So... Arena and Daggerfall

I still think these are the two best games in the series. Granted, it
helps that I have yet to play Morrowind or Oblivion because I've never
bothered getting the hardware to run them.

Just recently, I played both Arena and Daggerfall again... Ahh, the
tweaking of Windows 98 (which I am still using) so that both games will
work near-flawlessy, and then it still not being perfect. Good times.

To turn this into a discussion, I'll ask... which of the two games do
you consider better: Arena or Daggerfall?

Also, does anyone know any good MS-DOS shortcut settings I could use
for both games (Note: I'm playing the CD-ROM version of Arena) to get
them to run in DOS? Daggerfall I could almost manage, but Arena keeps
giving me a "insufficient base memory!" message.

Nyctolops wrote:

> >To turn this into a discussion, I'll ask... which of the two games do
> >you consider better: Arena or Daggerfall?
>
> I never got Arena to run with sound, so I didn't play it much. I
> really, really like Daggerfall though and still play it quite often.
>
> >Also, does anyone know any good MS-DOS shortcut settings I could use
> >for both games (Note: I'm playing the CD-ROM version of Arena) to get
> >them to run in DOS? Daggerfall I could almost manage, but Arena keeps
> >giving me a "insufficient base memory!" message.
>
> I kept an old AMD 5x86 to play Daggerfall on and even with that I had
> to make a boot disk to play Arena at all. You may have to do
> something similar. The manual that came with the CD-ROM version of
> Arena has some pretty good instructions for doing that.
> --
> Nyctolops

As it happens, just after I posted this I ended up making a specialized
DOS configuration that worked for Arena. The only flaw was that
apparently there's something up with the music... sometimes it'll sound
like it's struggling with that and will only play one instrument at a
time. The game itself runs fine though, and I don't really mind the
music issue, especially as it's the exact same music as Daggerfall
anyway.

That, and the dungeon music (and the dungeons in general) creep me out.

As for the game itself, truth be told if there is anything I would
change about it, it's the control scheme. The game uses this
mouse-based setup... well, I'll explain it this way: It's a little
similar to the scheme used by Daggerfall if you don't customize your
control settings. Yea, the whole "Mouse cursor moves around the screen
and points where you want to go" thing. The only way I could tolerate
it in Arena was by using the slowdown feature of the CD-ROM version to
make the game play at a speed where multiple enemies don't overwhelm
me. Unfortunately Arena doesn't allow you to customize your controls
and, unlike Doom and the various Ultimas, no one is working on an
enhanced game engine for it. *Sigh* one can dream though.

Outside of that, there are actually things I prefer about Arena over
Daggerfall, and vice versa.