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Arcane   Released: 2000 Manufacturer: Sarbakan Developer: Sarbakan In Brief: Entertaining online adventure game.
Sure, you can spend years developing a fancy game engine for your next game, or you can do it with Shockwave and let people play it on the  internet, which Sarbakan has done with splendid results. The game is Arcane, a very traditional adventure game put out in a rather non-traditional way.
To play, go to the Sarbakan website and click on Arcane. You can then play one of the four chapters of Arcane. The game was put out in serial form, but now the whole thing is available (although it ends in a cliffhanger, so I suppose they'll start pumping out more chapters soon). There's an Evil in the world, and you play one of three people who are out to stop it. To do this you'll need to solve a variety of simple, logical puzzles.
And that's about it. The graphics are a little clunky by today's standards but would have blown people away in 1990. The acting is indifferent, the sound is poor (in IE it was poor, with Netscape it was abysmal), the story is indistinct. But the game is immensely enjoyable. I had to cheat once due to some simple misdirection, and I imagine I wouldn't have had to if the game didn't have a time limit (time being measured by how often you click your mouse). I couldn't save the game, although there is a save feature in it (this worked in game 4, at least) so I had to keep playing from the beginning and then, when the time limit was reached, I would die. Pretty aggravating.
Each chapter is quite short, so if the save feature doesn't work you either you can just keep playing from the beginning; it's not too bad. My only real objection was a maze in the 4th chapter. When will game designers learn: MAZES ARE BAD. The maze appeared to be some kind of puzzle, but I couldn't even figure out what the trick was. Fortunately I stumbled on the exit.
While you're at the Sarbakan site, check out their other Shockwave product, a puzzle game called Good Night Mr.Snoozleberg in which you have to help a sleepwalker get around by altering his surroundings. It's like those old Warner Brother's cartoons where someone's sleepwalking around a construction site and every time they're about to plunge to their death an elevator appears before them, and it's your job to get that elevator there. Loads of fun, and it won't cost you a dime. -- Charles Herold -2000 Glitches:The save feature didn't work on the early chapters. I'm not sure if I tried chapter 3, and chapter 4 did save, to my surprise. In Netscape the sound was abysmal, but when I used Internet Explorer it was acceptable.
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