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Ion Storm's Quake II-powered role-playing game is finally nearing completion--read on to see what you can expect when it releases.
After more than three years of work, Tom Hall and the rest of his development team at Ion Storm are putting the finishing touches on the company's upcoming console-style role-playing game, Anachronox. This epic science-fiction RPG begins with the introduction of detective Sly Boots, whose turn of bad luck has led him into a confrontation with one of the local thugs. After watching him take a few stiff punches to his face, you learn that Sly owes a large sum of money to one of the area mob bosses, and if he fails to repay his debts in a timely manner, he has to deal with the consequences. But fortunately for Sly, the situation starts to look a little less bleak after a trip to the local bar known as Rowdy's--a hangout where you gather information on different events occurring around Anachronox. It's here that Sly learns of several possible job opportunities, but none is more interesting than one involving an old man named Grumpos, who promises to pay Sly as soon as he recovers the valuable MysTech-related artifacts from the Anachronox mines. MysTech is a source of magic in the game.
Moving Sly from point A, to point B, back to point A, is what you'll spend most of your time doing in the early moments of Anachronox. You get started by getting to know the locals around Rowdy's, and if a character asks you to undertake an assignment, your personal assistant, Fatima--who is actually the spirit of Sly's dead assistant trapped inside of a technological device--will store all the pertinent information about the job, including whom you're supposed to find and where they might be, in a helpful menu screen. This feature is really helpful not only for deciphering ambiguous messages, but also for reminding you of any remaining quests you need to finish, in case you've been away from the game for an extended period of time. But there are times when even Fatima is useless because it's not clear what your objectives are or how you're supposed to achieve them. This serious flaw, caused by either bugs or a lack of clues, may be dealt with before the game's final release.
The manner in which you interact with other characters is similar to any other RPG in that you can occasionally choose what you want to say to get an appropriate reaction from another character, and if you bother a character multiple times, he or she tends to give you more information or even new items. Other basic aspects of Anachronox are typical of what you'd find in a console RPG. Sly and other party members can upgrade weapons by purchasing new ones at a weapon shop; they can buy healing items by going to healing shops; they can also rest at local hotels to replenish energy.
But there's one feature that gives Anachronox an adventure-game feel, and that's the individual character skills. Each character in Anachronox has a special skill he or she can use while just walking around the cities. For example, Sly Boots has a lock-pick skill that he can use to open locked chests or doors, but it's not just as simple as clicking on the object. For Sly's particular skill, a small combination icon appears with a series of numbers displayed on the screen--all you have to do is guess the correct number for each slot within the given time limit and you can open whatever object you're trying to get into.
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