Gothic

The Good
Well, while I don't share some people's enthusiasm for the game, I enjoyed it. The game itself was fun. I think the plot and storyline was well thought out, and I enjoyed how your reputation proceeded you whenever you met someone new. The NPCs' reactions to your character, while sometimes utterly redundant, were a fairly good spice to throw into the mixture. I like the freedom aspect, and how your character can own and defend his own property.

The Bad
While I'm sure that this will be remedied in Gothic 2, I didn't like how you couldn't create your own character. A couple of cheats to change your character's voice pitch, and a fairly vast selection of weapons and armor were the only ways to customize him. I wasn't too impressed with the graphics, because they were a bit choppy. I have a 1.6 GHz Pentium 4, 256 MB of SDRAM, and an NVIDIA GeForce 2 Card, so I know that it wasn't my computer. In any case, the controls were a little tough to learn, but once you get used to them, they're not bad. Besides all that, the game itself is pretty good, though it's tough to level up and become more powerful, not to mention the time I had scoring money to buy new equipment.

The Bottom Line
I like this game. I realize I had more bad than good to say about it, but I really don't think it's a bad game. I would say it is definitely worth the twenty dollar purchase, and I don't think anyone will be disappointed when they play it. It does almost exactly what you would expect from a game of its genre.