Ugh... managed to get the game to work perfectly, but it took a lot of effort to pull off.
Now that I've played it for a while, I think it's safe to form an opinion on this game. Driven by all the positive press you guys gave it, I kept playing Albion, and am now in the 3D Dungeon part of infiltrating the Kenget Kamulos compound. That's precisely where I just finally gave up.
Honestly, this is a good game, and I absolutely LOVE the storyline, but as fantastic as the plot is, the actual gameplay is at least equally BAD. In other words, I'd personally have to give this game a 3 just because it's the average of 5 (for the story) and 1 (for the horrible, horrible gameplay). The controls are difficult and far from common sense, and I've actually gotten at least 5 times more game overs from unavoidable traps in the 3D dungeons than from all other sources combined, and when I say "unavoidable", I mean that I either don't see them coming, or they home in on you, or once you've been hit once it's impossible to move out of the way of being hit again, or else the horrible controls insist that there's some completely invisible and, indeed, nonexistant object that's blocking my path unless I move a couple in-game centimeters to the left or right, leaving me directly in the way of an oncoming fireball while I try to figure out just how many centimeters and in which direction I need to move. Hell, just today, in the 3D Kamulos dungeon, the game randomly decided that I'd walked through a solid wall into a heat-seeking fire spell-filled room that can only be opened from the outside, leaving me trapped within, my entire party killed within seconds except for Mellthas, who was wearing that Super-Druid's torque that granted him enough of a bonus to luck that traps had less than 10% or so chance of actually hitting him, allowing me to walk around long enough to verify that yes, it was impossible to open the doors to this room from the inside, and no, I hadn't saved since before I even entered the 3D part of the dungeon.
Honestly? I would have absolutely loved this game (as I still do the storyline and the 2D parts of the game) if only they had adopted a more conventional "FPS-style" control setup for the 3D parts of the game, or even far better yet, left the 3D parts out entirely, since, as far as I can tell, game designers hadn't figured out how to do first-person 3D games yet when Albion came out. Although, then again, I'm pretty damn sure Wolfenstein 3D and Doom were both out by 1996, so the mooks at Blue Byte really have no excuse.
Don't get me wrong: I love the 2D graphics and the Storyline, and the deep, rich setting of the game is one of the best I've ever seen, better even than a heaping majority of the games I've seen come out of *Squaresoft*! But everything else about the game makes me wish I had a joypad or at least a conventional mouse attached to my laptop so I had something to hurl against the wall...
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