Every accountant I know swears by the powers of Excel. But not every accountant can harness that power as beautifully as Cary Walkin, an accountant from Canada. Walkin made a full RPG game inside Excel — as in you can use Excel to actually have fun!
The game, called Arena.Xlsm, can be downloaded here. It works with Excel 2007 and 2010, but it hasn’t been tested with Excel 2013 (it should work though). Unfortunately, like all things wonderful about Excel, Arena.Xlsm won’t work on the Mac version of Excel. Gameplay includes:
- Random enemies: Over 2000 possible enemies with different AI abilities.
- Random items: 39 item modifiers result in over 1000 possible item combinations and attributes.
- An interesting story with 4 different endings depending on how the player has played the game.
- 8 boss encounters, each with their own tactics.
- 4 pre-programmed arenas followed by procedurally generated arenas. Each play-through has its own challenges.
- 31 Spells. There are many different strategies for success.
- 15 Unique items. Unique items have special properties and can only drop from specific enemies.
- 36 Achievements.
- This is all in a Microsoft Excel workbook.
It’s like someone took the games we all used to play on TI-83s to a whole ‘nother level. And this maybe gives the rest of us a reason to use Excel! [Cary Walkin via BoingBoing]