an unexpected Journey to xbox

Despite raphael Colantonio’s strong aversion to all things involving tv screens and gamepads back then, Arx

Fatalis made the jump over to Xbox in november 2002.

The port, by French studio Dreamcatcher Interactive, didn’t quite do justice to the PC version however, with murkier textures, and a menu navigation system that felt cumbersome on a gamepad. That tactile spellcasting system, meanwhile, was reassigned to button combos on the directional pad, which lacked the wand-waving weirdness of doing it with a mouse.

The reviews from the gaming press at the time were a comically mixed bunch, ranging from high praise from Teamxbox for its “gruesome environments and humour of the goblins”, to a 2/10 savaging from games™, which evocatively described it as, “The faintest of pulses on a cadaver we have seen many times before.”