Microsoft Excel can be a powerful tool in the office, however, Canadian accountant Cary Walkin took the program to a whole new level by creating an entire role-playing game (RPG) inside a Excel workbook.
Called ‘Arena.Xlsm’, it features a level system where players have to defeat a series of enemies in order to progress through the game, and gain better weapons and skills.
According to Walkin, the game only works on the Windows version of Excel 2007 and 2010—it should also work on Excel 2013, but it hasn’t been tested.
The key features of the game are as follows:
• 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.
If you would like to waste some time—while pretending to do work—the game can be downloaded here.
[via Cary Walkin]