Risen has many common traits to every other traditional RPG in the past. The player is given a hero who is set in a medieval world surrounded by men with swords or magic and cool monsters of various types. Just like any other RPG the player is the center of the storyline and only the player could solve everyones problems and save the world from impending doom. Those who have played Oblivion would know what I am talking about and would be familiar to the type of gameplay Risen have to offer.

Piranha Bytes is a German developer who is famous for their Gothic series especially Gothic III. Gothic III was a disaster of a game with unsatisfed gameplay and major performance issues giving the developer a sore spot to their name. Risen, thankfully, have redeemed the German developers name by offering a game that has competitive graphics, fun combat, and no real performance issues with consistantly high frame rates.

Unlike Oblivion, Risen does not hold your hand by giving your arrows or waypoints on the ground to guide through every single quest. Alot of quests require the player to hear what the quest giver is saying, reading the quest logs, and explore the world to be able to complete quests. The player coming into contact and fighting enemies while trying to complete a quest is inevitable.

There are many types of enemies the player will encounter throughout the game. All the enemies will have a set difficulty level and will not decrease or increase with the player. There are a few enemies, mostly at the beginning, will very challenging to nearly impossible to complete. It would be wise to advance through the game by completing quests and fighting enemies will the players character have the opporunity to get stronger. The once challenging Boar and hungry wolves, will be easily beatable by one or two hits.

Risen will offer many more advance and challenging characters to fight, such as gnomes, skeletons and other humans. These characters will have body armor, sword and shield making combat more challenging. Active use of a shield to provide a defense to enemy blows and timing just right to return a hit. This kind of interactive combat gives Risen more realistic feel and slows down the tempo of the game.

How poorly did Wolfenstein fare? According to NPD numbers obtained by GameSpot, the 360 version sold just over 59,000 units, with the PS3 edition barely clearing 30,000. Add in the PC iteration's 17,000 units, and Wolfenstein sold only around 106,000 units in the five days from its August 25 launch to August 29, when NPD's monthly reporting period ended. http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/action/returntocastlewolfenstein/news.html?sid=6217169

Wolfenstein is a high profile franchise name that should have gotten better sales then it did within its first week. Activision did responded in disappointment to the low outcome. The article above does list the total amount of box sales within its initital week of sale. Futher reading the article, it does not explain or make any kind of presumation to why it did so poorly.

Batman was released for the consoles on Aug 25th, about one week after Wolfenstein. According to VGchartz.com, 900,000 retail boxes were sold within its first week. Its may be possible that Batman may have contributed to the low sales of Wolfenstein, as people were to just wait one week. We are still in a recession, because of this people would decide on limiting down to one game per month instead of two or three. Adam Sessler did mention on his video blogs about how publishers are becoming more selective on which dates to release games to increase the likeihood of success.

Wolfenstein was only offered on the retail box, it was not avaliable through Steam of Direct2drive. This is a mistake that could have led to low sales for the PC. There are alot of people who will only buy PC games via digital distribution and by Activision not putting Wolfenstein on a download service, they would be ignoring alot of potential consumers. Any publisher ignoring digital distribution as a method to sell more games would be completely idiotic.

My computer is currently running Windows Vista every since I bought my machine two and half years ago. After the entire time of dealing with Vista, I had enough of its problems. My PC will take a minute and half to load up Vista and another two minutes to finish loading each time I start up. Software I have running on my PC would most of the time crash after start up, programs like Fraps, Asus hardware temperature program, Xfire, or my anti virus software. All the annoying little problems with Vista have started to get to me, enough so I have decided to upgrade to Windows 7.

Windows 7 is finally due to come out next month after two years of extensive development. PC Gamer, Gamespot and PC World editors have all gave very high remarks of Windows 7 and including a two month open beta with millions more trying it out. I could imagine Microsoft is going to make the first two months of Windows 7 to be as flawless as possible to everyone from just doing the internet, networking, gaming, and video editing. A few times I have considered on getting Windows 7 or stick with Vista for another two years. Weighing out my options, I will most definitely get Windows 7 full version with in the next six months after its release. The six month wait would be due to any kind of unseen flaw in the operating system that didnt get worked out before its final release, this would give time for any patches and bug fixes to come out before I rush out to get it. Amazon.com have the full version of Windows 7 at $200. The reason I rather get the full version so I could move the software license onto another machine in the future.