Forums > Submission Feedback > EmP's Unearthed: Trail of Ibn Battuta - Episode 1 review

This does sound pretty awful. It always amazes me how developers sometimes think that releasing a new edition of it will fix everything when it really doesn't. I guess you can't blame them for trying, though. I'm sure there are plenty of cases where it actually proves to save the game in the end.

Who exactly is Ibn Battuta anyway?

...didn't you major in history? Another success for the American educational system!

Short version: Ibn Battuta was a 14th century Muslim explorer who decided one day he was going to find Mecca, then buggered off for sixty years and went more or less to every place on the planet. He wrote his memoirs which was published into a book you can still purchase today from all good bookstores, some bad ones as well, and all those novel download sites you hip kids use. It's called Journey and has nothing to do with the game of the same name. Though there is a game loosely based on his tale in the same way the first Uncharted is based on Marco Polo. This one's called Unearthed and, look at that, we've just gone full circle.

Personally, I'd earmark him as a traveler rather than an explorer, but this makes a certain demographic very, very angry. Get over it, certain demographic: he discovered exactly nothing and just bummed around fully fledged civilization for half a century. Then someone locked him in a jail. and, oh, he was a king for a few and married a boatload of woman.

There's a lot of history wrapped up in Ibn Battuta's travels. It's quite an interesting tale. Unearthed is still rubbish.

For us. For them. For you.

Heh. I honestly never learned about him in school. When I studied history, I focused more on Medieval Europe and Colonial America (including pirates!). I also studied Spain, but not in History. Mainly in my Spanish classes, and then it was more culture than history, so we never really covered this person. :/ Oh well. Does sound interesting. Might check the book out sometime. Though, somehow I think I'd rather read about Sir Richard Burton.

[Eating EmP's brain] probably isn't a good idea. I mean... He's British, which means his brain's wired for PAL and your eyes are NTSC. - Will