A: No, you haven't, because it had DRM, and when the servers went down, huge chunks of the single-player game became unplayable, and Ubisoft pulled the game from stores rather than fix things. It's cool though. Ubisoft is "aware and investigating the reported issues with our internal teams." Any day now, they're going to do something about it! You can find reviews of this game on this site, explaining that this is all hysterical fear-mongering, and having large chunks of a single-player game hidden behind always online connections isn't such a big deal, actually. I wonder if the people writing those reviews played Might and Magic X? Too late now, if they haven't.
Eric the Unready was a comic text adventure (with graphics, but the game is controlled with a parser) ; it's kind of a shame that the medium should have died off just as it was being perfected, because games like this show how good text adventures could be. With a list of objects that could be interacted with taking the place of the “hot spot” indicators of modern adventure games, and a list of verbs that the player can scroll through at any time, the classical problems with the genre (most especially, knowing the solution to a puzzle but having to guess the word choice that the devs want you to use) are almost entirely absent, and the fact that the puzzles are logical (within the framework of the game, anyway), plus a LucasArtsian design philosophy that largely keeps you from screwing yourself over (you can die, but the “undo” command removes the sting, and except as mentioned below, you won't be able to make the game unwinnable by accident), makes this an enjoyable, relaxing experience. On the cons side of things, the sense of humor occasionally falls flat (including an extended Monty Python reference, because of course there is). Each day (chapter) actually has a hidden time/turn limit, so it is possible to save your game in an unwinnable state; since beating a day takes a matter of minutes once you know what to do, this doesn't really matter as long as you keep a save from the beginning of each day. The last chapter requires a certain amount of timing (as you're trying to stop an event that happens at a fixed time, and everything you do advances the time in-game), but again, unless you just keep one save file and repeatedly write over it, you'll be fine.
A puzzle/adventure game where you explore a 2-D world, solving puzzles, collecting items, etc. Like Zelda but this is a lot less combat heavy; there are only a few required fights. The gimmick of the game is that you play it in one-minute bursts; the sword you’re carrying is cursed, and will kill you after that amount of time. When you die, you respawn at the nearest house you rested at, but you keep found items, quests stay solved, etc. It could be interesting or frustrating, but really it ends up being not much of anything. There are enough houses and shortcuts, and the game-world is small enough, that you never can lose much progress or get frustrated. At the same time, the game doesn’t do much of anything with its core mechanic; there aren’t puzzles where you have to find the quickest way of doing something, or clever challenges built around it. It’s just sort of … there. Which isn’t to say it’s bad. The game-play loop may basically be Zelda, but there’s a reason that Zelda’s been around for as long as it has, and the game pulls it off well. The graphics don’t look great in the screenshots but work fine in practice (and for the record, the reason that game’s star rating is so low at the time I’m writing this is that a bunch of forum posters saw the screenshots and gave it low ratings without ever actually playing it), the puzzles are fairly simple but solid enough to be rewarding, the music’s good, and the world is well-designed (and as I said, designed in such a way that playing it in a one-minute loop isn’t frustrating). Its only real weakness is its short length, clocking in at about two hours; it probably would have been better to have redesigned it so that the optional side-quests were moved into the main game to extend its length. There is a NG+ mode where stuff is changed around, so you could double that to four hours if you wanted, but again, I think it would have been preferable to use the time that went into NG+ to extend the main game.
