Arabian Nights is
an action-adventure game that revolves around a stale plot involving
a Sultan who is granted five beautiful daughters by a genie. By some
unfathomable decree or another, they must each be married on their
twentieth birthday or face banishment from the palace. Not surprisingly,
all five disappear shortly before their common birthday. Ali, the
dashing hero of our game, is given the responsibility to save them,
and so he sets off on an epic path that will take him to exotic locales
rife with enemies bent on destruction and treacherous puzzles.

Character
development is very flimsy in this game. The leading hero, Ali, is
incredibly immature when it comes to wooing his five brides to be,
expressing his satisfaction in a chaste kiss in the way a pimply teenage
boy might. The women don’t seem to have more than two and a half brain
cells, which was slightly offensive as a female player. It seemed
that the sole purpose of the five barely dressed princesses was dance
as seductively (and brainlessly) as possible and give away their hand
in marriage for some idiotic incentive, such as the collection of
a special bouquet of flowers. Yes, I know, it’s just a game. That
doesn’t mean all of the characters have to be intellectually challenged.

The graphics in Arabian
Nights may or may not meet your expectations, depending on the
sort of games you are used to playing. These graphics are not lush,
pre-rendered 3D graphics of your typical adventure game. These graphics
are rendered in 3D in real time, as most action games are, which means
that textures (of walls, trees, faces, etc) are mapped onto the thousands
of polygons that make up the environment and characters. Up close,
some of the textures can be extremely pixelated, which was a bit of
an eyesore. In some of the environments, I also felt that less than
wise decisions were made regarding color and pattern choices – The
Sultan’s Garden, for example, features a rainbow of clashing colors
and patterns that, while successful in evoking an ornate Arabian look,
was hard on the eyes. However, there are many environments where the
graphics work very well, and overall, I was not disappointed at all
by the graphics.

The
quality of the audio in Arabian Nights is far from agreeable,
unfortunately. The music, by itself, is nice enough – standard Arabian
sounding music. There were a few instances where the music became
distorted or quit playing altogether, but this was a minor annoyance.
The voices of various characters, however, were completely aggravating.
First of all, it was virtually impossible to hear the voices over
the music. The separate music, voice, and sfx controls in the options
menu were useless, despite my best efforts to bring out the voices
over the music. I found myself leaning towards the speakers and straining
to hear what was being said, which was a ridiculous workaround for
a situation that shouldn’t even exist in the first place. Secondly,
subtitles were not an option, which, in my book, is an absolute must
in any game. If there were at least subtitles the first problem would
not have been as severe.

And now on to the most
important part of a game: puzzles and gameplay. This is the element
that truly makes or breaks any game, in my opinion. I am somewhat
of a finicky gamer – if a game bores me or aggravates me too much,
I stop playing it. I have much better uses for my time than to be
trudging through a game that bores me to tears or makes me want to
punch a hole in the monitor. Luckily, Arabian Nights generally
succeeds in the puzzle and gameplay department, because I played and
generally enjoyed the game all the way from start to finish with only
limited frustrations.

Arabian Nights features
many standard action-adventure puzzles, all well integrated into the
game. Most of them seemed original to me, but this could be because
I don’t have extensive experience with action-adventure games. I also
enjoyed most of the puzzles. As an example, one puzzle late in the
game involves finding a way across a big pool of poisonous muck. Slabs
in the water rise and fall according to the weight of what is on them,
either Ali’s body or some heavy rocks that you have to hunt down in
the surrounding sewers. The trick was to discover which slabs needed
to be weighted, or unweighted, in order to rise all the necessary
slabs above the muck to cross to the other side. I found this puzzle
to be challenging enough to make it interesting, but not so hard that
I felt the urge to cheat.

A
few puzzles were not so successful, primarily the time-based ones
that involve careening at top speed around tight corners using unmanageable
controls. For example, in one particular puzzle, you had to sprint
at top speed, leap over wide chasms, manage to run over buttons in
the floor, and make it to the destination gate before it closed. Needless
to say, this puzzle took many, many, MANY attempts. To make matters
worse, the exact path that you have to take in order to open the gate
at all is not obvious, since there is a mess of connected hallways
with buttons and chasms in the floor. I certainly did not expect myself
to try and find the correct combination of buttons and paths – you
can imagine the difficulty of knowing the right path if I could barely
get through the correct path! I was forced to resort to a walkthrough
in this case. Once I knew the correct path, I finally worked out a
method of saving the game at key points on the way to the gate until
I was successful, thereby reducing replay.

Fighting enemies was not
overly difficult, despite what the game designers might like you to
think. It would be easy enough to employ a “strategy” that
boils down to running up to the offending creature and pressing the
attack button repeatedly. Using distance weapons, such as fireball
spells, knives, and bombs can be very useful however, and developing
more complex strategies to dispatch enemies should be no problem for
seasoned adventure gamers. Other strategical options include sneaking
up behind gullible guards, using protection spells to make yourself
virtually impenetrable to attacks, and so on. The variety of enemies
is nice, however – you will come to face with all sorts of malevolent
animals, poison spitting undead, city guards, cultists, and several
more difficult big boss types. The different types of enemies also
fight differently – some will hurl knives or arrows at you, others
dodge around like crazy and attack from behind, and some just use
brute strength to pummel you.

After
years and years of pure adventure gaming, I discovered how little
I like the extremely limited movement in pure adventure games. One
of the things I enjoyed most about Arabian Nights was the freedom
of exploration. This feature is not unique to Arabian Nights,
of course, but if you are familiar with only standard point and click
games then this will be a pleasant departure. The seven episodes of
the game are each fairly large 3D worlds with many nooks and crannies
to find. Exploration is usually rewarded by discovery of vases that
contain goodies. If you are lucky (or very tenacious) you’ll find
rings that will grant you magical powers.

Final consensus: If you
are very patient, have a knack for action-oriented puzzles, and are
not opposed to lots of fighting, then Arabian Nights will be
a treat for you and other adventure gamers who have always wanted
to explore every corner of the gaming world. Otherwise it is merely
an average action game with only a hint of a plot.

Final Grade: C

If you liked Arabian
Nights:
Play: Prince of Persia 3D
Read: Richard Burton’s The Thousand and One Nights
Watch: Disney’s Aladdin

System Requirements:

Pentium II 233 Mhz (300
MHz recommended)
Windows ™ 95/98/ME
DirectX ™ 7 (or higher)
64 MB RAM
8 MB Graphics Card (16 MB recommended)
Sound Card 100% compatible with SoundBlaster™