The first image you will find on a Google image search of this PC game is this. The image may look banal, but it in fact contains within it so much to ridicule and talk about that I, as a sufferer of verbal diarrhoea, could cry; the ancient swinging scythes work perfectly, the lines of enemy fire are impossible, the paint jobs on the late 1300-era sculptures and afore-mentioned death-traps are surprisingly pristine, the list could go on and on, but I won’t. I’ll tell you why soon.
Before that though, some old news no one could
be bothered to cover at the time.
Unearthed: [The] Trail of Ibn Battuta – Episode
1 – Gold Edition – Definitive Version
was released to no large amount of fan-fare; a cursory position on the front
page of Steam, a special deal for the game that made it cheaper than a London
train journey, and nearly no media coverage beyond a Metacritic
score of barely over ten and the week late words of The
God-Thanked One advising conflicting guidance. This did not, however, stop Unearthed:
[The] Trail of Ibn Battuta – Episode 1 – Gold Edition with Collector Armour from enticing me to
buy and play it. It did this through two very basic means: first, I’m always
looking for new ways to quicken my own demise through auto-schadenfreude and the Steam
images were too seductive, and second, I can speak Arabic.
I feel I should now disclose that this game is
the first game on Steam to have full Arabic and
English voice acting, part of developers Sema-Phore’s agenda to make Arabic
games for Arabs (and Westerners can join it too). This opens up the potential
for the game to feel and appeal to a new, untapped demographic totally diverse
from the White Straight Man: that being the Arab Straight Man. It’s a start, I
suppose. However, it is clear that this was a foolish error on my part, for while
this dual-language means that anyone can listen to the dulcet tones of Arabs
speaking Arabic to escape the terrible English voice acting, it also means you
are subjecting yourself to the Arabic voice acting.
To describe what this means, I must first
explain that Arabic as a written language and as an oral tradition are almost
systemically different, in the same sense that lemons and tactical
thermo-nuclear weapons are almost systemically different. Whilst the spoken
word has changed with the times, creating a whole slew of accents, dialects and
slang-terms, the written form has been unchanged since the early dark ages. Leading
to the unique event of reading a newspaper in Arabic being like reading a
time-shifted medieval knight’s accounts of today’s news. This trend, for
reasons unbeknownst to my lesser mind, stretches to all facets of Arabic media,
including voice acting.
As a result, the conversations Faris Jawad has
with his sister Dania and others becomes longwinded, melodramatic and oddly subversive
as they try to be hip and cool and sexy like Tomb Raider with none of the
horrifying controls (try, though never really succeed), all the while bandy
words in the equivalent of Latin.
So the question stands: why not go for the
gullet on this one? The word of Jim Sterling says it all: it’s a bad knock-off
with nothing but mutant, malformed mechanics and a script incompetent in two spoken
languages. Why not ridicule to exhaustion?
Well, I’ll give you two reasons why I stay my
tongue (if not my hand); beneath all the glitches and horror is a radiant
feeling of real and present love from the developers for their creation. Misguided
as it may be to stick by this game,
the developers are doing just
that and you have to respect them for it, polished shit analogy notwithstanding.
My other point is really more a question than a reason; would you rather play
this game, or ride a London train? (Hint: London trains do not kill you with
darkness or let you breakdance along ledges)
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