic sword, which he uses to cut down everything standing between him and the wicked witch. Can Arthur strike down LeFay and save the day? Should our hero manage this feat, he is treated to about 25 seconds of cutscene, before the game just abruptly ends. That’s all, folks.
Okay, so the game isn’t winning any awards for writing here. That’s fine, though! So long as the gameplay is compelling enough to compensate, it’s all good in my book. So, what’ve we got here? A primarily melee-driven first-person action game driven by a branch of the LithTech engine (likely 1.5 or 2.0). You could definitely go worse as far as choice of engine than the one that powered such gems as No One Lives Forever, Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, KISS: Psycho Circus: The Nightmare Child… as well as Sniper: Path of Vengeance, Gods and Generals, and Navy SEALs: Weapons of Mass Destruction. Yes folks, this engine would go on to power three other games in the “Don’t Play This Game” series. Welp, reckon we’d better start getting to know it a bit better.
In the right hands, the LithTech engine has been used to craft some masterclass games. In the hands of 3LV, not so much! Half of the game’s eleven levels take place in largely interchangeable forests, which are host to some of the worst invisible walls I have ever encountered in a video game. Narrow clearings between trees are made even more narrow by invisible blockages lining the sides, rather than simply allowing the trees themselves to serve as barriers. Clearly shallow rivers serve as absolutely treacherous rapids that Arthur dare not cross. Invisible walls serve as invisible lifeguards in deeper bodies of water (though not always close enough to stop you from seeing where the map’s geometry ends). On the bright side, collision detection doesn’t exist on most scenery, including small trees, so feel free to walk right through those! Oddly enough, enemies do seem to be affected by collision on these objects, which can lead to instances where towering ten-foot tall ogres get completely caught on ankle-high mushrooms. It’s all very comical.
Hey, speaking of those ogres, there’s really no reason to fight them. In fact, there’s only three or four occasions in the game where combat is required at all to progress (in order to trigger story-advancing cutscenes or unlock doors). For the rest of the game, it is in your best interest to simply run away from any and all encounters, gradually adding to massive trains of enemies that follow behind you through the entirety of the games short levels. It’s just as well, since combat kind of blows, with your attacks seeming to miss on an arbitrary basis even at the closest of close-range melee combat / with perfectly lined-up arrow shots. I don’t think it has to do with any sort of dice-roll system being in place or anything, and is more likely something to do with hitboxes during animations.
In either case, there’s nothing to be gained from combat: No experience points or item drops or anything of that sort. That being said, there is a half-baked progression system present in the game, where finding haphazardly-hidden blue fairies will boost one of your three skills; Damage, Attack, or Defense. I don’t know what the difference between Damage and Attack is supposed to be, and it’s honestly kind of hard to tell if any of the skills actually have any effect on anything? Also, there’s an indicator for “Enchantments” with portraits that light up for each of the four enemy varieties, which I assume is meant to indicate which enemy types your current weapon has an applicable buff against, but again this seems to be largely inconsequential.
If you should decide to partake in combat – whether it’s to break up the monotony of running away from it or simply to fill your bloodlust – you’ll have four weapons with which to dole out the pain. You begin with a rusty sword, are given a bow shortly thereafter, eventually replace said sword with a mace, and eventually replace said mace with Excalibur. In other words, each of the melee weapons are simple iterations on the previous, and again I am not entirely convinced that they are anything other than cosmetic changes. You can block enemy melee attacks with your weapon, but this doesn’t really seem to stagger them any, and so you might as well just pound on enemies while eating the one or two attacks they might be able to get in. You are eventually able to carry two different types of arrows for your bow, with the “magical” arrows supposedly doing more damage, but the effective range and accuracy on arrows is so poor anyway that it doesn’t really seem to matter. You’ll eventually decide that it is far more amusing to kite massive single-file lines of enemies until the game itself begins to slow down, which is actually far more entertaining than it has any right to be.
It helps that the levels are so barren and lifeless, that you’ll most often have plenty of room to play the “Pied Piper” routine. The forest levels are full of wide open clearings, connected by those aforementioned narrow passages. The first forest even has a nice circular path around a giant rock that is perfect for creating a sort of merry-go-round of monsters. Most stages are entirely linear, with clear paths from start to finish mixed together with obvious dead-ends that might be hiding a fairy. There are one or two instances where it took me a minute to realize what the game wanted me to do in order to progress; once when the game didn’t explicitly state that I needed to kill nearby enemies in order to trigger a cutscene, and again where the game expected me to know that a vertically stacked log barricade was meant to be jumped on in order to scale it. There are a couple of light labyrinthian elements in two of the levels, where it is actually very easy to get lost due to the sameness of the environments / lack of discernable landmarks, but luckily these are rare occasions and are confined to small areas. The only thing you have to worry about is not accidentally turning yourself around, facing yourself in the wrong direction, and heading back to the beginning of a level. It takes longer to realize and correct this mistake than you might think.
You can chalk this up to a complete lack of care in the presentation department. The lack of effort in creating unique or memorable environments is just a facet of a game completely uninterested in making any sort of impression on players. The subtitles in cutscenes are so small as to be barely legible, and are combined with possibly the most hilariously poor implementation of letterboxing I’ve ever seen across all forms of media. You see, whenever the game enters a cutscene, the letterboxes transition in to give the game that bit of “cinematic” flair as well as to provide empty space for the subtitle text. Unfortunately, the way 3LV decided to implement this effect causes the initial resolution when a cutscene begins to be extra tall vertically — stretching out the image until the letterbox comes into view. This creates a very noticeable warping effect on the image, which never stopped being funny to me personally. It also helps that all the dialogue is purely expository, making every conversation feel completely unnatural and giving the impression that Arthur is just the world’s busiest / quietest errand boy. There’s a subtle comedy to Arthur taking orders from everyone he encounters, and never interjecting with so much as a question or confirmation. Not very kingly qualities, if you ask me.
Other amusing bits of design deal largely in animation issues and inconsistent “contextual design.” For an example of the latter: There is one stage that takes you inside a cave with active lava, which quickly drains your health and kills you if you should fall into a pool of it. To create this hazard, the developers clearly just retextured a pool of water with a lava texture on the surface of it, and set the damage by repurposing the drowning flag. This would be acceptable, if not for the fact that you still release air bubbles under the surface of the lava as you die. Also, I’m not so sure lava is transparent under the surface? Admittedly, I’m no volcanologist. Then again, I don’t have to be a physicist to tell you that you usually need to move your legs and feet when walking or running, and that folk don’t typically slide across the ground on flat on their feet while in the throes of death.
Outside of bugged animations and the incredibly repetitive nature of graphical elements, the game doesn’t look terrible for a 2002 budget release. I mean, it doesn’t look great or anything: All the character and world design is completely uninspired, and the level design is as basic as can be. But, y’know, you can at least distinguish between the individual fingers on a character models hands. So, at least you can’t make the accusation of the game looking entirely “like an N64 game.” That being said, you probably wouldn’t have to change much to get this game up and running on one of those 64MB cartridges. For one, all of the cutscenes are in-engine, so there are no pesky FMVs to worry about. Secondly, there’s basically a minimal amount of audio samples in the game that would need to be downsampled: You’ve got a few grunts for enemies, a handful of attack sound effects, and I think a grand total of three songs that repeat through the game. There’s no voice acting, no ambient audio I can recall, and you generally get the sense that a lot of typical sound effects you’d hear in a more finished game are missing.
Which begs the question: Is this game even finished? They released it and charged money for it, which is usually a good sign that a game is more or less complete. On the other hand though, aside from the generally incomplete feel of the game, there are a few “features” that I feel like they probably should’ve removed before release. I mean, you don’t usually see games leaving an F2 bind to turn noclip mode on and off in the final release. Also, you can totally cheese the game into letting you access the level select from the game over / “You are Slain” screen, by selecting “Back” and then the “Custom Level” menu option, giving you your pick of any stage in the game. Admittedly, it isn’t the wisest idea to skip to the last level with little more than the starting sword and no stats built up… Or maybe it’s fine, and all the progression is little more than an empty sham anyhow.
If you ask me, my money is on the game being “finished” as far as what the developers had envisioned, with the left-in noclip and level select being accidental inclusions. 3LV had their game pegged as a “budget title” from the start, and weren’t concerned with cramming as much content into a value priced game as they could. The game runs just about an hour and a half in length — easily completable in one sitting, and with little in the way of replay value. It is a game meant to be ingested rather than enjoyed: It is a Banquet® brand frozen dinner of a video game. Luckily, it’s got one thing going for it: It’s amusingly bad. So incompetent were the developers, they couldn’t even rise to the standards of a completely forgettable value game, and ended up releasing a game so bad, it ends up being genuinely entertaining to play [for all the wrong reasons]. And with its otherwise unforgivably short length, it mercifully doesn’t overstay its welcome. Priced at $20.00 back in the day, I can definitely understand walking away from it feeling ripped off, but the experience was more than worth the roughly three dollars I paid for it on Amazon.
Could the game have been salvaged and made into a genuinely good game? Probably not. Maybe if some sort of experience point system had been implemented in place of the hidden fairies, if the game was at least three times as long, had at least twice as large a variety of enemy types, featured a completely revamped combat system, and if you could keep all the different weapons and they each had unique stat bonuses — maybe then, the game might rise to the level of “boring bad.” But that would be a step down for the game. I think it’s perfect as is, being laughably awful and wholly incompetent. If you’re looking for an actually good mindless medieval fantasy kind of game, Dark Messiah of Might & Magic is still my stand-by. However, if you’re looking for a textbook example of “how not to make a game,” Arthur’s Quest: Battle for the Kingdom is a bit of unintentional perfection.
“noclip mode” refers to a feature typically enabled during a game’s development, allowing developers to effectively fly around the map / through objects in order to easier access different parts of the map. Some games may include player access to noclip as a cheat, but rarely if ever does a game let players access it by simply pressing a key on the keyboard during play.
Also known as “that game where you can kick baddies off ledges to their death.” I still contend it’s the best game Arkane Studios ever made — better than Dishonored, even!
“When This Reaches Zero, Arthur Is Slain.”
Andrew Park’s written review of the game goes into more detail than his inspired four-word video review. Scoring it a 1.9 out of 10 on GameSpot’s review scale, Andrew addresses several of the criticisms you may have just read me make, as well as taking several opportunities to compare the game to the then-modern Serious Sam: The Second Encounter. I guess he figured it a fair point of comparison on account of Serious Sam also initially being a budget series of games, and considered it to be the better value proposition. As a matter of fact, the closing sentence of the review comes across almost as a paid ad spot for Croteam: “You could take the same amount of money you’d spend on Arthur’s Quest and use it to get a copy of Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, or three copies of Serious Sam: The First Encounter, and in either case, you’d be making much better use of your money.”
The game would later be nominated as a contender for GameSpot’s annual “Worst Game on PC” award, but would lose to real-time strategy title Demonworld: Dark Armies, as published by Xicat Interactive. It was one of two Xicat-published titles to be nominated that year, alongside Sniper: Path of Vengeance. The closing statement for Demonworld’s award recognition ends with a familiar plea: “So please, take our word for it: Don’t play this game.” Welp, guess that means I’ve gotta include that game as being a part of this series too, huh?
So, now comes the million dollar question: Does Arthur’s Quest: Battle for the Kingdom truly deserve to be written off as a game not worth playing? I reckon it’s all a matter of perspective, innit? For the original asking price, I would absolutely contend it was not worth it, and that consumers would be better served buying just about anything else. Even as an ironic amusement, it’s not worth a hard-earned twenty dollar bill. However, as the price has continued to drop to rock-bottom lows of mere pennies on the dollar, there is certainly an argument to be made that some folk out there might actually be able to get something out of playing this game. Not only is it bad in just the right ways as to wrap back around to being entertaining, but it’s also one of those prime examples of “how not to make a game” that I’d contend anyone involved in the games industry (whether on the indie or corporate level) should experience for themselves. Even if there’s few lessons to actually be learned from it, those with knowledge of how games are made should get a kick out of trying to put themselves in the shoes of 3LV Games, and imagining the process of rushing this game to pass.
Arthur’s Quest: Battle for the Kingdom might very well be among the worst first-person action games of all time. But I promise you that in the span of this series, we’ll be encountering some FPS fare that gives this game a run for it’s money. Cherish these precious moments, dear readers: It’s all downhill from here.
