I played Gothic for the first time this month and I ought to say I am impressed. Yes, I almost gave up after I got angry with the controls and the brutal difficulty at the beginning, but in the end it was all worth it. Few games that I played matched the sheer quality of Gothic's atmosphere, but none of them were fantasy rpgs, staged in a penal colony locked from the outside world by the virtue of a magical barrier. As I played, the game got progressively darker and I got more and more immersed. Also one of the great joys of the game for me was how strong your character actually gets by the end of the game, while at the beginning you can't kill even a chicken, by the end of it you are taking on entire armies alone.
