Disastrous in every aspect, Arthur's Quest makes Big Rigs look like a masterpiece.
Unfortunately keeping away the really disastrous aspects of those two games must have taken a lot of CPU power, as I could get a faster framerate from simply drawing each frame on the monitor with a pen. I can run some high-tech games with harsh system requirements just fine, so why does such an ugly game run so badly? Probably because the copy/paste function was more dominant than, you know, actual effort. The smartest guess is that each line of code was copied 15 to 20 times.
And there are no great graphics to take your mind off of the framerate, in fact, Arthur's Quest is probably without a doubt the ugliest game of 2002. The graphics are an insult to all humans and some animals. Textures are absolutely terrible, and character models are constantly reused. Sometimes if you shoot an arrow it just disappears. Imagine this. An enemy is straight in front of you. You line your arrow at the enemy's stomach. At the moment the enemy is still. Does this sound like a shot you could possibly miss? If you answered 'no' you aren't familiar with how crappy the game engine is. Enemies will also clip through green walls (which are supposed to be trees, I think). Sometimes crouching in the right place will make you fall through the map, where you can explore anything, such as the house in the distance that's identical to all the other houses.
And the story is entirely forgettable. In fact, if a play were made out of the story, tickets being available through anything but a cereal box would be a complete ripoff. You start out in some random town overran by clones. The people are standing there doing nothing, until some gnomes run in. This causes the people to flee for about two seconds, until they stand there motionless after running about 20 feet. Then someone runs up to you and hands you a plastic sword to fight the gnomes with.
You'd think stabbing a gnome in the face would kill it, right? Well it turns out that these gnomes require four or five stabs to kill. And since they swarm in large groups making obnoxious sound effects over and over, you'll play for about ten seconds before you heavily intoxicate yourself in the hopes that you'll forget everything. Once you fight them off, you get a crappy bow and force you to find somebody. After an extremely long and aggravating trip through a forest maze you find Merlin, who tells you in extremely crappy English to go and kill someone. He also gives you magic arrows that you find on the ground ten seconds after being dumped out of the forest.
Your weapons are the Plastic Sword, which has the power of a roll of toilet paper, a Bow which inflicts less damage, has limited ammo, and misses 104% of the time. Sometimes the arrow will even arc upward into the sky, meaning the developer literally did not apply gravity (aka "Hey! Things fall down! Not up!"). Then there's the Phantom Mace, which you can't equip under any circumstance for whatever reason. And finally the Excalibur, whose power is like getting an enemy to swallow an A-Bomb while two nuclear missiles strike it from opposite sides and somebody snaps its neck. Instead of hitting an enemy with Toilet Paper Sword 10,000 times to kill, you can hit them once with this weapon and it'll be like you dropped a house on them.
This game is not merely unfun, this game radiates a strong sense of anti-fun from any computer unfortunate enough to have this game. The kind of anti-fun that kills people and withers flowers. This is probably the absolute worst game I own, at least to the point where I got sick of this game and made it my own personal duty to make sure every file related to this game was destroyed in any cruel or inhumane manner.
And it was a hell of a lot more fun.