Nostalgia, birth of a genre.

User Rating: 9.4 | The Elder Scrolls: Arena PC
This is where 3D-role-playing all began! Ultima Underworld was great, so was ShadowCaster, Doom was nice but with TES: Arena all limits were vanished!
I spent hours wandering through the wilderness in search of some hidden dungeon and encountered many bugs along the way but who cared? In those days saving you game was like your most preferred action (still is, with some games) And if you failed to save in the heat of the game-play sometimes hours were lost, ah, I could have killed those guys at Bethesda many times over.
TES: Arena was the first 3D game with which you could define and develop your own character D&D-style, in that respect not much really has changed beside the graphics and sound. The game was issued on a pile of floppy-disks (remember that tricky pre-CD-rom medium?) with which you were never sure you could complete a proper install. It ran under DOS for who used Windows back then? That started with Win'95.
In regard of the then limited hard/soft-ware it’s senseless to make comparisons to the modern way of gaming (the use of a mouse wasn’t even common practice).
Anyway, this first edition really had no limits, there wasn't a real (limited) map like later on in the series, you could go north forever without reaching any borders, your world was rendered (more or less so it seemed) on the fly, right there for you. I wonder why they abandoned that strategy later on in the series, for you could get and I mean really get lost like in the real world. Your only hope was you still had a save-game with ties to the actual game-world (you didn't just save limitless with your 10 Mb hard-disk)
Moreover, this was a game in which the baddies didn't breath down your neck all the time or some timer was ticking away your life so it could be kind of relaxed, in fact just as relaxed as you wanted it to be, not like the modern on-line games where there's always someone on the lurk waiting to slid your throat, that type of game never appealed to me very much.
So, hats off for the guys at Bethesda Softworks for creating a whole new, unique sort of game-series and genre that, at times, has kept me busy over the years. Despite others similar nice adaptations like Knights Of The Old Republic, this series remain my favorite, I hope they keep coming up to the expectations over time.