Closure

So as soon as I'm back, I'm gone.

Yes, I am here to announce that I am shutting down this blog. Well, not shutting down per say, but I will stop to post here.

I'm doing it because I don't feel like playing Ultima. I came back to Ultima VI not because I felt like playing it, but because I had a blog to update and 'fans' waiting for my return. At this point I've played about 4-5 hours of Ultima VI (I had day 4 coming but decided to write this instead) in my comeback and I'm just not feeling it. My mind is filled with thoughts of trying out that new Xbox 360 driving wheel I got way back during the summer and haven't yet had the chance to try, it's also filled with thoughts of playing some JRPG's, which I haven't done for quite a while.

Really, when I stopped because of college I just lost the beat and moved on to other things, and for the time being I don't feel like going back.

I will play Ultima again, for sure. For me, things are always in a continuous looping motion, which means that I always end up where I started. It could take two or three years, but at a certain point I'll think "hey, how about going back to Ultima, that might be fun!".

I'm also closing down the blog because of the blog itself. I have to admit that I didn't really enjoy writing the blog. I started it because I thought it would motivate me to play the games. It might have, since I'm not sure I would have forced myself through Ultima II if I didn't have a blog to write, but I know that I wouldn't have needed a blog to play through Ultima V. The blog was kind of time consuming since on average it took me at least an hour per post. And obviously, there's there "Damn, I need to play some Ultima because I have a blog to update".

I just don't want to feel that anymore. If I didn't have a blog, I would have put Ultima on the backburner without really thinking about it, but with the blog I've spent the last couple of months feeling slightly guilty about not playing Ultima. So yeah, with the blog closed down it's going to lift a burden off of my shoulders. I'll be able to indulge in the games I really feel like playing without telling myself that I should be playing something else because I need to blog about it.

Of course that would exclude me starting a blog about any other series.

So does this mean that this blog will never be updated ever again? Not necessarily. When I come back to Ultima, I might post again from time to time, but it won't be in the daily posts format, or maybe I should call it the daily grind format. A big mistake I made is to base my blog on Ophidian Dragon's blog. There are two reasons for this:

1. He really likes to blog
2. He really loves Ultima

Those are two things that I lack. I don't like to blog too much, to me it's more about leaving a trace than about actually enjoying it, and although I like Ultima, like I said in earlier posts, it's just not a natural gaming style for me. I think I talked about this before, but when I was a kid and playing games, I thought it was absolutely ridiculous for a game to require you to do 'work' outside of it, like taking notes or drawing maps. I thought that everything should be included inside the game. And we're talking about a kid playing games in the 80's here, when pretty much every serious game at the time required you to do these sorts of things. I guess it was a visionary thing for me to think, since now every game has an in game journal and an in game automap, and you can be pretty sure that if a game somehow 'forgot' to include these features that it would be lambasted by the gaming media and the players alike.

My affection for Ultima comes mostly from the fact that I grew up watching my dad play it. When I was three years old, sometimes I had pretty bad nightmares. My dad would pick me up, sit me down next to him, and ask me to listen to the Ultima III overworld music, telling me how beautiful it was. And yeah I loved it. So most of my nostalgia comes from that, but it also comes from Ultima Online, which I really played only for a month during christmas 1997/1998, but I loved it so much during that month that I played it during every waking hour, which meant I would get up, play UO until I had to go to bed. I did that during a full month and basically burned out on it :D But it was really really magical for a time, and I think it's also part of my Ultima nostalgia.

But, the most important thing to notice here, is that my nostalgia or my interest in the series doesn't really come from me actually playing the games. I played Ultima I to IV as a kid, I sort of liked them but couldn't undertstand them very well so I just went through the motions.

So yeah, what I'm trying to say here, is that I may love Ultima as...a representation of my past, but from a gameplay standpoint, I merely only like it. For me I really prefer games with more structure than that, I like a strong quest oriented system with specific goals.

And Ultima VI has flaws, oh man does it. I think they are that much more apparent to me now that I'm not in the mood to actually play it, but remember when I complained way back when that the closed up view made it nearly impossible to explore? Well god damn I wasn't kidding. I'm HATING that camera at the moment. Try to find a specific building in those towns I dare ya. How many times have I looked for the INN and couldn't find it? That's just...I wouldn't say inexcusable, this is a 1990 game after all, and they surely sacrificed a lot of thing to get that graphics engine in there, but I would say this: It's a freaking pain in the ass. And the fact that now each city spells specific equipment, and you can only sell back equipment to a store that actually sells it, is another pain. That means that if you want to unload a bit and make money, you'd have to run around the kingdom to sell your stuff to the shops who are willing to buy it from you.

And the spells? Darn. Now you need to look for specific people who sell specific spells. What happened to the time when all you needed were reagents, the words of power and high enough MP to cast the spell?

Oh well. Yeah like I said, I'm not feeling it, I think that's clear by now :)

So what am I gonna play now? Heck man I don't know. That's a hard one. There was a series I really liked to play back in the 90's, the strike series. It's basically a game where you control an helicopter, complete missions and the like. At the time it was innovative because it used cutscenes during mission which was rare for action games. It also had a dynamic system in which mission goals could change on the fly during a mission. I really feel like going back to that so I'm looking to get my hands on the first three games in the series, for the Sega Genesis : Desert Strike, Jungle Strike and Urban Strike.

I also have a JRPG itch I need to scratch, so I'll probably go old school again and take a stab at the first Phantasy Star for the Sega Master System. I already own that one so no need to look for it. The new Ace Attorney game for the Nintendo DS, Apollo Justice, came out last month and I have yet to get it. So I'm going to look out for that.

Ever since Gamespot went down the gutter I've been looking for a new site to host my reviews on. It took me a while, but I'll probably start posting reviews on mobygames. So look out for a GrahfZilla there. Also I have another blog on blogger at pospeaks.blogspot.com , but I don't really update it often. You know, me and blogs.. :D

I'll still be looking out for potential messages on this blog, so if you leave any I'll be sure to see em. So yeah, it was fun for a while, but now I'm looking for my fun elsewhere. Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed it!

GrahfZilla.

Ultima IV day 3

I'm back! Although I can't say I'm back in full force, since today was kind of uneventful. Let's pick up where we left off shall we?

So the last time I played Ultima VI, I had just explored what was previously...wait...holy crap, what was it called again? *check out Ultima VI notes, can't find anything, goes back to his Ultima V notes* oh yes Stonegate (am I rusty or what?).

Last time I was ready to leave Stonegate, and I was still ready to do so. The first thing I did is head up north towards Minoc. But on the way, I remembered something I had previously read in the comments of my blog, something about liberating the shrine of compassion first since it was easier than the others. I thought I should try to do that...but I had a problem. I was stuck on the absolute northern side of the map with a skiff. Now I wasn't sure if I could get back down to britain on foot (Probably I guess), and with the skiff it would have taken forever. I didn't really want to abandon the skiff either. I remembered something about being able to use the orb of the moon to open moongates, so I tried it.






I left my skiff at the minoc harbor, I used the orb on the ground and out came a red moongate. I saved, stepped inside, and I was in LB's castle! Holy moly! That was EXACTLY what I wanted!







I immediately headed towards the shrine of compassion. Didn't take me long, and as soon as I got there I was attacked by three gargoyles: two small ones, and a big one. And guess what? I kicked their ASSES. It wasn't even fair, I just tore through them.






So next I inspected the altar. That was a bit weird. There's like a standing blue moongate that doesn't do anything, and an altar on which there is a stone. On the stone there was some kind of force field, stopping me from doing anything with it. At first I was a bit puzzled by that new development, but then I thought that I probably needed the rune and the mantra, and I didn't have the rune. So I went back to LB's castle, and asked him about shrine, and then about compassion. He told me to seek out his...chancellor, Tholden. I didn't know where to find him, so I looked around the castle and he wasn't there. To be honest I just didn't remember what a chancellor was exactly.



















However as soon as I left the castle, and noticed the...holy crap why I am forgetting all the names? I think it's the treasury. Well as soon as I saw the treasury, I knew somehow that it had to be there. And of course, he was. I asked him about the rune, and he told me the bards have it. I asked them about it, and the little girl told me to go ask her parents permission. I did so, then went back to her, and got my hands on the rune.






Obviously it didn't take me three years to head back to the Shrine, I went immediately. The gargoyles were back, but once again they were easy targets. As soon as I defeated them, I went to the altar, used the rune, spoke the mantra, and grabbed the moonstone.






Then something weird happened. I stepped into the moongate...and nothing happened. Or so I thought. I was immediately attacked by gargoyles, and I thought "Holy crap there were other gargoyles on the right side!". Now bear in mind that I had already saved after stepping on the moongate. I tried to defend myself...and I couldn't. The gargoyles kicked my ass. They were those 'invincible' gargoyles I complained about a couple months ago.







So I reload my save and try again. Nope, those gargoyles are invincible. Now I'm starting to get confused. I try to run away, I can't, the big crazy gargoyle keeps catching up to me and totally owns me with fireballs. I reload again, for like the fourth time, and suddenly I understand. When I saw the new moonstone in the middle of the altar, I thought it was a bug. But then I thought about it, and realized that it wasn't a bug, it was an ENTIRELY NEW MOONSTONE. And obviously, an entirely new shrine! I panicked a bit, and then thought, F it, I'll just teleport back to LB's castle using the orb of the moons.

At that point, I realized one thing: I hadn't gone up in levels. I remembered that you needed to use the shrines to level up, but somehow I hadn't. I thought, maybe I need to pray at the shrines again after getting the moonstone. So I headed towards the shrine of compassion, again, and as I thought, using the moonstone and saying the mantra leveled me up. I also realized that everyone were extra points in dexterity only. At first I thought it was a coincidence, but then I figured that it must have been because of the shrine itself, kind of like in Ultima IV. Love = dexterity, courage= strength and truth = intelligence. The virtues like Compassion which only contain one of the principles probably give more of one specific stat, while the virtues who contain more must give less. I saved and reloaded to see how many points exactly I was gaining, and I saw that I was getting three.

I decided to level up all of my characters there, after all dexterity is pretty useful for any class. Iolo has 29 though, so he can't get more than one point in DEX or it will be wasted. As for me, I was already maxed out at 30 everywhere so I didn't get anything except hit points.






The next thing I wanted to do is sell all of my surplus equipment. I had what seemed to be a hundred throwing axes and I wanted to get rid of them. It took me a while, but I managed to find the armorer in Britain. Unlucky for me though, he wasn't interested in buying any of the throwing axes. He did accept though the 25 or so spears I had, and most of the surplus equipment I wanted to get rid of. I ended up with around 500 gold pieces, so that was pretty good.






While I was looking for the armorer, I stumbled on a person sleeping on the floor instead of her bed. I checked her out and it was Gwenneth! What the hell is she doing!?!








So after getting ready for travel, I took a look at the map and decided to head south towards Trinsic. On my way there, I stumbled on the shipwright. He was selling a deed to a ship for only 300 gold! That was a bargain for me! I immediately agreed to the offer, and off I was with my new ship!








There's a whole lot of islands in the southern region of Britain you know? I thought there must have been something on those isles, but outside of giant freaking weird plants with vines all over I didn't find much. Those plants were the most annoying things to fight too, even if you kill the main plant the vines still attack you. I didn't even finish all of them off, I just got out of there.

I also found some peculiar things on those islands...






I then headed towards paws. I got out of the boat, ran around the town a bit and got lost. It's really hard to navigate your way around a town in Ultima VI, you just don't see much!

And that's it for my first day back. It's kind of late, and I don't have the time to post the screenshots. I'll do it tomorrow.

EDIT: There, I posted the screenshots! Hope you enjoy them!

See ya!

In case you were wondering..

I am back! Well almost, I played about an hour yesterday, and I will play another couple of hours later on today, and I will probably publish the official blogpost after that!

It's on guys! Oh and thanks to whomever recommended I start out with the shrine of compassion, I'll tell you more about it later :)

As for remakes, I AM planning to play any remakes that are out at the time I reach the end of the series. So if the U9 remake is done by that time, yes I will play it.

That's it, be ready for the big return soon!

Almost there!

I'm nearing the end of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I have a couple days left at the most, I should normally be done before the weekend. At that point, it's going to be back to Ultima baby! Next week is an off-week for school too so that's just perfect.

Other blog

BTW, I don't know if you know but I do have another blog on blogspot, at pospeaks.blogspot.com

It's about gaming in general, and it's updated somewhat regularly, so if you're interested in other games beside Ultima or you want to know what I'm up to, check out that blog!

I ain't dead!

Yeah I've been absent for four months now, but I'm not dead! The last couple of months were sort of busy for me so I drifted towards simpler games during that span. But I'll be back on Ultima soon! You can expect me to resume my Ultima 6 playthrough before the end of february!

I'll see you guys then!

Ultima VI day 2

I'm back! Yeah, I've been gone a while but what can I say, college is hard! But now I sort of have gotten a hang of it so I'm expecting to be able to play at least once a week.

Let's get to it!

After roaming around in Britain during my last game I decided to head to yew. Now the funny thing is that I don't remember why I wanted to go to Yew, but I think I wanted to ask Jaana to join me. I also thought that liberating the shrine of justice first would be a good idea.

So I headed off towards Yew like the good traveler I am, but when I reached the western crossroads I took a quick look at my map and saw that Skara Brae was really really close by. I didn't think I would be able to go there on foot of course, but I still wanted to check it out.

To my surprise, you can now effectively walk to Skara Brae! So there I went and I promptly started my information gathering.









The whole town of Skara Brae is up in arms over the murder of a man. The rumors seem to pinpoint the murder on gargoyles, but it really looks much more complicated than that. After a lot of talking and prodding I learned that the murdered man's daughter has the rune of spirituality, so I went and talked to her. She talked about an amulet she got from her father and whatnot, so I figured that her possessions must have been in the chest right next to her. I opened the chest and low and behold, the rune of spirituality!





I wanted to solve the murder but at this point it doesn't seem I can. I tracked down the ghost of the murdered man but I couldn't talk to him. I then checked out the spell book that comes with the game and noticed a spell to talk to the dead. At first I thought: "This is it!" but I quickly found out that in Ultima VI you can't just cast any spell for which you have the necessary level and reagents, you also need to have the spell in your spellbook. Unfortunately I did not have that spell, but I had heard of an hermit that specialized in magical stuff who lived just north of Skara Brae. I took a skiff from the harbor and went to the hermit's island. The hermit did sell spells, but he wasn't selling the one I wanted. I had to resign myself to come back later to solve the mystery :(


















In the picture of the spellbook you can see that firefox is opened to a page called "How to rest". I couldn't seem to figure out how to sleep in beds so I googled it and I never found anything. It clearly seems that you cannot sleep in beds in Ultima VI which is quite retarded! My back is aching for my characters!

Now everything I just wrote happened when I played a bit about 3 weeks ago, or maybe it was two? Time goes by very slowly these days :) What I am about to write happened today.

So after Skara Brae I decided to head up to Yew like I wanted to. I took the road and headed north, all the way to Empath Abbey. Not much was happening in the abbey, it seems to have transformed itself into a winery. I honestly did not see much of importance, but I surely missed something. One thing about Ultima VI is that I am a lot less thorough in my investigations. In the previous Ultimas, I would literally plunder the towns of their information on my first visit there. But in Ultima VI the towns are large and kind of hard to visit so I'm not as thorough in my gathering. I'm expecting to have to visit each town more than once that's for sure.

Oh I didn't mention my encounter with Smith the talking horse. Quite a funny one :D Didn't seem to have anything interesting to say though.










So after talking to a few people in the Abbey I headed east to Yew. I encountered a couple reapers, who summoned what seemed like a million insects. The reapers were sort of easy, and didn't give much treasure which is an unfortunate change from the previous games :) Not a lot of battles in Ultima VI so far, the focus has clearly changed from fighting to adventuring that's for sure.






Didn't take me long to reach Yew. Once again I did a quick talkthrough and it quickly led me to the thief in the prison. I needed the key to talk to him so I went and asked the mayor or whoever she is to give me permission for it and she agreed.

The man told me that he stole from the grave of the previous mayor to feed his kids and all sort of sad things. He told me that If I could get him out of there that he would tell me where the rune is. So I went back to the mayor and asked her if she could release him and she said "NEVER!". I then asked her about his kids and she told me he was lying, that he didn't have any kids! So I went back to him and he admitted to his lies. He then asked me to take the rune from the city if he told me where it was, and to that I obviously agreed since that is what I was going to do with it anyway! That's when I learned that he hid the rune under a plant in 'the Slaughtered Lamb inn'.

I looked for the Inn and quickly found it, and guess who was sitting there? Jaana! And she looked like she had just turned 95! She honestly seems to be falling at the seems, she looked so bad that I hesitated to ask her to join me. I sure as hell ain't keeping her in my party, she's distracting me with her granny looks! Afterwards I grabbed the rune, under the watchful eyes of granny here.










I then thought I was done with the city for now and decided to go liberate my first shrine! As quick as the wind I headed up the path to the shrine and got the living hell beat out of me! Not once but twice! Those gargoyles are TOUGH! Not only tough but the big ones with wings seem to be invincible, I couldn't even touch them once. I'm guessing I need magical weapons for them. Oh well. I don't have much of a choice but to come back later.






I ran for my life to the east and stumbled upon a pair of skiffs. I quickly embarked on one, looked at the map and headed for Minoc. Before going there I thought that it would be interesting to see if I could reach Stonegate without any sort of crazy rappel shenanigans. To my surprise I stumbled on a kid who told me he was the adopted son of...cyclops?!? Holy crap!




















He also told me that there is a bunch of stuff laying around Stonegate, so I went and talked to his 'mother' and she told me that everything down there is locked and that I need the key. The 'father' was obviously holding the key so I went and talked to him and he told me that he would trade the key for a fish. I like that trade!







I grabbed a fishing pole and quickly got me a fish. I gave it to him and I got the key! YES! But what the heck was I supposed to do with it I asked myself. The key wasn't working in the portcullis on the lower level. At first I turned off every brazier but that didn't seem to be working. I then searched every wall but couldn't find a thing. I then went upstairs and started to search the walls there and I found a secret door! I went down the stairs I found there but couldn't see anything except a weird blue square. Couldn't seem to do anything with the square so I searched all the walls, nothing either. I was becoming a bit irritated so I headed back up and..what? When my teammates disappeared I saw that there were switches below them! I quickly headed back down and flipped all of them on. They opened the portcullis below!




















That didn't help me much though. After roaming for a while I had to come to the conclusion that I need to be able to open magical doors to get anywhere. At one point I found a secret door BEYOND a magical door which was quite annoying. Disappointed, I headed back outside, saved, and decided to call it a day.







So far I've realized one thing: I need more stuff! I need magical weapons and more spells! That will be my quest from now on. Expect to hear more from me in a week!

Ultima VI day 1

Yeehaw it's time for Ultima VI! I played more than 2 hours yesterday and guess what? I didn't do crap! In the way that this game is so large that it feels like I haven't accomplished anything in my first two hours. That's thoroughly impressive :D



Ultima VI is LARGE compared to Ultima VI, or at least it feels like it. After killing the gargoyles and conversing with LB, I proceeded to loot the castle clean. I then went down the sewers once, fought some rats, went down again, now it became serious since it sort of looked like a dungeon. Is this the return of Hythloth beneath the castle? Maybe so. I killed a party of headlesses and cyclops and they looked GREAT! Honestly it feels so good to have finally crossed over to a more modern look. Not that I dislike the old look, but after five games it sort of started to grate on my nerves!



But no more! After killing those monsters I decided now wasn't the time to clean out the dungeons so I headed back up but instead of getting back to the castle I wound up in Britain! What how where uh? I realized it when I opened a chest and took the money inside. A big STEALING! scrolled up my text window. I went back down immediately and managed to get back to the castle.

I finished my looting, talked to a few dudes and then decided to get out. I opened the gates and lowered the drawbridge and stepped out in the real world.



Now the new viewpoint is confusing because it's hard to know where you're going. That means I constantly have my nose in the map to orient myself. Also the NPC's have so much more to say than they used to, and there are so much more of them too. Even the merchants talk now which is a real good improvement.


Even though everything is overwhelming right now I am really impressed with the game. Did I mention the new equipment screen? I love it, it makes equipping stuff really fun unlike how it was before. So yeah, so far, I've looted LB's castle, went down the sewers, killed some monsters, went back up, finished the looting, left the castle, talked to a whooole lot of people in Britain and sold some stuff. That's pretty much it.







Oh and I also really like the way you get stuff off of monsters. You kill them and then search them. I have no idea why but I really like it. I think I'm crazy about this whole 'seamless' thing, it feels fresh doesn't it? It sure does to me.

You can also assign auto-battle profiles to your companions. Now that is both good and bad. The good is that it will make battles much less of a pain. It will allow me to concentrate on my avatar and give some pre-made tactics to the others. The bad though is that it might make battles much more bland and give them a feeling of unimportance. This is probably the Ultima that will transform Ultima into more of an 'Adventure RPG' rather than the 'RPG Adventure' it was in Ultima IV and V.

There's a problem though. All of my guys have enough experience to go up a level. Grahf can go up to 5, everyone else up to 4. But in Ultima VI it seems that I need to pray at a shrine to go up a level, but every shrine is under gargoyle control. I'm not sure I'm strong enough to free one yet but I'll have to try because I want those levels!

Maybe I should make a trip to Yew and see if Julia is hanging around? Oh now that I think about it, I met someone in Britain who wanted to join my party. I told him no because I didn't know him and I don't want generic characters in my party, preferring to keep it to the 'classic' Ultima characters.

Talking of classic Ultima characters, Geoffrey is a jackass in this game, he barely speaks! He's actually giving me the impression that he is too busy to speak to me, the avatar! Darn!

Oh and what's up with that mouse? I know that when I dabbled in Ultima VI in previous I got her to join my party, but why in the blazes would I want a mouse with me? That doesn't make sense. Is there a special quest that I can only do with her in my party or something? I'm curious.





I'll keep you posted!

Ultima V review and notes

I will start by answering the comments I received in my last post:

I will play through the Undeworlds and I also plan to play the two Runes of Virtue games.

I will play Ultima IX twice. The first time I will play the original version, the second time I will play the game with the dialogue, economy and monster fan patches.

I also plan to play through the NES version of Ultima III since I bought it and will also play Ultima V Lazarus. I will play those three games (Ultima III NES, Ultima V Lazarus and Ultima IX with patches) at the end as the final three games.

This is how it is going to be I think:

U6 (Yeah I guess I'm leaning towards playing it before the two Worlds of Ultima game now that I've thought about it)

RoV1

RoV2

SE

MD

UW1

U7

UW2

U7-2

U8

U9

Ultima III NES

Ultima V Lazarus

Ultima IX with fan patches



There's also an Ultima VI remake in the works but I doubt it's going to be finished by the time I'm done. But if it is I'll play it.

I could play Ultima III NES earlier, but I want to put some distance between the two times I am going to play Ultima IX so I'd rather put it there.

Okay so I'll paste my review of Ultima V here:

Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny

"An incredible leap over Ultima IV

Ultima V is a thoroughly impressive game. It takes everything Ultima IV brought to the table and polishes it many times over. If this is a sample of what is to come then I am truly excited.

Unlike Ultima IV there is actually a story in this one, one of total chaos to boot. Lord British is gone, Blackthorn is reigning supreme and the shadowlords are running amok. Throughout the game there is that heavy feeling of oppressiveness which is really well done for a 1988 game. The fact that the early game is incredibly tough contributes greatly to this feeling; early on you have no idea what you're supposed to do and feel very lost. Help is hard to get because everyone is scared of Blackthorn, the guards who are enforcing the new laws or the shadowlords themselves. The general gameplay is pretty similar to the previous game. You need to talk to people, gather hints, solve clues, find objects and solve the game. At first the amount of speech is overwhelming but you soon find out that it is only a facade, they don't really talk more than in Ultima IV they just pad out what they are saying more. The text is also much better written and lively which makes the hint gathering portion of the game much more enjoyable.

It's still not perfect though. Although the dialogue is much better written, it is incredibly dry. I don't think I've ever felt a hint of an emotion while playing this game. There's a part where you go down the underworld and talk to a shipwrecked captain. He tells you his story of having killed his shipmates while under the influence of the shards, causing them to become the shadowlords. Now in a modern game that would have been an absolutely gripping confession, but in Ultima V it is said so blandly that it didn't elicit much of an emotional response from me. The whole game is like that, total lack of emotional involvement. This truly drags the story down a couple of notches. There is also a lack of reaction to your accomplishments. No one notices that you've killed the shadowlords, no one compliments you on a job well done. Without the shadowlords Blackthorn should go back to normal, and even if Lord British had been lost forever Britannia could have strived under a new ruler or the council. Still no one notices that the shadowlords are gone, it is sort of a bummer.

This game also introduced night cycles. It is a good idea however it can be a pain sometimes. Simply put, nothing happens during the night. Very few NPC's are awake during that time, so the only thing you can do yourself is sleep. I've played this game for 7 months and 6 days of in game time and most of it was spent sleeping to skip the nights. The concept is good but it needs to be executed better in the future. The world of Britannia is much richer in this game. The castle of Lord British has suburbs and there's keeps and huts scattered throughout the land. This makes traveling more fun than it used to be because you're always stumbling on something new. The dungeons are greatly improved. Most of these improvements are graphical; dungeons are now fully detailed, each sporting a different look than the next. They also feel less maze like, but that could be an illusion stemming from the fact that the added clarity of the graphics makes them easier to navigate. At the bottom of the dungeons there is a new landmass called the underworld. It has the same exact proportions than the overworld and is quite fun to go through. The monsters are really tough and come at you often. You also don't see much around you down there and everything is hilly so you often have to follow a set path. It definitely feels different but to me that was one of the strongest part of the game, I loved going down there.

So far I've only been heaping praise on the game so why the 7.5? Well obviously this game is old. The graphics are good, I sort of like them. At this point you could say that they are "simple but clean". However, this is the fifth game in the series that has been using the same overall graphics engine and it is starting to wear thin. Luckily it is also the last. I'm tired of all that black!

The battles are better than in Ultima IV but they're also somewhat more annoying. In Ultima IV everything was way too easy, monsters were simply XP fodder, it was a contest of who can kill what faster. There was absolutely no challenge to the battles. Think about it, near the end of the game my party was put to sleep for about 30 minutes by reapers, and the surrounding monsters weren't able to finish us off since they couldn't hit us even while we were sleeping. If something like that happened in Ultima V, my whole party would be dead within 20 seconds. That is a good thing.

But there is also some bad. Your characters are incredibly inaccurate and they often hit your own party members rather than the monsters. I could understand at level 1, but level 8? How can a maxed out level 8 avatar throw his magic axe sideways, hitting his teammate, instead of forward? It seems to get worse when everyone is crammed closely with the monsters, it's not uncommon for your party to be hitting each other more often than the monsters.

Even when they're not hitting each other they might miss like crazy. At one point my 29 DEX avatar missed a mongbat like 6 times in a row. Just imagine how much the other party members were missing. A reason for might be to focus on magical spells. Simply put, magic is devastating. I don't want to imagine how hard the last dungeon would have been without eight level spells.

The music in Ultima V is absolutely astounding. Granted I am using the music patch for the PC version, you'd have to be an idiot to play the game without it. The music has none of the problems found in the previous games. It doesn't feel repetitive like in Ultima III and the songs are great across the board unlike Ultima IV. Ultima V also marks the introduction of the traditional Ultima soundtrack with 'stones' and the like which is quite pleasant. Overall I loved the music.

I think I've pretty much covered it. In the end this game is really close to an 8/10, which is a 'Great' game according to Gamespot's ratings. A higher rating wouldn't have been achievable for this game because it is simply too old, I'm not giving an 8.5 or a 9 to a game this ancient, except if the game was absolutely perfect from a gameplay standpoint. It isn't but it is pretty close, at one point during the game I was loving it so much that I thought about giving it an 8.5. In 1988, this game was a surefire 10, no doubt about it, especially since at the time no one would have been looking for a deeper, more emotional story. To me though, Ultima V is the first truly great Ultima."

END OF REVIEW

I really hesitated between an 8 or a 7.5 but I eventually settled on the latter. Usually when I hesitate on a score I like to give the lower score. In Gamespot's old review system I would have given a 7.9 or 7.8 to Ultima V but you can't do that anymore.

So there it is! I'll probably play Ultima VI next so stay tuned!

Ultima V day 8 - FINAL-

Yes I'm done!

Doom wasn't very fun. It really felt more like the mazes in Ultima IV, as in quite mazelike and confusing. None of the other mazes are like that in Ultima V. It got to a point where I would shoot every wall of every room just to make sure.

The battles themselves were not too tough. Luckily my avatar was level 8 so I used IN VAS GRAV CORP profusely. That spell is really really good.

I was surprised that LB asked me for the sandalwood box. I was even more surprised when I replayed the ending and realized that without the box you can't finish the game. I honestly found that box by mistake, no one ever told me to look for it. Kind of crazy isn't it?

The last post is always pretty short from me, that's because at this point all I want to do is move on to the next game! That's what's it's all about: progress! I still haven't decided which game I am going to play next although I am still leaning towards Savage Empire, basing this on the fact that although Ultima VI is not necessarily better, it's probably bigger and more ambitious. And well, probably better too but who knows. In the end this Ultima quest is all about the main Ultimas so I'd rather keep those for the end and play the sidegames first.

However chronologically SE happens after Ultima VI so that bugs me a bit. I wouldn't want to be spoiled you know? I'll play them a bit tomorrow and make my final decision then. If Ultima VI feels like the superior game I'll go with the others.

There's always the possibility of doing SE, UVI and then MD. It would be weird, but possible. Choices, choices, choices.

I'll write my Ultima V review tomorrow and post it on the blog. Take care till then!

Ultima V day 7

I'm back again after that huuuuge post. Honestly that post was too big, I think it scared some of you away!

This one will be shorter. I played a LOT yesterday however what I did was quite simple. I went and got the last two remaining shards and destroyed the shadowlords once and for all. It's simple but it took me a while.

The first thing I did that day is get out of the underworld via Destard. The first room you get into has like 4 dragons and is quite hard, but I managed to put to sleep all four of them. They don't asleep for long though unlike mongbats so I barely had time to kill two before they woke up.







I then worked my way out to Britannia. Since I had so much money at this point, I decided to max out my karma. So I gave 8700 gold pieces to the shrine of compassion and now I am truly an avatar of great value! So much for having to follow the virtues and all that :)








Afterwards I decided to go after the shard of hatred (I think). I have no idea why but I was SURE that it was at the bottom of the dungeon Despise, which is the first dungeon I tried, remember? So I go back to Despise, make my way down quite quickly and start looking for the shard of hatred. I couldn't find it. I looked again and again and no sign of the shard. I did find a weird keep (well actually it's a boat but on the overworld map it looks like a keep) with a wizard called Johne who told me a peculiar story. Seems he got stranded in the underworld way back when and killed his three comrades when he was under the influence of the shards. His comrades then became the shadowlords! Darn!












He also wanted to join me but I was already full so I said no. Natreg seemed to imply that I should take him with me. I'm guessing he has pretty good stats but at that point my two wizards were already close to reaching level 5 and I'm not interesting in having a level 2 or 3 character in my party. Maybe in Lazarus :)

I then looked at my notes and saw that I had entered the wrong dungeon, I had to enter through DECEIT to get the shard of falsehood (oh so I was looking for falsehood not hatred). DARN! I then read that the shard of hatred was below the region of the lost hope bay. But wait, isn't the bay just east of Despise? Maybe I could get there without having to go back up? I went as far east as I could and guess what? I could see grass to the east! And when you see grass, you can blink there!







And so I did and it worked! I took a quick peek at a gem and saw that weird clearing to the north and thought that the shard was surely there. I managed to climb my way through and yep, as I thought, here was the shard.











Next I tried to do the same thing for the shard of falsehood but I was never able to find a spot to blink. After looking for quite a bit of time I had to resign myself to go back up a dungeon. I went north, spotted covetous and decided to give it a go.

Man do I love the dungeons in this game, THEY LOOK GREAT! Covetous looks totally different than the other dungeons! Despise is like a natural cave formation, Hythloth looks like a mine but Covetous is more like a man made crypt. Just take a look at this screenshots and compare them to the other dungeons. This game is crazy for 1988.











The minute I got back to Britannia I headed for Empath Abbey and took care of the shadowlord. Two destroyed, one to go!

I barely took the time to heal and went right back inside a dungeon, this time Deceit. Deceit also looks like Covetous strangely, I'm guessing they were both man made for specific purposes. There's less skeletons though.

The fun thing about Deceit is that there is a hole right in front of the entrance that will take you all the way to the eight floor if you decide to drop in. It hurts a bit but it's worth it.








The eight floor is a bit confusing because there is no visible down ladder when viewing a gem so you need to find it yourself. One interesting note is that it is totally easy to abuse the monsters in those four little rooms you can see on the map. If you enter them via the middle instead of using their extremities, it's easy to place your avatar in such a way that the dragons will constantly try to shoot at your teammates instead of you. Of course their shots get blocked by the pillars of their 'cage' so that allows you to kill them with the avatar. I cleared out all four rooms obviously since I needed the experience to reach level 8.












That room at the bottom of the floor is extremely confusing. You see a down ladder but there's a huge wall blocking off the access. The first thing I did is grab all of the hanging torches but that didn't do squat. Second I stepped on every tile with my avatar and you guessed it, nothing. Third out of desperation I shot at the walls and that still didn't do a thing. Only at the did I throw a random axe at the upper right wall and that worked. I honestly was THAT close to getting the hell out of there. After that it was a simple matter of killing the monsters and hitting the right switches. Whew.










Coming out of Deceit it was easy as hell to guess where the shard was I mean just look at that screenie. And I knew it because the two sisters in cove told me that the shard was on an island in the underworld so there it was. The hard part was learning how to get there but it didn't take me too long.











Getting back up the dungeon was harder than going down since there was no crazy hole to drop through. At this point though I'm pretty good in dungeons so I managed.

Then, you guessed it, I destroyed the third and FINAL shadowlord. YES! I am finally at the endgame point of Ultima V, I can hardly believe it. I think if I had told the me of 10 years ago that I would ever finish Ultima V legit like that he wouldn't have believed me.

I don't think he would have believed me if I told him that I finished Ultima IV legit either :D

Natreg's comment on my last post made me go OH MAN CRAP. I had TOTALLY forgotten about those glass swords! I had learned everything about them in the early game, if you go back a couple of posts you can see me talking about them. Still they had totally left my mind until Natreg reminded me. I immediately went to the spot where I found the white stone in Ultima IV and climbed the mountains. As I thought, there was a grass spot here containing a glass sword. Yes, I said A glass sword. How can there be only one? That doesn't make sense. I left the moutains, thought about it a bit, equipped the glass sword and went back to see if it made others appears ala mystic weapons in Ultima IV. It worked! So I managed to get 7 glass swords that way. Sweet!






Now all there was to do was get ready for the endgame portion. I had so much money that I had no idea what to do with it so I spent it on maxing out my food supply, making a bunch of spells and then buying new reagents, maxing out on torches etc. Basically if I could spend it on something I would. After doing that for a while I felt prepared and headed for Shame.


The first floor was confusing since it's basically an empty room but that last room in Deceit taught me better. I threw my axe everywhere and managed to hit the switches. I was surprised to see rocks in the way though and even more surprised when I realized that I could climb rocks in this game. Kind of useless though :) In general design Shame looks like Hythloth, which means it looks good, like all the other dungeons in the game :)













Shame was quite easy overall and it didn't take me long to get to the underworld. The dungeons in Ultima V are either much easier than the ones in Ultima IV or I am a master of them. Or maybe both!

I went east since the center of the underworld was that way, blinked once to cross the vast area of mountains and oh crap, what the hell is that? I have no freaking idea but it must be what the codex called "the gate to the core of the world". I flew around the island to see if there was a path of non shallow waters to cross through but there wasn't so I just flew over the turbulent waters.










At this point it was about time for me to stop playing but I was incredibly close to reaching level 8 with my avatar so I fought monsters after monsters. Eventually I reached 6400XP and was awarded my eight level by LB but..wait...WAIT, HE GAVE ME A POINT IN INTELLIGENCE! But I'm hardly maxed out in that stat I need points in DEXTERITY! When I saw that I immediately did a quit and load, hoping that the allocation of points was random. But he still gave me a point in INT the second time. CRAP, that really really sucks! I was hoping to have that perfect character like I had in Ultima IV. I am honestly thinking about modifying my save file to give me that 30 in DEX, I think I've earned it. It's unfair to be given a point in a stat you've already maxed dammit.






Oh well. I stopped playing at that point. So next time I play Ultima V, it will be to finish the game!

Btw Natreg, I didn't go talk to that person who knew about moongates since frankly that would be kind of useless to me by now, I'm at the end and I've never used the moongates except to reach the shrine of spirituality.

Get ready for the final post! :)


EDIT: Well I sent my save file to my friend and told him to check out if he could so something about the faulty dex and guess what, he did! Look at that beauty!

Ultima V Days 4 , 5 and 6!

Oh man three days of intense gaming to talk about! First things first, this game is GREAT! Oops I said it once or twice before didn't I? Well I'm saying it again, this game is RAD. Loving it!

Now I'm checking out screenshots of my first day and I barely remember what I did. Let's see.

1. I seem to have gotten the word of power INFAMA from the sleepy guy.
2. Learned about the HMS Cape's plans.

DAY I

Oh yes! That's a good story. So here I am learning about the plans so I immediately head to Britain to have a chat with Master Hawkins. Or is it North Britanny? I think it's North Britanny. Whatever.

Here I am and I realize that Hawkins is the merchant and merchants don't speak! I'm a bit perplexed at that revelation so I ask the little dude in his shop about it and he tells me that the master lost his plans! WHAT! Now I'm panicking a bit because no one seems to know where the damn plans are! I decide to loot the place just in case the bastard left them in his own shop and there they were, in a desk at the end of his shop! Whew!





So what else did I do? Oh darn that's the day I went to Blackthorn's castle! I had gotten the badge from that crazy woman on her island and I felt ready to try my luck at the crown. Armed with the badge and the carpet I headed for the castle. It was actually quite easy overall since the guards would leave me alone after I told them the password of the oppression. I just headed up until I reached the crown, grabbed it and then made my way down, freeing a poor soul in the process. Oh and I paid a visit to Blackthorn and he recognized me! He tried to kill me but luckily I have the almightly power of the quit and load which I promptly used!

What's up with that corridor filled with doors anyway? Who built that? :| Oh wait I know who did, I met a dude in some prison who told me quite proudly that he was the one who built Blackthorn's fortress with pit traps and all. He told me "If you fall, think of me HAHAHAHAHAH ROFLMAOOMFGBBQ". Luckily that wasn't much of a problem on my trusty carpet!

























Wait why wasn't I using the carpet in most of those pics? Am I an idiot or what? Maybe I just didn't want to look 'suspicious' you know? Imagine you're a guard in the castle of Blackthorn and you see six idiots crammed on a carpet flying around, what would YOU do? Yeah, exactly.


Next I decided to tackle this "Scepter problem". I first went to Minoc like Natreg told me to and investigated the skull keys. Someone in the Lycaeum told me that she had gotten the keys from a man named Shenstone. So what do I find? This shenstone is the merchant running the weapons shop in Minoc! DARN! Another merchant! So once again I panic and go ask his smith about the keys which he doesn't know anything about. I check out his place and I can't find any keys. Now I'm wondering what the hell is going on and all of a sudden I see him leave. Now that's not necessarily weird because in Ultima V, NPC's take breaks from time to time. But as I was watching him go he suddenly left the path and headed into the back of the town. That was weird. I followed him and saw him next to a tree, CHA CHING. Searched it and found some keys! Thanks Natreg!












Now it was time to get that sceptre. Following the instructions given to me by Sir Sean I went all the way down the bay of lost hope, or the lost hope bay, whatever they want to call it, and climbed those mountains. Didn't take me long to find what I was looking for, however I got a bit more than I bargained for..













The shadowlords are in the houuuse! DAMN! Okay that ain't good! On top of that there's like a gazillion bats flying around. After whacking a couple on the head I enter and find myself face to face with the 'fearsome' deamon Balinor. I didn't think he was that fearsome but eh to each his own! So he asks me this question which sounds like "What is round like a cup and as tall as a house?" and I'm like, what? The first thing I thought about was a well but that ain't as tall as a house, so I answered LOL and he attacked me. I thought I could take him on but he possessed my avatar and then it became a pain so I reloaded my game. Then I thought about it a bit.

There must be a way to stop possessions? How? And it just came to me that the Crown would probably do the job, it's supposed to stop every magical attack right? And indeed it did! And this time I answered 'well' like I first thought and that was also the right answer!

But that greedy SOB attacked me anyway! No big deal he got it and good too!








Next was grabbing that friggin scepter. Now there's a shadowlord west, north and east and they all come out ready to rumble. The scepter is over some pits but that isn't a problem since I'm on my carpet. The problem here is to get the scepter without getting attacked by the 'lords. After a lot of trial and error I managed to do it! I also found out the hard way that if you get attacked by a shadowlord while you're holding the scepter they take it back! But I won't let that happen, not with my trusty quit and load!










It's strange that the third shadowlord hadn't yet come out when I got the scepter. Maybe he got stuck? That poor bastard hahahaha thanks dude loved the help!





Afterwards I checked out my notes and saw that I was lacking the names of the shadowlords of falsehood and hatred. Someone told me that a deamon who knew a lot about the shadowlord of hatred was living in the eastern desert so that's where I went. As I was told, a deamon was living there...farming crops? Right. Without much prompting he told me the location the shard of hatred and the name of the shadowlord, which is ASTAROTH.







I'm not sure what happened next but I found myself in the basement of LB's castle looking for the armorer. I found a suspicious locked door to the south and decided to check it out. Oh my, it's a treasure chamber! I opened a few chests and picked up a magic bow and some other great goodies but then I thought that I shouldn't be doing this, I'm supposed to be the avatar and all that crap so I stopped did a quit-load. Let me tell you that my viewpoint on this matter changed dramatically the next day :)








I finished the day by going back to Jhelom to talk to that confused mage. The first time I talked to him I couldn't learn anything from him but this time I had the idea to talk to him backward like he does to me. It worked :|





That's it for day 1.

DAY II

The first thing I did is get some nightshade, as you can see. I never looked for it in Ultima IV so I wasn't sure where to look but my instructions were to look for the "most forested spot in spiritwood" and I found it quickly.





Then I decided to equip myself a bit better, bought a bow for Gwenno and a crossbow for Iolo and headed out to complete some shrine quests. I did the one for spirituality which gave me a nice +1 boost to every stat and then headed to the codex to do the one for humility. Oh man was I in for a surprise. This is what it looked like:





My runic isn't so bad these days so I managed to translate it all. It told me how to enter "the core of the world" from Shame. Right. I think the codex took some good stuff before I got there.


And then, THEN, it was finally time! Time to enter my first dungeon! Woohoo! I was ready to hate again but it wasn't to be! The dungeons are...well I wouldn't say amazing, but much much better. They're detailed and actually look like caverns and not..you know, bunch of grey stuff. I'm loving the details, even the monsters look good!









One thing I found strange is the total lack of rooms in the dungeon, which was Despise btw. I went down the floors quickly and then at one point on the eight level saw a ladder down. I thought oh hell there's a 9th level!?!

Oops...








The underworld! Finally! Man I was really happy to finally reach it however I was a bit scared since Natreg told me it was pretty much a hell on earth. I decided to go further in it just to check it out, you know, a little bit. I fought some spiders, some rats, ran around a bit, and then faced a party of mongbats. They killed me in like, 30 seconds. I did a quit-load, same thing, killed me in 30 seconds. I thought "Holy hell if I'm not good enough to fight mongbats imagine how I'm going to fare against stronger monsters? I'm getting out of here!".

It is at this point that I decided to drop this whole holier than thou thing. Heck my equipment was awful and I had NO money. Look at at first dungeon screenie, I have EIGHT GOLD PIECES. I mean come on now! So I headed up the dungeon and went straight to LB's castle, down the ladders and to the treasure room. I looted that room lord knows how many times. I would loot the room, get out, get back in, loot it again, repeat about 10 to 15 times. I was fed up with being a weakling. And you know what? It worked beautifully. I managed to buy magic axes, plate mail and magical shields for all of my characters. Only Mariah couldn't wear the plate because she wasn't strong enough so I gave her chain. The only bad point is that now when LB appeared he would tell me "You have strayed far from the path of the avatar, come back before you are lost forever!". Oh well. I'm not sure how to come back yet but I guess giving money at shrines is a good start.


Now after equipping myself with the best stuff money can buy I thought "Okay, let's complete that notebook". I still had to find the name of the shadowlord of falsehood so I headed for the lycaeum, but I somehow stumbled on something pretty strange..:






You gotta love that name!


Once I got to the Lycaeum it didn't take me long to find the person who knew about the shadowlord of falsehood or should I say FAULINEI? Mouahhaahah!

At this point what else was there to do than plunge in another dungeon? I decided to hunt down the shard of cowardice so I headed south to Hythloth. Oh my, the amount of detail in the dungeons is incredible! Hythloth looks completely different than Despise! I absolutely love that attention to detail, it makes the game much more immersive and it allows me a minimum amount of liberty in movement since I can recognize my surroundings much better than I could in Ultima IV.






I have to admit that I got lost a few times, hythloth is a pretty complicated dungeon. But after a bit of trial and error and a lot of gem viewing (with a lot of quit-load afterwards) I managed to make my way to the underworld. Once I got there, I viewed a gem and saw a weird volcanic formation to the north. I also noticed that I was basically stranded in the middle of nowhere. Then I remembered what the keeper of the flame of courage told me, which was that I would need to cast a specific magic many times to reach the shard. At this point it was obvious that the spell in question was blink.

So I blinked northward to check out that lava, swam right to the middle and searched and HOLY CRAP I found the mystic armors and weapons. I guess I was so excited by that discovery that I didn't take a screenshot which is kind of lame but oh well. I didn't equip the swords because they're short range weapons but I equipped the armor on everyone. Yay!

That was it for Day 2.

DAY III

I got curious about the transferring my character to Ultima VI. I knew that I could transfer either my Ultima IV or V character so I wanted to check it out. Transferring my Ultima IV character results in the same guy I got in Ultima V, 25 in every stat and 999 experience points.

However, transferring a character from Ultima V is much more lucrative because the transfer keeps the stats point for point. At that time I had 30 STR, 29 INT and 29 DEX and that's the character it gave me in Ultima VI. Impressive! However the game still divides the total amount of experience by 10 so although that character had better stats he was at a much lower level. There's not much I'll be able to do about that because I'm not reaching 9999 experience points in Ultima V for sure. I'm not even sure I'll be able to reach level 8, that takes 6400 XP and I'm at like 3300 at the moment. When I realized how much of an advantage it was to transfer my Ultima V character over my Ultima IV one I started to set my avatar as the active character in combat, allowing him to be the only one killing monsters. Obviously I can't do that with stronger monsters but it works wonders with the weaker ones.


Now remember when I said that I couldn't beat mongbats during my previous trip to the underworld? Well guess what, I still couldn't beat them! At first that really bugged me because here I was, fully decked out with armors and weapons and I can't be these little critters. I didn't have a choice but to look for applicable spells in the spell book. The first one I tried was Tremor but since these guys fly it didn't do crap to them. I mixed a couple of level 8 and 7 spells only to find out that I can't use spells from a level higher than mine and I was level 6 at the time.

So what was a guy supposed to do? I mixed a confusion spell and it worked pretty well, the mongbats started killing each other and all. However I was worried that it was taking some experience away from my guys since if they're killing each other we're probably not getting any of that XP.

So I looked again in the spell book and saw a sleep spell. Now I hate sleep spells, I've always hated them, always found them useless and retarded in every RPG I've ever played. But this was a MASS sleep spell...sort of interesting. And oh man the results were astounding!









I'm never doubting sleep spells again!


Did I mention that by that point I had already found that shard? Yeah, I was blinking around and fighting and I ended up finding the shard. Wasn't as hard as I thought it was going to be, it was simply about viewing a gem, seeing where to go, placing myself correctly, blinking, quit-load and then doing it perfectly without having to view a gem or waste any blink spells. Rinse, repeat.








The hard part was coming back. Somehow the way I took to get there didn't seem to work that well to come back so I had to found another way. I was also running out of blink spells but luckily quit-load saved the day once again!

Now you can imagine that as soon as I got back up to Britannia I headed straight for Serpent's Hold. I wanted to destroy that shadowlord as soon as possible! And I did! Went right up to the flame, called out his name, waited until he was RIGHT on top of the flame and used the shard! BYE BYE!









After that I again looted the treasure room in the castle and filled my pouches with reagents, food and pretty much everything else. When I was looking for Karma tips on the internet I found out that I can press CTRL+K to see my Karma level out of 99. I was at 5. Giving 100 gp to shrines raises my karma by 1, when I'm ready to go save LB I'll gather like 9500GP and give it all to a shrine, case closed.








Then came a fun bit. You know in the expedition journal LB talks about a waterfall east of spiritwood. I decided to see if I could also use it to get into the underworld. Seems I can! I was looking for the waterfall in the middle of night when I couldn't see much and I fell into it and into the underworld! I knew that the amulet LB had was still where everybody died so I followed the journal right up to the amulet. I'm not sure what the amulet does yet, it probably has a very specific function of which I learn more about later.








The fun part about this was getting out! I fell down the waterfall so how was I supposed to get out of there? Now the thing about the underworld is that it corresponds to the overworld map, so I thought about it a bit and looked at my map and realized that I was probably pretty close to Destard so I looked for it but couldn't find it at first. I got lost for a while then came back to the burial ground, retraced my steps upward, was blocked by the waterfall, realized there was another path to the left of there, managed to go back up and finally, on a gem, I saw the entrance of a dungeon.






I hiked my way there and as I thought, it was the entrance to Destard. I opened the entrance with a word of power and saved my game, ready for another day of adventuring. Next time I boot up Ultima V I have a dungeon to climb, I just hope Destard isn't too hard, some dungeons can be pretty savage.

College is starting on wednesday so I don't know how it'll affect the blog. Most likely the posts will be much shorter and with fewer pictures. This one took me a good 2 hours to write, I'm not writing 2 hour long posts while in college that's for sure.

P.S: I started this blog post a 7:14PM and finished it at 11:15PM. Now I didn't work on it non stop for four hours, but I know I spent the last two on it. Kind of shows you how much time these things take. I really have to cut down a bit, this is crazy.

See you later!

Ultima V Day 3

I spent a lot of time playing Ultima V yesterday, my biggest day yet on the game. Man so much happened, my notebook is now 9 pages long, which is what my Ultima IV notebook was at when I finished it. That means that my notes for Ultima V will easily dwarf those of UIV in size, but that was to be expected.

The game is great, no two ways about it. It's harder to play than the previous games in the series due to its complexity but it also feels much more rewarding. At this point in time I have a solid understanding of what I am supposed to do.

1. I need to destroy the shadowlords. The way to do this is to call em out at the flame representing their opposite virtue and cast their respective shards in the flame. Repeat three times to get them all.
2. Find the artifacts Lord British left behind.
3. Save Lord British.

I already know the name of one shadowlord and the location of two shards. I know where the amulet, sceptre and crown are, at least approximately if not exactly. I know that Lord British is somewhere in the underworld.

There's a lot less "retro gaming moments" in Ultima V than in Ultima IV so it's a bit harder to write anything about the game. I did accidentally find the carpet in LB's quarters but at that point I was investigating every carpet I saw so it's not really a surprise. I have completed two shrine quests, a bit boring I must say.




So let's recap a bit what I did shall we? The first thing I did was go to Serpent's Hold. There I learned about the abyss, or wait, now it seems to be a generic no-name dungeon, and the shard of cowardice that lies at the bottom of it. The man said that I need a special spell to get it, what spell would that be?

I then headed up to Buccaneer's Den where I mainly learned about glass swords being lost on the serpent's spine (why does that ring any bells?BLINK ANYONE?) and about a grapple that would allow me to climb mountains. When I first learned about that I thought it sounded a bit useless, I mean, why would I want to climb mountains? Didn't make much sense. Well except that if I had a grapple in Ultima IV I would have simply climbed the spine to find the white stone instead of blinking my way on it. Hmmm.

So after that I decided to see if I could find a certain 'Sir Simon' who lives on an island west of spiritwood. And that's what I found:



.....Well I'll be damned. Where was that grapple again? Oh yeah that dude in the abbey. I have to say that I had no idea Simon was actually at the top of the mountain until someone told me in the Abbey (I think). I have to admit climbing mountains is pretty cool, even if a couple of my companions keep falling and hurting themselves.

I learned a bunch of things from Simon, such as the fact that I have to recover the artifacts and about the location of the Sceptre, INSIDE the Shadowlords earthly fortress, which I had learned of previously from a man named Sir Sean in the Lycaeum, a fortress guarded by a terrible demon named Balinor.

Lovely.

At least I know how to get there, that's a start.

Next is a little bit of cheating from my part, or at least some 'bending' of the rules so to say. I had been trying to infiltrate the mysterious organization known as the 'Oppression' for some time and I finally learned that I needed to speak to a mage in Skara Brae. Now reaching him is annoying because he's locked himself in a tower and the doors are magically locked.





See? It wouldn't be so bad if you only needed one skull key to get in, but everytime you unlock the door a bat comes out and attacks you. And of course once you defeat the bat, the door is locked again. In total it takes three skull keys to get in. I bought those keys for 100GP from the cook of the Lycaeum if I remember correctly. That's 60GP gone just to open a door. That sucks.

Once I got in he told me that to get in the Oppression I have to prove my loyalty by telling him the name of a council member SO THAT THEY CAN GO AND KILL HIM. Now wait just a minute, I am the avatar, the embodiment of all that is good in this world and I would go and do THAT? Give me a freaking break. So I gave him the name, in this case Annon, he gave me the word I needed to get my badge and then..I left the game, reloaded my game which I had conveniently saved right in front of his tower. I was then able to get my badge without giving the name of the council member, probably saving me a shitload of karma in the process. Isn't that lovely? I sure loved it.









So what else happened? Well I completed a couple of shrine quests, nothing really exciting there. It increases my stat increased but since I started out at 25 across the board I shouldn't have any problems maxing my avatar out. I also find a magic axe in a tree stump in Jhelom. How ridiclous is that? A magic axe left in a dead tree. Right. Hey I'm not complaining but it IS sort of stupid.

Now that magic axe is an absolutely ridiculous weapon, you can fire it across the screen and it always comes back! Someone at Origin around 1988 must have loooooooved magical axes because the best weapon in another Origin game released in 1988, Times of Lore, was also a magical axe that would come back to you after being thrown.

Talking of Times of Lore, while checking out its wikipedia entry I learned that Origin made another game similar to Times of Lore in 1990 called Bad Blood. I've never played it, which means I'm putting it down on my to play list for when I'm done with Ultima. Maybe my next blog will be called "Classic gaming with GrahfZilla"? You never know!

Okay back to Ultima. When I first visited the castle of Lord British I had seen many magical doors, and since I now had keys to open those doors I decided to check out what was behind them. To be honest I was a bit disappointed since the first two doors I unlocked had absolutely nothing behind them. What the hell?








But then I found the big daddy of them all, the door leading to LB's quarters. After evading the crazy guard who gently offered to throw me off the roof I promptly unlocked the door...and slept in the King's bed HAHAHA NICE you gotta love that!















I then checked out the room and saw the harpsichord in the corner. Now what better time to play Stones? I had learned the song at the lighthouse south of Trinsic and someone had told me to play it in LB's quarters so I did. It actually opened a passage in the wall containing a..sandalwood box. Now what the hell is a sandalwood box anyway? I can't open it but I can take it. Now what am I going to do with a box made out of sandalwood? Anyway, I then looked at the carpet, and my character remarked that it was an ODD RUG. OH OH OH, NOW WHAT DO WE HAVE HERE! I then gleefully picked it up and YES it was the famed magic carpet. I didn't even have to find that talking horse for Bandaii to get it too!

I ran outside and immediately put the carpet to the test. I was disappointed to find out it couldn't fly over mountains, but it can do pretty much everything else. I went to cove, talked to the sisters about the shard and they shared their vision, a very very long and convoluted vision might I add, and then saw that they actually sell Mandrake and Nightshade here! But it is horribly expensive, might as well go pick some up instead.

So I headed to that little spot of Mandrake in the bloody plains and waited for midnight. A good thing about Ultima V is that now you search NEXT to you and not on you so I can get mandrake without getting poisoned.






I then saved my game and called it a day. Whew what an adventure eh? Ultima V is pretty good so far! I haven't yet tried the dungeons though :D

I have to admit that I am a bit tired of the graphics engine used in Ultima 1 to 5. I'm anxious to be done with Ultima V and move on to the the 1990's where there's actually more than like 5 colors in the game (yes I'm exaggerating).

P.S: I've been thinking a lot about what I am going to play next after Ultima V. Now the logical answer to that would be Ultima VI, but I am instead thinking about playing Savage Empire and Martian Dreams first. My reasoning is that those two games are basically inferior games to Ultima VI, at least from a technical standpoint. They seem to have inferior graphics, music and depth to Ultima VI so why would I want to play the superior game before the inferior ones? Ultima VI came on eight disks while the two other games came only on two. Tell me what you think about my idea.

Ultima V Day 2

Yeah I haven't posted in a while even though tuesday. I sort of forced myself to write before forgetting what happened.

Well I did forget :D What I can say though I that I am finally getting into my groove. So far I think I've played around 6 hours and I'm just getting comfortable. This game is much much harder to play than the previous ones. The day-night cycle and the oppressive atmosphere contribute to the difficulty and in fact are probably the source of it. At one point I ran out of food and I had to go from Minoc to Paws to get some. I managed to use a moongate but it took me a couple of tries to do it without having one my character die.

But now I have a boat, gotten from some pirates and more money. I also have a lot of surplus equipment which I could sell for my monetary needs. I got a couple of quests from the shrines and learned a couple of things from the fortune teller in moonglow. I'm still not sure about the big picture, what am I supposed to accomplish in the end? I still don't really know. But as I learn more about the little pieces it should complete the puzzle.

Is it me or is the morning star absolutely awesome? I love it!

I'm just getting into my comfort zone so I expect the real fun to begin here. I'll tell you more about it in the next few days!

Ultima V Day 1

Here I go! As you can see I started Ultima V yesterday and well, it was quite interesting. Before plunging in the game I had to create my character and I noticed that I could transfer my character from Ultima IV. I didn't think I could do it since I had played Ultima IV using xu4 instead of the original DOS program, but after digging around I found my savegames and they worked with U5!






Only my stats were not maxed out in Ultima IV. I finished the game with 50 STR, 46 DEX and 46 INT. That gave me 25 STR and 24 DEX/INT in Ultima V. I thought about it for three seconds and decided it was worth it to max out my character in Ultima IV before importing him.

So I fired up U4, got the heck out of the abyss using x-it, grabbed my boat, sailed to Britain, ran all the way up to wrong (the Truth + Love dungeon) and looked for an orb. Didn't take me long to find one, saved my game and headed back into Ultima V. Look at the results!




















From what I can see this gives me a HUGE, and I mean a HUGE boost early on! Everytime I tried to play Ultima V (which consisted of running around to fight monsters basically) before I thought the battles seemed quite hard even that early in the game. This should even the odds a bit. I know I can do the same for Ultima VI so this fills my heart with thoughts of glory and success! And also of Love, Truth and Courage of course. My capacity for good is INFINITE after all! At least I think it is. Oh no, wait, it isn't according to the rest of this post!

What do I mean? I'll get to it don't worry. Before starting the game I read through the manual, which is HUGE btw, far bigger than any of the previous ones, and found it quite interesting. I also read the player reference card, the spell book etc. What's fun about Ultima V is that I still have the original map! Lookie!





Yep, one of the few things left over from the games I had on the commodore 64 as a kid. The other things I have left are of course the Ultima IV guide I talked about earlier in a previous post, and two of the coins that came with some of the games. Having the map will keep me from having to use that black and white atlas that came with the Ultima Collection.

After importing my character I read the in game introduction, and I have to say that I was quite happy to hear stones. I finally feel like I'm really getting into Ultima now. Then the game started.

Oh boy. OH FREAKING BOY. Already in that hut I was OVERWHELMED with the possibilities offered to me! I was testing out the controls and I realized I could look everywhere, search everywhere, get the torches on the walls, push stuff. Can you imagine? Of course you guys can but for me it's day and night between this and Ultima IV. The complexity of this game, even that early on, seemed to be on a totally different level than Ultima IV. Oh and did I mention the equipment? So many more choices! And my characters actually started out pretty well equipped which is...actually I'm not too sure what I think of it since I like the concept of starting out in my trousers and then getting to buy some cool new stuff as time goes on. I guess I'll take every advantage they're going to give me, it's not like I have a choice though.





































After this little period of discovery my first thought was "Holy hell I'm in deep trouble". You know when I started this blog the title of it was "Follow Rotting Dragon as he TRIES to finish every Ultima". I wasn't sure I could do it and games like Ultima V shows me why. At this point though I'm sure I'll end up finishing all of them so I changed the title. It's not going to be easy though that's for sure.

Did I mention that I love the graphics? In fact I don't ever remember commenting on how ugly the overworld graphics are. The reason for that is that I DON'T find them ugly. I was raised with these graphics and I love them. Now I won't say they're good looking but they don't disturb me one bit. The dungeon graphics however that's another story entirely. It's just that I feel that a first person game relies almost entirely on the graphics to convey information to you, so if the graphics suck then it's basically like you're walking around blindfolded. That was certainly the case in Ultima III and it was also the case in Ultima IV. I don't know about you guys but I like to see where I'm walking. That's really my main problem with the dungeons. In a way their problem is that they're too ambitious for the technology that was available at the time.

I also like the music. Now I was slightly disappointed with the music of both U3 and U4 but the reason for it was because of the repetitiveness of it. As good as the music is, when you've been hearing it over and over and over again for 25 hours, you'll get tired of it guaranteed. One way to solve that is to make each particular tune longer, so you don't notice it as much when it loops because the track lasts 2 to 3 minutes. The other solution is the one they started to use in Ultima VI (if I remember correctly) which is to use more than one track for any given situation, totally solving the problem. I think, I'll know better after playing Ultima VI. But for the moment the music in Ultima V definitely sounds better than the two previous games. One reason for that is that I am finally hearing some classic Ultima tunes, such as the aforementioned 'Stones', which feels great.

I'm getting distracted a lot today aren't I? I decided to write in a more natural manner lately and rely less on screenshots. Anyway on to the game.

I headed in a straight line for the castle of Lord British. I found it quite quickly and entered it's surrounding suburbs (which is a nice touch). My first interaction with the population of this Britannia was,well,non-existent because it was nightime! And in Ultima V people SLEEP during the night! Holy cow that makes my job of gathering information THAT much more complicated! So I walked around trying to find something of interest and I found what seemed to be an empty bed at the healer. So I slept. After waking up the healer kept blocking the way to the door so I had to step on the bed of one of the patients to reach it. Oops!






















Afterwards I gathered a lot of info, learned the word of power Vilis, heard something about a secret quest given by the shrines, glass swords etc. I learned a good bit of info. The NPC's sure have a lot to say compared to Ultima IV, that's for sure! It makes it harder to detect the good stuff from the bullshit but I'll manage.

Something funny happened during my discovery of the game. I stumbling around at night and found a stable. Strangely the doors were unlocked so...I stole a horse. Now I don't know wether upholding the virtues is important in this game but I have a hunch it is and I still took the horse. The funny part is that I had no idea how to kept him from moving. The manual says really clearly that I have to leave my horse next to a hitching post if I want him to stay still and not run away. WELL IT DOESN'T WORK! I tried and tried and tried. I tried to leave him north of the post, south of the post, west of it and east, NADA. If I sleep or go up stairs that son of a mare leaves! After 20 minutes of this circus I realized that I just leave him outside like in Ultima IV he just stays put. Are those manuals supposed to help me or hinder me? I wonder :)

The rest of my time was spent gathering more information. I messed around with an harpsichord in LB's castle which was interesting and fired a cannon which seems to have made the guard pissed off at me. I didn't way to see what they were going to do to me I just restarded but it could have been interesting to see what happens when I get thrown in the dungeons.


I ended up going over to Paws and ended my session there. Total play time at this time stands at around 3 hours. My impression of the game so far are great but really intimidating. Ultima V is much much more complex than Ultima IV is. As long as I keep taking good notes I'll be fine!

Some thoughts!

In the comments section of my last post my ideas were criticized by Calibrator and it made me think a lot. I'd like to make a few things clear.

First off you guys need to realize what kind of person is writing this blog. Even though I've always loved the Ultimas I was never able to finish them. Why is that? Obviously because I wasn't able to handle them. I was raised with them up to the age of 7 but then my attention turned to the NES and I became a hardcore console players from that point onward. In 1997 we bought our first PC and that's when I had my first contact with Ultima 6,7, UW etc. I tried my hand at those games but I just couldn't play them. Even as a kid I didn't understand the concept of having to take notes in video games, I thought that was just stupid, that you shouldn't have to 'work' while playing a game. In a way I'm still like that, I think games are about sitting down and unwinding. I'm also quite the lazy person, both mentally and physically, so that obviously factors into the equation. I usually do things because I have to, not because I want to. For example I train at the gym because I need to, to be healthy and not die from an heart attack at age 29. I go to college because I need to, I want to have a job I like and not be stuck doing boring work for my entire life. I'd honestly rather not do anything but play videogames all day but I can't so I don't. With videogames though you often have a choice, if a videogame asks too much of you then just don't play it and that's what I've always done with the Ultimas even though I've always desperately wanted to finish them.

In a way that makes my blog even more interesting because it's about someone who's not an Ultima style player trying his hand at finishing all of them. Will I prefer the autonomous party members of Ultima VII? Most likely. Will I like the Nintendoish Ultima 8? I know I already do because of all the 'modern' Ultimas it's the one I played the most. By now you probably don't have to ask yourself why. Now the question is, will I like Ultima 8 MORE than the 'real' Ultimas or less? I might like it less you never know. But I might also like it more I won't rule that out :)

And Ultima 9? Action adventure games are not my cup of tea and that's why I never played it. The reason why I'm not a big fan of action adventure games is the mix, I don't like the mix of genres. To me, action and adventure games should be separate not together. I dislike being in a big action packed battle and then when you're done everything slows down and you have to figure out how to get to the next door or whatever. The mix of style doesn't suit me, give me either an adventure game or an action game, not both in the same package. I like the Zelda games but I don't love them for exactly that reason.

Aside from that I disagree that today's games are shallower than they were before. If you compare them to Ultima then yes obviously they are more shallow but then what isn't? There's nothing quite like Ultima out there and from what I know there was nothing quite like Ultima even when Ultima was the big thing! Oblivion isn't more shallow than something like the Bard's tale or Wizardy. Bioware is putting out some great rpgs still and they must be respected. The first person shooters of the 21st century are better than those of the 90's, adventure games might not be better than they were in the 90's but I'd argue that they are deeper storyline wise, Japanese RPGs are in a rut right now I'll admit but that's more due to the somewhat collapsing japanese gaming industry rather than due to mainstream taste.

I mean honestly, aside from the incredible depth of the Ultima series there was nothing before that was really deeper than what we have out now. The market is dominated by first person shooters and sports game but if you want a deep game you can find it, you just can't get an Ultima style game. Does the lack of Ultima automatically make the market shallower than it used to be? Well I think THAT'S a shallow thought. If you're not able to enjoy yourself except by playing the deepest of games then I guess that's your problem, not mine :)

I'll admit that I'm not the deepest person on the planet but I think there's place for everybody. You also have to keep in mind that I am NOT a native english speaker which explains my inability to write correctly sometimes. Just keep in mind that I'm a lazy SOB when reading my writings and you'll be fine! Oh and keep the comments coming, I like even the negative ones! I sincerily hope that Calibrator will keep reading my blog and will keep commenting, and I'm not freaking joking. Of course Natreg too and that anonymous guy (or maybe guys, that would be weird since I always see anonymous as being the same person over and over), whoever he is.

On another note I've started Ultima V and O M G is it a step up from Ultima IV, and I mean in difficulty! I told my friends on MSN that I was finally starting the Ultimas I've always feared. There's five freaking levels to LB's castle! Holy moly.

I'll tell you more about it tomorrow!

P.S: I usually answer comments directly in the comments section, so if you left a comment at one time chances are I answered it there!

Ultima IV Day 7 - FINAL -

So I finally managed to finish Ultima IV. The last few days were AWFUL. Once again the dungeons really really suck in Ultima IV. They probably were state of the art in 1985 but today they just don't hold up. The rest of the game still feels somewhat unique since there aren't any games like Ultima out there today, but dungeons? Dungeons are in every modern RPG thus they make those in Ultima IV feel so old, slow and boring. Crap I almost wanted to kill myself at some points.

I was hoping the abyss would be better but obviously it was much worse. The whole room system is awful, it's slow as hell and you need to steer your characters to the exit yourself which is awkward. Dungeons have just been done so much better afterwards, that's the main problem. Oh well.

Overall though the game is much better than the first three, but it's not quite 'there' yet. I don,t have much to say because what is there to say? I spent the last two gaming days going in the dungeons, grabbing the stones and then when I was done I went in the abyss, used the stones on the altars, answered the question and that was it. It was boring, that's all there is to it :D

I blinked my way to the entrance of Shame which is pretty nifty but since I had already done the trick for the white stone it's not quite as impressive. I used to think that Blink was an awful and useless spell but now I think otherwise, I friggin love it!

I'll be honest I'm anxious to put Ultima IV behind me and move on to Ultima V, a game I have pretty much never played. In a way I have now completed the first step of my journey: I have completed every Ultima game I had played as a child. Now I am getting into the obscure (to me) Ultimas, the one I completely missed at their date of release. Well Ultima 5 isn't exactly like that, we did own it on the Commodore 64 but I wasn't allowed to play it and when I finally did it felt clunky, buggy and it didn't have music. The game kept crashing too so I'm thinking our discs were going bad.

What do I expect of Ultima V? I expect it to be a substantial leap over Ultima IV, a more dynamic game with a much improved story. I'll probably start it tomorrow so stay tuned!

Ultima IV Day 5 & 6

Sorry guys I have been busy the last few days!

Also I'm at what seems to be an extremely boring bit of Ultima IV: the endgame. My guy is now level 8 so I recruited Mariah, giving me all companions. I found the mystic weapons and armors, found out you could sell em, sold a bunch of em giving me limitless funds, bought a bunch of reagents, created a bunch of spells etc.

I readied myself for the dungeons, and guess what? The dungeons SUCK, once again! I can't believe how bad and boring they are! Now I hope the abyss is better than the other dungeons because good lord this is not fun. I expect it to be since, you know, it's the endgame so it'll probably be pretty exciting :)

I won't say more than that tonight but you can expect a post from me in the next couple of days when I finish the game!

I'll post a couple of screenshots for you lonely sods :)

Ultima IV Day 4

...Honestly I did so much yesterday I have no idea where to begin, again. Generally, I found all of the runes, became a partial avatar in five of the eight virtues, learned a bunch of stuff about the Skull, the Wheel, the bell...well about everything I would say. I know exactly what stones should be placed on what altar, mostly by deduction. I even know the word that encompasses the three principles of virtue. I would go as far as to say that I know pretty much everything there is to know at this point. I have the three words that make up the word of passage too. Really the only thing I don't know about at this point are where the mystic weapons and armors are since I need to be an 8 part avatar for that. So for this post let's focus on the strange happenings once again, rather than just sort of being a parrot and repeating everything I did.



...Need I say more? I was looking for some mandrake in the bloody plains and I came upon this little spot of swamp. Now the dude who told me about mandrake specified about a place where the ground is always damp. I realized right away he meant that little wimpy spot. However I couldn't seem to be able to find any, but then I thought "Hey it seems most things can only be gotten when both moons are dark in this game so this might not be any different" and tadaa, mandrake root. Sort of lame if you ask me but hey, this was made in 1985 so no complaining.





Eventually the seer told me that I was a subject for elevation in the virtue of humility. Now that meant that I had to go to that crazy island in the southeast...an island with volcanoes, monsters and like a thousand pirate ships. I was also told that I needed a silver horn to scare away the demons guarding the shrine and that it was located somewhere "Some say the horn is buried on a small isle off the tip of spiritwood!". I'm sure someone could have given me the EXACT location with lat and long but I still didn't have a sextant so I wouldn't have been able to use it. I'm actually always very poor in this game somehow. So I checked out the map, saw spiritwood and noticed the islands. Away I went!



















I finally found it after searching like a madman. And this wasn't the worst of it, you should have seen me look for the Wheel today, pure craziness. Although that will be for day 5's post :)






Next I headed for that island in the southeast. At this point I'm not sure I had went yet, someone told me to check out the place "In the southeast!" so that's where I went. Oh boy I wasn't ready for this. I stumbled right into a lair of nasty pirates and after downing a couple found out the hard way that I wasn't ready. I guess that's the reason why the wheel is needed uh?





I headed up instead and eventually reached a spot that seemed to be the entrance to the shrine. It was sort of mazelike and confusing but I eventually ended up where I wanted to. I blew the horn, not once but twice and became a partial avatar in humility. Weeee!





After that I decided to learn how to use the moongates. Was quite easy, I just wrote down where each moongate would take me and now I can travel easily that way. I found out that I couldn't reach cove via the moongates though so I entered a whirlpool with my boat, who miraculously survived, and headed for cove. There I learned a bunch of neat stuff and I got the candle. I also learned about that crazy word there even though I had already sort of figured it out by that point.


Then I felt like exploring that island in the southeast. I had seen the lair of the pirates and the shrine but there seemed to be so much more! So I navigated there by way of Skara Brae and sailed around the place. I found a place that seemed like a volcano I could walk in. Now someone had told me that I should only use the skull of mondain at the mouth of the abyss to destroy it. I thought this was it, this was the place. So like an idiot I park my boat next to the swamp, cross it, enter the volcano, go smack in that spot that looks like a waterfall and used the skull. It sure as hell didn't work because it rid me of all my virtues. I rebooted the game and went to the same spot, but this time I pressed on every key on the keyboard to see if there was an 'other' option like in Ultima III. By mistake I pressed on Q and saved my game. LUCKILY I hadn't used the skull this time but two of my characters were dead and it was generally a pain in the ass since no one has enough MP to Resurrect yet so that was 600 gp to pay at the healer. I'm already poor darnit!



















Next is something absolutely crazy. The ghost told me that the white stone was on top of the serpent's spine and that I need to fly to get there or something like that. I was roaming around the spine and just couldn't think how to get there. I thought "Hey, there's probably a passage up there in the mountain to which I need to get." So I looked at the book of spells and saw the 'Blink' spell. It's sort of like a short range teleportation spell. I said to myself that if I timed the range right I could teleport myself right in the mountain and hopefully I would lend in the passage.




















As you can see I missed it the first time. So I backed up a bit and tried again. The results? See for yourself :





UNBELIEVABLE! There's no way in HELL that I could have, in my second try, teleported myself right in that small itty bitty spot! The only logical explanation I have for this is that the game is rigged in such as way that the moment you teleport anywhere on the mountain it immediately takes you to that spot. Because anything else would be insane, just insane. When I blinked out though it seemed like I went back to the same spot I started from so..who knows. Still can't believe it.

Next I tried to find the black stone. That was easier since all I had to do was search on a gate spot when both moons were dark. I wasn't having much success with the first few gates I tried so I tried Moonglow since its gate goes up at the dark moon and my guess was good, there was the black stone at the moment the gate went up.





So that's it for yesterday's news! I played the game for about 2 hours today and will probably play again before the day is over. You'll hear about it tomorrow!

P.S: Oh and a funny screenshot for you guys. My character died at one point and I got him ressed by LB. And guess what? When I got in battles afterwards my character icon was still the dead one, even though I was fighting and moving! Luckily a restart fixed all that.

Ultima IV Day 3

Holy cow this game is crazy. I took like 60 screenshots yesterday alone. I'm not sure where to start but I guess i'll take it from the beginning. I think from now on I will use a new way to write the blogs, as in I will write first and then afterwards post the fitting screenies. Before I would look at the screenshots first and then write something about each one but that takes forever and isn't really interesting, at least for me.



The last time I had stopped in front of the Lycaeum..no wait, that was Empath Abbey, I made a mistake there. My goal was to sail around the map remember? I gathered as much info as I could from the abbey, including stuff about the candle of love and some bard and whatnot. Afterwards I found Yew and collected the rune and the mantra. I also asked Jaana to join me since I wanted a pure magic user in the party to cast spells. I know it would make even more mobs appear but I don't really care, I'm used to random battles in JRPG's so this isn't much different. A thing I found funny is that the whole Antos family is well and alive in Ultima IV and the father came down from his crazy planet it seems. I met the brother, the sister and the father. And they all have crucial information about the candle, book and bell.

















In my travels I ended up going pretty much everywhere on the map. I'm not sure I want to get into the details of what I found out in every city and whatnot, it's a LOT of information and it would make for one long ass post, and I don't feel like writing that long. I will focus instead on the interesting stuff.

Once I had seen all three castles and almost all of the cities (at that time I hadn't yet been to Buccaneer's Den, Cove and Vesper) I realized that some of the stuff on the map was missing. Where was Magincia, where I had already been? Where was the den? I took a quick look at the Ultima V and VI maps and there were certainly more islands on there than on the UIV one. So I decided to check out if those islands were indeed in Ultima IV.



I sailed east from Serpent's Hold and ended up at a trio of Volcanoes. I thought it looked pretty cool and decided to take a screenshot for you guys. So I navigate in the middle of the volcanoes and then I realized something: That was the only way of entry and everywhere else there was shallow waters. In fact you can't even get close to the volcanoes because of that. Everything looked weird...and suspicious. Usually in an Ultima when you see something like there's something really important close by. Without even thinking I went south a bit to reach the corner, since everything in Ultima IV always seems to be in a corner, and pressed S. I didn't even think about it, it just came to me naturally and my finger went automatically on the S.

Holy crap the skull of mondain was there! Hahahah! That is so cool. In most modern games you can't get plot sensitive items unless you've gotten the quest or heard about them beforehand but in Ultima IV there's none of that. Sort of like the ghost episode in my last post luck and instinct allowed me to take a shortcut here! Now I just have to learn what I am supposed to do with that skull, someone told me that if I use it I lose all of my virtues. I won't use it :|




Afterwards I sailed upward to check out some of the other islands and I found Magincia and eventually, the den. I was happy to finally get my hands on a sextant but..wait..I don't have enough money! BUMMER! Man those FREAKING sea monsters don't give any money and that's all I've been fighting. I can't wait to get back on solid ground.






Also is it me or do NPC's sometime give out false information? Calumny told me that I can find Mandrake Root at the fens of the dead and on the bloody plains. So here I am at the freaking fens looking for Mandrake and I never found any. I searched every square there and I found NOTHING. What the hell did he lie to me? I'll have to check out the plains next and they better be there because if they aren't, I'll be pissed.





At this point I know all of the mantras and I have six of the runes. I know where the last two are but I wanted to be able to dispel fields before getting the one in Trinsic and to get a little stronger before getting the one in the forges of Minoc. Afterwards I'll focus on becoming a partial avatar in all virtues since it seems I need to do that to get my hands on some mystic weapons and armors. I already am a partial avatar in valor, my only one at this point in time! They gave me a vision when I became a partial avatar in valor and it's a weird one. It's a picture of someone fighting skeletons with the rune for F on it. What the hell?





Next I'll get the last two runes I need, get my points in each virtue high enough to become a partial avatar in them, get some mystic weapons and armors and well, plunge into the dungeons for the first time. I'm still really confused about this whole stone business. I know that each altar needs four stones..and the way I understand it there's an altar in every dungeon. Each dungeon is supposed to contain a stone although Hythloth lost his. So I need to know what stones go on which altar in what dungeon before going there. Oh boy, this is going to be something. I'm scared that I missed out on some information along the way, that's going to be painful. I also need to find Cove and Vesper and I think I know how to get there. That's it for today!

Ultima IV Day 2

I'm back! So I played a couple hours of Ultima IV today for the first time since the first day. It was interesting to say the least!

I did play some twice since the last post but they were quick 30 minutes trips at the most. I basically ran around, fought some monsters, gathered some gold and bought some weapons. Today had a bit of that too but this time I also gathered some information from multiple places.

The first thing I did today was go to Trinsic and recruit Dupre. When Iolo joined my party I was really shocked at the sudden increase of monsters outside and was regretting my choice a little bit. But now I sort of decided that since I recruited one member might as well get em all. So I started off with Dupre in Trinsic and proceeded to pillage the town of its information.

At this point in time I have 4 pages of notes on file. I use a word processor to takes my notes, finding it easier than writing them by hand. And they're easier to manage too. I wonder if I still have my dad's notebook somewhere? Probably but anyway that would be cheating, or almost.






Speaking of notebooks, I was recently looking for some of my old Ultima stuff and I stumbled on the book 'The way of the avatar, a guide to Ultima IV'. Back when I had Ultima IV on the C64 that book was in the box so I thought it came with the game. So I check it out and I'm like "HOLY HELL THIS THING ROCKS! It has dungeon maps!". I'm thinking that FINALLY Origin realized how awful it was to have to map levels or buy tons of gems so they woke up and decided to print the maps in the manuals! Man was I happy.

But then while I was reading I thought something wasn't right. In the description the book actually tells you that there is a certain stone in one of the dungeons. I thought "Hey why are they spoiling the game for me? I'm supposed to find that on my own not learn it in the manual!". At this point I started to think that maybe this didn't come with the box but was actually a guide for the game..I know what you're thinking: "It's written A GUIDE TO ULTIMA IV ON THE COVER DUMBASS" but you have to realize that I had always seen that book included in the Ultima IV box. I went on www.ultimacollectors.info and yup, it's not normally included with the g of a dungeoname. Bummer.

I'll still use it for those sweet dungeon maps though, I hate friggin mazes!

























Let's go back to my adventures shall we? So I decided to talk to everyone in Trinsic. I think I learned pretty much everything I wanted to. I now know the mantra of Honor, I know where the rune is but I want to be able to dispel fields or at least cure poison before trying my luck. I also had received advice from someone else to ask about...the white stone at the local pub so I did and they told me about some hermit living in lock lake. So once I did everything I could I moved on to paws.




In paws I did the same thing as in Trinsic, gather info. This time I surprisingly found the rune of humility there in some hills to the south east. I also talked to some guy at the pub who told me about the word of passage for the codex. He told me to seek his brother at Lock Lake. Again! There's actually a THIRD person who told me to look for someone there, so I'm starting to see a pattern here. At this point I have no idea how to get there but somehow I'd bet it has something to do with the whirpools, tornados OR the moongates. I'll try the moongates first :)









At this point I thought it was a grand time to learn to cast spells. I'll be honest with you guys, I've never really dabbled that much in the Ultima spell system. When I played Ultima IV as a kid I never tried to cast spells much. Ultima 1-3 obviously don't count since they use the classic magic points for their spells. The only Ultima in which I have used reagents in is Ultima Online, so yeah I don't know much. But it's actually quite easy when you look at the manual, and I think I'm going to enjoy this a good deal. In the picture here you can see me looking at how to create a cure spell, and you can also check out my notes in the background.




Then I smelled the wind and the wind told me "See the world friend! See the world!" So that's what I did. We boarded one of my boats and headed for adventure. Although to be frank I headed straight for Jhelom to buy some weapons and armors for my guys and then decided to head up to Skara Brae for...I can't remember why I did that. To check things out I guess, to smell the flowers and pray a bit. I saw Shamino and thought OH DUDE CMON IN WE HAVE SOME ROOM and he agreed so now I have four dudes in my party. I bought a bunch of reagents at the shop, 10 of each to be exact, and then took a look at my party and saw Dupre half dead so I told him "Cmon old Brother let's go take a nap". He Obviously agreed. At the inn the owner warned us that it was haunted..yeah right. Give me that key and shut your yap! So he did and I sort of regretted it at first..because when I woke up a ghost was in my room! He didn't seem hostile though so I engaged in a sweet conversation with him but there was a problem: he had nothing to say.

So I proceeded to exploit the Ultima IV system and ask him about rune, mantra and stone in succession and guess what? He knew about the white stone! He told me the stone was atop the serpent's spine and I'd have to fly to get it, or something. Weee!








After that we headed out and continued our dangerous trip, getting attacked from all sides from all manners of beasties. Shamino was having a hard time with his measly 200 hp so I parked in front of the lycaeum and that's where I stopped, and that's also where my next tale will begin! Take care!

Ultima I,II and III reviews

Recently I reviewed the first three games in the Ultima series on gamespot. Now I review games based on modern standards so that explains the poor scores the games received. I will post the reviews here for your reading pleasure:


ULTIMA I (PC)

The first official game in the Ultima series.

OVERALL: 6.1 (FAIR)

Gameplay

7

Graphics

3

Sound

2

Value

2

Tilt

10

• Difficulty: Easy
• Learning Curve: 0 to 30 Minutes
• Time played: 40 to 100 Hours

"Old-school"

Ultima I is the first official game in the Ultima series. It is a rather straightforward action rpg, sort of like Diablo but 10 or 15 years earlier. Gamespot states that the PC version of Ultima was released in 1980 but that is a mistake; Ultima was first released in 1980 for the Apple II and the Atari 8-Bit and was then remade in 1986 for the PC, Commodore 64, MSX and Apple II. So the version I am reviewing now is the 1986 remake for the PC, not the 1980 original which I have never played.

Like I stated earlier the game is incredibly simple. You fight monsters, get money, buy better equipment, fight more monsters, get more money, repeat process. Upon exiting a dungeon in which you have killed monsters you are rewarded with hit points, usually more than you lost inside. You can give money to the numerous kings for hit points. The goal of the game is to reach the evil wizard Mondain and kill him, to do so you need to complete quests given by the king, rescue a princess, engage in space battles and eventually travel through time. The game is sort of a mishmash of styles, containing both classical fantasy and out of place sci-fi elements. The graphics work, they are definitely not impressive today but they still catch the eye somewhat although I may be biased on that point. There is no music, and the sound is limited to footsteps and some sound effects for attacking. The game doesn't hold much value because it is quite short, being easily finished under 10 hours and even under 5 if you know how to play. It is also quite expensive if you wish to buy it on ebay. Don't even think about buying the original boxed version, but you can get the Ultima Collection for $30 to $50 which is the best way you can get your hands on Ultima I. I wouldn't recommend it though, this is a game that will be enjoyed only by those who feel nostalgia towards it. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else. I like it though :)



ULTIMA II (PC)

The second and possibly the worst game in the Ultima series.

OVERALL: 4.0 (POOR)

Gameplay
5

Graphics

2

Sound

1

Value

2

Tilt

6

• Difficulty: Hard
• Learning Curve: 1 to 2 Hours
• Time played: 10 to 20 Hours

"Broken"

The second game in the Ultima series is easily the worst. Ultima I was slightly incomprehensible because of its weird mesh of subjects but Ultima II just totally goes into overdrive. Minax, the apprentice and lover of Mondain whom you killed at the end of Ultima I, is pissed off. She decides to destroy your homeworld...earth. So using the 'timegates' that spawned after the death of Mondain she comes to Earth, causes an holocaust in 2111 or something and then hides at the origin of times thinking she's safe. Obviously she wasn't because at the end you kill her.

Reaching her ain't easy though since this game is so idiotic. First off forget about playing this game as a good guy because you can't, you need to kill guards to get keys and you need keys to solve the game. I don't know if you could steal the keys from the guards though which would not be as bad as killing them. Also the timegates system is quite confusing early on requiring a lot of trial and error before getting a feeling of how to use them. Most of the game is spent wandering around with no clue of what to do, most hints you are given are quite short and cryptic in nature. The game isn't nearly as tightly sewn as the first game, at least in Ultima I you had quests to solve and princesses to save. Here you have no goal except to try and find out what the hell is going on. The game just feels plain random. The dungeons are absolutely useless, you can and will solve the game without ever putting a foot in there. They are also quite confusing unlike the simple dungeons of Akalabeth and Ultima I, so don't even think of trying them out if you're not a cleric (since he has the go down a level and go up a level spells). There's even some invincible monsters running around, specifically an invincible balron in Minax's castle. So Minax ain't the most powerful entity in the game? Okay...

I even think there are some missing hints in the game, or at least some really dubious ones. At one point in the game someone tells you that only the quick sword can kill Minax. Okay, point taken. Then one day during a spree of carnage in which you kill dozens of guards once again you might talk to someone who tells you "Beware! I have a quick blade!" Now tell me, would you make the link between that line and the earlier line? Even if you did, would you know what to do with it? Would you think of giving him 500 gold pieces? I'm telling you this game is RANDOM.

The graphics are not as good as the ones in the Ultima I remake but that's to be expected since UII was released in 1982 compared to 1986 for the remake. The sound is also worse, in fact everything is worse. This is just the worst game in the series by far and no one except masochists should play it.



ULTIMA III (C64)

A game that spawned a genre.

OVERALL: 7.0 (GOOD)

Gameplay

8

Graphics

4

Sound

7

Value

2

Tilt

10

• Difficulty: Hard
• Learning Curve: 0 to 30 Minutes
• Time played: 40 to 100 Hours

"Revolutionary"

Ultima III is often seen as one of the most important games ever. It brought RPG mechanics to a whole new level with party based strategic combat. It's basically the distant ancestor of strategy rpgs. The game is a big leap over its predecessors Ultima I and II who were simpler action rpgs. In Ultima III you create a party of four characters to play as. In structure the game is more similar to Ultima II than Ultima I which is surprising since Ultima I was a superior game. However I think Richard Garriott preferred a free roaming world to a more linear quest based one so he continued in that vein. Fortunately Ultima III is much more interesting than Ultima II and has more of a structure to it which helps keep it interesting. However it still has some weaknesses. The dungeons are a big hassle. In 1983 the technology wasn't yet good enough to allow detailed graphics in dungeon so you're left to wander around in a mess of orange walls. The only things you see in dungeons are orange walls and bright yellow treasure chests. It's not a stimulating sight and since the dungeons are much harder than in Ultima I it's not a pleasing one either. You need to spend a lot of time in the dungeons in this game so I would have liked them to be more interesting. The game also rewards playing as evil rather than good characters which is a bit annoying. Killing guards is the fastest way to gain levels and in some cases the fastest way to gain money. A nice touch now is that you can bribe guards if they are in the way of some information or a couple of treasure chests so you can avoid bloodshed that way.

The commodore 64 version had full music and it was quite impressive too. The only real problem with it is that it's relative brevity; the music loops a bit too much to my liking. The sound effects are still the simple ones found in the earlier games although with some additions. Once again I can't say Ultima III is a good value since it's quite old and expensive if you want to buy it. The Ultima Collection is still your best and cheapest bet. Even if the game is an improvement over Ultima I and II it still is too old and rudimentary to recommend to anyone else but Ultima fans.

-------------------------------------

I reviewed the C64 version of Ultima III because I couldn't simply review a game that I played with music and graphic patches. Now that I think about it I played Ultima II with such a patch (graphics only for that one) but it didn't change my view of the game much, the graphics were still ugly. But the patches changed the PC version of Ultima III a lot and I think a review should be based on the original version of a game and not a subsequently modified one, thus I chose to review the C64 one which already has music from the get go.

The time played stat also encompasses the time I spent on those games as a kid, that's why it's so high.

Hope you enjoyed them!

The ethicality of downloading old games

I've been thinking about this subject a lot lately. I'm the type of guy who wants to own absolutely everything he plays even if it's an old obsolete game. I was worried about the fact that I don't own Savage Empire nor Martian Dreams even though I would have to play them to complete my blog about Ultima.

So while browsing ebay I found this auction:
http://cgi.ebay.ca/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=200138760738&ssPageName=STRK:MEWA:IT&ih=010

I immediately thought: "COOL! Those will probably go for really cheap and it'll allow me to legally download the game!".

Then I thought about it. Does that really make sense? Buying a pair of floppies from 1990, floppies I can't even use since I don't have a floppy drive, is going to allow me to download the game?

Now the problem with 'allowing' me to download the game is that no one cares about it. This game isn't being sold anymore by anyone, no one is going to lose any money if someone downloads the game instead of buying it. The only losers are the people selling the game on ebay, but even then you'd have to think that the type of people who would download the game wouldn't necessarily be the same kind who would want to buy a fully boxed and complete game from 1990.

From what I know none of the games in the Ultima series is officially abandonware. In fact I don't even think the term 'abandonware' is accurate since there's always someone out there who owns the original rights. Then again, do those care if you download the game or buy it off of someone on ebay? I highly doubt it.

Fact of the matter is, when you want to buy a game instead of downloading it, it's usually to support someone or some company. I think this is where the ethics or the lack of come in when talking about piracy. Pirates don't care about supporting the work of others, they only care about supporting themselves and their wallet. However, buying Savage Empire off of ebay does not support Origin, Richard Garriott, or even EA. So why would I want to buy it?

It also reminds me of when Natreg told me that "Some might object to the idea of downloading FM towns games...". I tried to look for them on ebay but now I'm wondering, would someone seriously object? I highly doubt it.

The way I see it, if the creator or those who own the rights of a product don't sell that product anymore and cannot benefit from the sales of it then I feel that that product can be freely distributed.

In my case though I just like to own the original box with the manuals, it gives off a tangible feeling that downloading just cannot bring. However too much is too much. In the end when it comes to dealing with older unsupported software whether you buy it or you download it depends on your preference, and on your wallet. And no one should care one way or the other.

I'm still alive!

Hey guys I know I haven't been posting lately but I've been busy these past few days. The last time I played Ultima IV was in the wee hours of thursday morning. I'm in the process of buying a new monitor (22 inch widescreen LCD!) and I have to study for an exam next week so I will be busy for at least another week, maybe two. So I probably won't play much Ultima IV during that time but you never know! I'll post if I do.

In the meantime check out what I got in the mail yesterday!







See ya! :)

Ultima III on the NES!

Hey I just received my Exodus NES cart I got on ebay :) I took a couple pictures of it and I even posted a video of it on youtube which you can watch in this post. The camera is a bit shaky but eh, I was trying to play and film at the same time.

I don't know when I'll play it, I just finished Ultima III on the PC so it won't be soon. Maybe once I'm done with every Ultima I'll go back and finish the alternate NES versions and whatnot. I'll see in due time.

Enjoy the pictures and video!


P.S: In case you were wondering NO I did not create those usernames, they were already on the cart when I received it. I'm happy though because it shows the battery is still alive and well!

Ultima IV Day 1

I finally managed to play Ultima IV. As I said in the previous post I was forced to use xu4 to play Ultima IV but at this point I sure don't regret it. I'm extremely impressed with the program, it doesn't only play Ultima IV but also improves it on many fronts. The only problem I've seen with it so far is that the sound effects are too subdued compared to the music but that's relatively minor. I took screenshots of the configuration screens to show you the amount of configuration options they've added to Ultima IV.
















































I pretty much enabled everything in the end. Automatic actions is pretty cool and text colorization makes everything easier to read. For example when I'm fighting and the enemy start to flee I see the text in yellow to the right so I don't even have to look I can see it from the corner of my eye. For the graphical options at first I used the 2xSai filter but I found it too soft quite quickly. I really miss the HQXX filter, that one is truly the best one I've seen. 2xBi and 2xSai are too soft while Point and 2xScale are quite sharp. I ended up settling on 2xScale at 4x magnification.


So what about the game you ask? I am absolutely impressed. Now I don't know how much xu4 is affecting my gameplay experience but the game just feels better than the previous games in the series. Seems like every problem I had with Ultima III was fixed here: The food consumption has been greatly lowered, the battles are much faster paced, the dialogue is much tighter (there's actual dialogue now) etc. Everything is better. I'm baffled at how I could once have thought UIII to be better than this, there's no way. The music is much better too, in Ultima III the base melody is good but it doesn't last long enough so you get stuck with the same song repeating over and over quite rapidly which becomes annoying in no time.




I ended up being a fighter like I always am. As a kid compassion was my leading virtue followed closely by honesty. It annoyed me because I can't say I particularly like mages or bards. But as I grew older valor came at the forefront and now everytime I take the Ultima test I end up as a fighter. However compassion is always up at the end against valor however this time it was honesty as it sometimes is. So you could say that I haven't changed much since being a kid.




I started out by learning everything I could at this point from the town of Jhelom. If I remember the rune here is in a jail cell however with no keys I can't get it. No problem I'll come back later. I learned many things here such as the mantra of valor, the location of the red stone and the connections between the dungeons destard, covetous, shame and hythloth. Afterwards I checked out the weapons and armors shops but everything was too expensive for me so I headed out.





I entered the gate that appeared next to Jhelom and appeared outside Skara Brae. I promply proceeded to once again loot the place of its information, at least of what I could get at this particular point in time. I learned of the location of the shrine of spirituality, I heard of Zair the wise in Paws who knows something about the word of passage necessary in the abyss, Nightshade in Vesper etc. I won't relate everything I learn in every city because that would be interminable but I learned a lot here. Most importantly I was told the location of the rune and what the mantra was.



I took another gate and arrived at New Magincia. I entered it but quickly realized I had no business here yet and should come back at a later date. So after entering a couple of gates I arrived south of Trinsic and decided to skip it to head directly to Lord British's castle.


















I thought his speech was funny, it seemed to directly criticize his previous game since those games were all about killing stuff and getting gold. I asked him to heal me and then headed off to grab the rune of spirituality. I have one! This is actually the only rune of which I remembered the location. I visited the seer to ask a couple of questions then took a walk around the castle to pick up a couple more conversations before heading out to Britain.



There I managed to both get the rune of compassion, its mantra and learned the location of the shrine! I asked Iolo to join me and then I headed off to the shrine however we came to a stop in front of a massive swamp. At first I tried to cross it but quickly realized that I couldn't do it without getting poisoned. I thought maybe I should go to Yew and ask for Jaana's (I think) services but then realized that there was no need since Iolo as a bard can cast spells! So all I would need are the reagents for a few cure spells and I could go meditate at the shrine!




But I was already planning on stopping for the night so I didn't have time to go hunt for reagents. I decided to stop by Britain and equip myself with some new equipment. I was disappointed to see that the shops in Britain truly pale in comparison to the ones in Jhelom, at least the weaponry and armour shops do! I still decided to pick up a nice sword, much better than the Axe I had previously. Next thing in line is try to get a bow or even better a crossbow for Iolo and some reagents, all the while stopping by towns to plunder them of their knowledge.

Ultima IV problems

I've spent the last hour trying to make Ultima IV work. The first logical way to play it is by patching the game with the Ultima IV upgrade. The problem with that is that it seems to be in conflict with my keyboard because most of the time the game doesn't recognize my input devices or if it does eventually it stops during gameplay. I tried running the game under dosbox but it seems even worse, however the music sounds good unlike when I try to play it under windows. I replaced avpatch with the one made for dos and it's not much different. I tried to change sound cards in the program to see if one worked better than the other. It seemed to help when I selected MPU401 instead of Roland MT32 but it sure didn't help enough. As far as I know I tried everything. I don't seem to be having any problems without the patches.

I tried to install the standalone music patch but unfortunately it's a much older version than the one in the Upgrade package and the music sounds FUNKY. The music is just ugly with that patch.

Those patches were made in like the year 2000. It's not surprising that they might be starting to struggle with more modern systems. It sure doesn't seem to work on mine.

I haven't tried to disable the vga graphics in the upgrade package though, I don't know if you can? The music sounds great in that one so if I could disable the graphics which seem to be the source of the conflicts I could have a good version on my hands...but I'll be honest I'd miss the VGA graphics. They look pretty good.

So that would leave me only one option: xu4. Now I'm a bit scared about using that program. It's still in beta mode so I'm scared of running into some crazy bugs. However the program does look excessively nice and the music is absolutely amazing. Anyways at this point it doesn't look like I have much of a choice, seems every other option has been exhausted. It's either xu4 or Ultima IV ega with no music, or Ultima IV ega with buttugly music with slowdowns in weird spots.. I'll take my chances with xu4.

Ultima III Day 4 - FINAL -

I managed to finish Ultima III today. I tell you I literally played ALL day. I had the day off so I just plunged.

The problem I'm having lately is that I tend to forget what I did earlier in the day. Like now I'm looking at some screenshots to try and refresh my memory. Let's see if it works.

I began the day with some typical guard basing. I guess I had decided to raise my levels a bit and that seems to be the best way to do it in this game. I had my sights well set on getting all the +4 bows for my characters and I needed a lot of money for that. However I was somewhat disappointed with the bows. Although I saw a difference between the normal and magical bow it wasn't as much as I thought it would be. At that point I had already bought two bows but I decided to focus a bit on raising my stats instead. So I gathered some gold and headed to Ambrosia. At first I focused on raising dexterity a bit and then afterwards I put everything into strength.


During that time I kept killing guards whenever I
so at one point I decided I was strong enough to take my foot off the pedal a bit and look for clues. The first place I headed to is LB's castle. I unlocked the doors of the prison and liberated some thieves. They started following me giving me my own little posse of brigands! Then I decided to check out if the monsters in the right cell had something to say, they didn't. In fact they tried to kill me so I returned the favor only I unlike them succeeded. Now for some reason the guard is pissed off at me and wants to do me in. Um, dude, they just tried to kill me I just defended myself isn't that ok? I guess he probably took offense with the fact I was the one who freed them from their cells in the first place.


So here I am making a fool out of the guards with my horse and look who's there! Lord British himself! He looks pretty darn pissed that I killed those monsters in the prison and he wants to teach me a lesson! Now there's no way I'm letting that guy get anywhere close to me he probably has a godly amount of power under his little finger. I've always wondered why he doesn't fix his own problems if he's so powerful? I guess he's too busy with h
is kingly duties.








However as powerful as he is there's no way he can catch my horse. I just galloped away and he got stuck on his own follower. hehehehe!










I left the castle and got right back in. Somehow that seems to have the effect to erase everyone's memory which is great for me. I decide to go look at some of the corridors hidden deep inside the castle and guess what I find? Freaking walls made of lava! Inside LB's castle! What the hell is he doing with lava walls? And how did it get there anyway? I decide to follow this suspicious wall of molten rock and guess where I end up? :!






At the oracle! Now that is weird. An oracle hidden deep inside a castle with lava walls. Now that would sound logical if this were Exodus' castle but this isn't it. Oh well. So I decide to repeat my little magical act of Ultima II and ask him everything he knows all while restarting the game everytime I run out of money. I learned a couple of interesting things. He tells me that I will learn to use the marks in devil guard...now I had no idea what devil guard was in fact I thought it was the town I kept looting over and over but I found out later it wasn't the case. Also I already knew how to use the marks, in fact I already had two..or maybe even three at that point. Yeah I'm pretty sure I had three, I got the fire mark and the force mark on the bottom of the Dungeon of Fire (I think) and I got the mark of king way back in the early game in the dungeon to the right of the castle. I haven't really taken a lot of pictures in dungeons, I guess they were too boring for that. Once I started using gems they were easy as hell too, I must have spent a couple thousand gold pieces in gems alone for the dungeons. Thanks to Draconius for the tip!

Now there were a couple of interesting things in the castle. At one point a guard kept following me but was not attacking which was creepy. I guess he was a fan! Too bad you can't other:autograph. Also I found a boat in the back which I kept in mind in case I lost mine. I didn't.


















At this point I decided to finish buying magical bows for my parties. I headed to..death gulch I think it's called and proceeded to loot the place. I got a little greedy and decided to loot the food joint and well, I got caught. Now at this point getting caught wasn't much of a problem for me however it was a major one for the town guards who were on the verge of getting slaughtered. I killed the two guard parties here, stole the rest of the chests here and then moved on to the armor shop.






Afterwards I headed up to the weapons shop. At this point pretty much every guard had been killed except for those two behind the gates. So I could steal in piece without getting disturbed. I headed down to show you guys the result of my destruction:







There you go. Cleaned it good uh? Nothing left! And I'd like to assure the noble citizens of Death Gulch that I put all of that money to good use by saving your land and all its people! You should thank me for the multiple massacres I did in your town! :|
The game is really evil. I totally understand when parents sent letter to Garriott claiming his games were promoting breaking the law. There's no way you can succeed without doing it :) I guess every impressionable kid who played this game came way from it thinking that If you don't break the law you won't get far.



















I finally headed to Dawn to buy my last bow. I was really happy about getting it so I went to the armor shop and proceeded to loot it clean, it and every other shop in the city. The guards were pretty mad so they chased me but they couldn't catch me. I even took the time to drop by the guild shop and buy some torches, keys and gems! At this point the guards were not only pissed but quite insulted, look for yourself:



Now the oracle told me two other things. He told me that I should look to the Montors for help from above and that I could find the lord of time in the dungeons. Now for the Montors bit I headed to Montor ...west I think, fired up a gem and understood right away what he meant: the prison. So I headed up to the prison, prepared to bribe the guard...and then thought what the hell I'm not spending another time on these guys let's just kill him. So once again I fended off another torrent of guards, quite easily.

I was really surprised when I headed to the castle for some leveling up and was answered: NO MORE! I was like WHAAAAAT! Seems the level cap is 25, holy crap I was already much higher than than and I wasn't done yet with the game, I still was lacking the mark of the snake, two of the cards and had yet to see the time lord!



Then I decided it was about time to finish the game. When you reach the level cap well, you should be thinking about finishing it up. Now at this point I had been to the bottom of four dungeons, giving me three marks. I went to the dungeon to the right of the castle because I remembered it was an easy way to get the mark of the king. I went to the bottom of dardin's pit because it was logical to do so; I was always in there for the gold anyway. I did two other dungeons randomly so I ended up with three marks out of four. I decided to try out the dungeon to the south of Death Gulch for the simple reason that I had seen a gate spawn there once and I thought "hey if there's a gate right in front of that dungeon then it might be an important one". It was. That one gave me the mark of the snake.

Now I had a problem. Where was the time lord? The oracle told me he was in the dungeons..that worried me. I had done five of them and hadn't seen anything resembling a time lord. Then I remembered someone telling me that I would learn to use the marks in Devil Guard. I had realized that DG wasn't Death Gulch but then where was it? I was stumped. So I looked at my atlas trying to think but nothing came up. So I decided to try the moongates. I hadn't even used one yet so I thought heck they might get me somewhere interesting. So after bumping from one moongate to another I ended up stuck in a narrow mountain path with no escape! I was like WHAT THE and then a gate appeared right from under me and it took me to Devil Guard. I was quite happy however they didn't teach me SQUAT. Everything they told me I already knew! I was REALLY stumped now..so I decided to get the hell out of there but I wasn't able to, I kept getting teleported to the narrow mountain patch and then back to DG! Just when I was getting desperate a gate took me right in front of a dungeon entrance, one closed off from the outside world! I knew this had to be it! Luckily I my HP was still pretty much at max, I had a enough gems for a dungeon trip and my food was high enough. So I plunged in!





The dungeon was quite easy actually. Honestly all dungeons are somewhat easy when you buy as many gems as I did. I just use like 3 per level and I'm in the clear. I got down to lvl 08 quite quickly and proceeded to the upper left corner. Guess who was there!






Here is the big man himself in all his ugly glory. He tells me the order of the cards which makes me giddy with joy. At this moment I had only two out of four cards but I knew where the other two were so it wasn't much of a problem. Yep, you heard that right, at this point in the game I had never been to the wisdom and intelligence shrines. Honestly I should have just picked four freaking warriors, the way I healed myself was to head down to the third level of Dardin's Pit, grab some chests, get healed and then come back up really quickly. No need for healing magic!



Here I am in my vessel going to Ambrosia for hopefully the last time. What's funny about this is that I can't find that darn whirlpool. I spent like 40 food just looking for it! In the pictures below you can see me leave filled with hope and then return to the same spot with despair in my heart and 30 food less per character!

















After my trip to Ambrosia I decided to try my hand at Exodus. Now I was a bit worried because none of my characters were closed to being maxed out. One character had 60 strength, another had 60 dexterity, and all of the others had a mix of those. My three other characters had 30 dexterity and something like 45 strength. My intelligence and wisdom scores were pretty miserable and useless. So I wasn't sure how well I would fare but I decided to try anyway.



















Here I am, my heart filled with rage and my fingers twitching with anticipation. I'm thinking "That thing is right up from here so that's where I'm headed, UP!". So here you can even see me going through the fire since that would have allowed me to state that I went through the fires of hell to reach my target. However my fairy tale wasn't meant to be because I came to face with the..







Phantom guards of Austin, Texas! Those sons of bitches were hard as hell when hitting me but everyone of my arrows just passed right through em! MAN I was thinking YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME. Was my dexterity not high enough? I said nah, that's impossible, I would at least hit them once every..ten times or something! So I settled on the idea that they were guards imbued with powers of an alien nature, somewhat like the Silver Surfer. Yes, they were all Silver Surfers disguised as guards.




So I rebooted my game, entered the castle and instead of going up decided to use the side door. I was promptly attacked by dragons but I thought "hey, no problem I've killed those things before!". Well the ones I killed weren't the Ghastly Dragons of Belzebub like these ones were. I was shooting my arrows like if they were rockets and the dragons just ate them or looked at them funny while gently avoiding them to the right or to the left. Something wasn't right and then it flashed, I remembered that bastard in Grey or some other hellspawned city telling me "Only exotics will protect you from great evil". CRAP.




I restart my game once again and equip the exotics. I go to the side and get attacked by wyverns this time, much better than dragons. I actually miss on the first couple of shots making me extremely nervous BUT THEN I START TO CONNECT! ALLELUYAH GIRLS AND BOYS I'M SAVED! However those monsters are TOUGH, they hit hard and I can't heal myself so I feel a bit nervous. When my two front line fighters start to weaken a bit I shift them back and replace them with my barbarian and lark.




So I finally reach the lair of the foul...machine, and WHAT'S THAT? I'm getting attacked! But I can't see my enemy! Is there even one? I look at the bottom right and it says I'm being attacked by the FLOOR, and I can't see it. ARGH. That was awful!


















On top of that I was poisoned so it was a pain to go through all those freaking mutant floor tiles. When I was done with them my lark had only 4 HP left! But I finally reached Exodus and proceeded to insert the four cards in the order the lord of time told me. Voila! Game done!


















FINAL NOTES


So what did I think of the game? I was disappointed. This isn't the game I remembered as a kid. At that age I preferred III over IV because it was simpler but now I think the roles are going to be reversed. In the end Ultima III is really similar to Ultima I and II except you have a party which both makes the game better but slower. But playing it through it again really devalued it in my eyes, it will never be again the same game for me, sort of like seeing that movie you were crazy about as a kid and thinking "Holy crap this ain't that good". Oh well. It's still good, it just isn't what I thought it to be. There is still no storyline in the game, the hackneyed dialogue from II is back in full force, the game isn't well balanced (those +4 bows are overrated I would have been better served spending that 26000gp I spent on the bows on stats instead, especially since I can't use the bows in the last castle). I'm happy to finally leave the first trilogy behind and enter in the realm of the true Ultimas, the second trilogy 'The age of Enlightenment' . Now I expect Ultima IV will take me forever to finish due to my inexperience with it. I know where a couple of the runes are although I don't remember the mantras. I also know how to play the game with the praying and all I need to do but really I never got further than a couple of runes and some characters in my team. It will be my first true test (although Ultima II was pretty harsh early on too).

I expect most of the problems of Ultima III to be fixed in Ultima IV. My characters should eat less food and everything should feel more polished. And hopefully the dungeons are better although I've never been in an Ultima IV dungeon before so I have no idea what to expect.

Anyway, see you in Ultima IV!

Ultima III Day 4 - I -

I've been playing Ultima III a lot today and I'm not done yet! I started the day by killing some more guards. After a while I decided that it was time to explore the cities so I set off and I talked to everyone in pretty much all cities. I discovered a lot of clues about exotics (not needed I guess), the silver snake, Dawn etc. But what I REALLY wanted to know was the location of those +4 bows! At first my guess was that they probably were in that crazy thief city or something full of locked doors. So I bought a couple of keys, my first set of keys in fact, and headed there. I was disappointed to find out they didn't have the bows however I did see a whoooooole bunch of treasure chests! I took a mental screenshot of that and then headed off to the only other location where the bows could be: Dawn. I sort of remembered where the city was from the last time I played Ultima III and I had uncovered the clue about it appearing at 0,0. So I went in the forest and lucky me, just when 0,0 hit the city was right in front of me! What luck! So I entered and YES they have the +4 bows, however they cost like 6500gp! That's extremely expensive! So I was wondering what I was going to do when I noticed they have a stable in there. I asked for some horses and they tell me it's going to be 800gp? Screw that!

So I decided to steal them. I went to the right side door, unlocked it, killed the two merchants and took a horse. Next thing you know the guards are after me which I'm sort of used to by now but then something magical happened: I could outrun them. Easily. The horses were much faster than the guards! So I slipped out of there without fighting which was awesome. So at that point my mission was clear: get enough money for those bows!















At first I resorted to my old trick of going down the dungeon north of the castle for money but that was a bit slow and a bit boring by now. So I decided instead to loot that city full of treasure chests. I boarded my boat and set sail to dreams of riches and crazy powerful bows. Surprisingly most of the treasure chests at the right of the armor shop can be taken without alerting the guards which is pretty cool! However to maximize my profit before leaving I always go down and steal a couple of chests from the armor shop and then kill the three guard groups who come down once I'm discovered. Then I leave and repeat until my guys are too weak. At that point I go back to the castle, go up to the dungeon, go down to the treasure room and use the healing fountain they generously provide me. At this point I have about 8000gp so I'm going to buy my first +4 bow soon, I'm really excited!

Ultima III Day 3

So the big theme of today's post is guard killing. Today I decided that I was finally going to try and get clues around the towns. So I grabbed a chunk of food off the grocer (again) and headed off. At first I talked to everybody in Britain and then went to Grey. At one point I entered a small room with a bunch of treasure chests and some thief attacked me! So I killed him and promptly started looting the chests using the open spell. Next thing you know I'm attacked by guards! So I'm thinking okay well I'm done..but no! I killed the first wave and that with near dead characters! At this point something flashed in my head. I thought "Holy hell I can kill those bastards somewhat easily and they give me a bunch of experience points!". So I started killing guards to get my levels up :)


Obviously it wasn't THAT easy, especially when you're doing it with characters who sometimes don't have much health to begin with so what happened happened one of my character died. Instead of reloading the last save I decided to head to the healer, I preferred that to losing 30 minutes of gameplay. However at that time I actually had a lot of money because I exploited the fact that treasure chests respawn in dungeons when you leave them. The dungeon right up north of the castle has a room filled with treasure on the second level so for about 20 minutes all I did was go down to the second level grab the chests go back up leave and then redo. I got about 3000GP quite quickly doing that and then I headed to Ambrosia for some stat raising. At first I concentrated on dexterity hoping it was going to make my characters more accurate in battle...however I'm not sure this game uses dexterity to calculate accuracy. I sure damn hope so. I'll probably repeat this many times until I get tired of doing it. I can do the important stuff later once I'm extremely strong :) Here are my current stats as of this writing:

Ultima III Day 2 - II -

I have to admit that I am disappointed with Ultima III, it's simply not as good as I remember it to be. Design wise it is really similar to both Ultima I and II except that you are controlling a party of adventurers instead of going solo. But that's not really the source of my deception, it being more the dungeons than anything else. I simply hate the dungeons in Ultima III. This time they are literally mazes, very low res mazes that is.

The problem is that if you're going to have complicated dungeons you have to be able to show them in detail. I've played Eye of the Beholder and I liked it but you could actually see what was going on in that game. In Ultima III everything is orange and boring. There's no way you can get your bearings in such a setting. The only thing you can possibly do is map the dungeon and that's something I'm not willing to do. When I first finished Ultima III I used a walkthrough with maps so I probably didn't notice how much of a pain in the ass the dungeons were but now I sure know. I loved the dungeon in Ultima I, you didn't need to map them they were simple and they were all about combat but now this is getting out of hand. I just hope that the future Ultimas can have detailed dungeons. Remember! I don't mind dungeons if I can see where I'm going!

The other thing that bugs me once again is the absolutely crazy food consumption, especially in cities. I can't believe how much these gluttons are eating in cities! It's turning me off of exploring because while I'm exploring every nook and cranny of the cities my guys are eating like crazy. From memory the food problem becomes negligible from Ultima IV onward. I honestly can't wait.

Some good news now, I discovered that bows are still better than exotics. It makes me feel a bit better about my choice of classes. I can't imagine the destruction we will wage once we get our hands on magical bows!

Later!

Ultima III Day 2 - I -

So I ended up going back and re-creating my second paladin as a bobbit. Since I wanted his role to be that of the main cleric in the party it was logical to have him as a bobbit, sacrificing some dexterity in the process. I also realized that I could create a bunch of dummy characters, form a party with them and one of my main characters and transfer all of their gold and food unto him. I did that a couple of time giving me quite a bit of gold and a lot of food. First thing I did with that gold is buy chain mail for my two paladins and bows for everyone. That was pretty cool :)

However I have to admit I am a bit disappointed with the game so far. The beginning is sloooooooow, I couldn't find any monsters! That combined with the once again absolutely insane rate of food intake makes for a pretty stressful early game. Running around looking for monsters while seeing that food counter go down and down. I was frustrated because I was spending far more money in food than I was making. Luckily at one point I stumbled on a pirate boat and immediately started hunting for the exotics. At first I didn't really remember how to get them, I kept (L)ooking for them but something didn't feel write. I kept looking for a 'search' button but there wasn't any. After looking on every island I check out the player reference card and noticed the 'other' key and then I remembered that I had to use that. At first I 'searched' with it but then out of the blue I suddenly remembered that I had to dig, so I did that and pretty soon everyone was equipped with exotics.















Now I understand that me doing so kinda ruins a part of the game. But it also brings some complaints from my part, namely the sameness of the character classes once you reach the endgame. At this point in time my party is much weaker than it would have been if I had picked a bunch of extremely specialized characters such as wizards, clerics, thieves and whatnot since they'd all be equipped with exotics anyway! I realize that's my own fault since usually you're supposed to look for exotics much later in the game but still I don't think an all powerful set of weapons and armor should exist. At least my characters will all be able to use +4 bows once they become available which is pretty cool while still wearing awesome armor.

Obviously at this point my party is extremely powerful because of the exotics. I had no problem going into a dungeon and getting the mark of kings to lift the 500hp limit on my characters. The reason I knew that is because I read it on Ophidian's blog when I first stumbled on it :) Now from my memories of Ultima III, here is what I remember:




- There are four marks and four cards to get. I believe all 8 are contained in the 8 different dungeons of Sosaria.

- To up my stats to their maximum I have to visit the island of Ambrosia by way of the whirlpool. However I don't really remember how much money I need.

- To get past the serpent I have to yell a certain word but I don't remember what I'm supposed to yell.

- I need to insert the four cards in a particular order to defeat Exodus but once again I don't remember the order.

That's pretty much it. I don't remember where I can get the magical weapons so that's a bummer, anyhow I wouldn't have enough money for them. Right now my money is all going into buying food :)

I have to say that after a slow start the game has certainly picked up. I'm not sure it can live up to the memories I have of it though, it's basically like Ultima II in design except it's not as random and you have a party of adventurers instead of going solo.

So next I'll go into other dungeons to get whatever lies in them and go from there!

Ultima III Day 1

Woohoo Ultima III! I freaking LOOOOOOOOVE this game! This is probably THE game of my childhood, at least the 0 to 10 years old portion of it. I love everything about this game...or maybe I should say loved. We'll see when I finish it again as an adult :)

One thing I always like about western rpg's are their really in depth character creation system. I love it and I swear that I spent a good two hours yesterday thinking about my party in Ultima III. It's quite complicated. The typical party in a game like this is a Fighter, a Thief, a Cleric and a Mage. However there are problems with that configuration. I don't like having only one front line warrior. So what, he's supposed to plunge head deep into danger while the others stay back? I don't like that. Also I don't like pure mages because I'm not a mage type. I'd much rather have a good archer than some dude throwing magic missiles. I like thieves and clerics however as the game progresses they start to feel limited because of their equipment limitations. So it was complicated.

At first I had decided on a Fighter, Paladin, Ranger and Cleric party. That would have given me three characters capable of healing, three characters capable of throwing down (the cleric would have been able to throw down also in the early game) and the ranger would have had some thieving abilities and able to do some sorcery. Seemed perfect...except for one problem. The ranger is limited to +2 weapons and I want everyone in my party to eventually be able to equip the strongest ranged weapon there is. Now I know that the Exotic armor and weapon can be equipped on any character regardless of class but the weapon is not ranged so that bugs me. That meant that my ranger would have had to use a weaker ranged weapon or an exotic and I didn't like that. So I decided to switch it up.

My final party is two paladins, one barbarian and one lark. The two paladins will act as my twin healers although one of the two will be more combat oriented while the other will be more clerical in nature. The barbarian will be my thief, a thief that can use every weapon out there that is. And the lark will be my replacement for a mage, being able to use every weapon and a good amount of mage spells. My party is a bit weak on magic but so far I'm pretty happy with it.

The two paladins are dwarves while the other two are elves. The logic behind the dwarves is that their weakest stat is intelligence which isn't needed for a paladin. At first I thought about making one of the paladins a bobbit since the bobbit is maxed out on wisdom. However they also have poor dexterity. So I don't know. I might go back and revise that to be honest since one of my paladins is supposed to be magic oriented so it would be logical to have him as a bobbit.


The other two are elves. For the barbarian it was a logical choice since his job is to be the thief in the party. For the lark it was a bit more complicated, I thought about making her a fuzzy which has maxed out dexterity and intelligence however he has a piss poor 25 STR max. That might have made her useless as a fighter in the endgame. I don't want to have to rely on her magic, that's not really my style. I mean if I'm going to have a lark with 25 STR might as well have a Wizard no? So I decided to pick the elf instead. That one was a hard choice but I can't really go back on it without gimping my lark. I want her to use the strongest bow and kick ass with it, not throw wind arrows.

So overall I'm pretty happy with my bunch of miscreants. I'll go play my heart out :)

Escape from Mount Drash

Man this is the worst game ever. It might actually be more awful than that E.T game for the atari. The fighting mechanics in this game are simply horrendous and at a certain point when you stop seeing things on your overhead map it just becomes retarded. It took me like 5 tries to understand how to solve that damn 13th level. I couldn't get into the portal! Eventually I realized that there were gems scattered around so I tried to teleport but my guy wouldn't teleport where I wanted him to. Just when I was ready to throw my computer screen I discovered the blast spell. That made it easy to finish the game.

I didn't even want to play this game, it's even an Ultima. It has the name slapped on it but it's not an Ultima. Sierra decided hey let's make a generic game and slap on the Ultima title on it that'll sell! This is called "Rotting Dragon's trip through Ultima", not "Rotting Dragon's trip through Ultima and all its derivatives, imitations, influences and every other game who used the Ultima name to try and make a profit" or whatnot. I shouldn't have to play a game like Mount Drash! *cries*

God damn.

Ultima II Day 3 - FINAL -

I've finally finished Ultima II. The whole last day of playing was spent killing monsters for gold. Can you believe it? That's all I did. At first I went around earth circa 1990 but there weren't enough monsters so I headed to pangea which was a lot better. Eventually though it still wasn't enough and I headed to the Time of Legends. There everything went much faster.















This game really wasn't good. Just to show you, here I am struggling to remember what exactly I did in this game today. It was really monotonous and it's affecting my memory :)

Let's see where I left off yesterday...oh yes. The first thing I did today was up my stats again at the hotel. I was really pissed off near the end when I realized that the more money I gave the clerk the more he raised my stats. If I had known that earlier it would have saved me a lot of running outside to save each and everytime I got a stat raised. I was also really pissed that every point of charisma after the 70th one was absolutely useless. Things cost as much at 99 than they do at 70.

New San Antonio. Unsurprisingly, when I talked to him he said he had a quick blade so I boughSo after raising my stats a bit I decided it was time to get the power armor. So, yes you guessed it, I killed monsters for money. Afterwards I bought the armor. At that point I had remarqued something funny; if I saw someone who was not moving in town then that person surely had something important to say. Well except for guards obviously. It got to a point where the only NPC's I talked to were the ones who weren't moving. There was one like that in the prison int it from him. Some other guy told me "She must be a 9-9-9!!" I thought he meant a year at first but I guess not. I talked to the oracle nine times to see all he had to say. At first I was really pissed off I thought he was telling me bullshit, he rambled on and on about some old man under a tree I couldn't believe it. Here I am giving loads of cash to this dude and he's raving like a lunatic? I wanted to kill him. But then when I was in NSA (again!) I opened a couple of doors and found an NPC standing below...some letters spelling "atree". Honestly that is so awesome and retarded at the same time. I guess British felt poetic but didn't have the technology to show his vision so he improvised :)

Like I thought yesterday, the power armor was the key to space travel. This time when I launched the shuttle it stayed in the air. I was confused at first since it said "You are drifting through space!" and I was like what the hell? Then I hit H for hyperspace and it asked for some coordinates, at this point I was on the verge of pulling my hair out but then I remembered "She must be at 9-9-9!" and I typed in that. Like magic it worked and I was on planet x. Well, after crashing the first three times that is but after learning how to land I was on planet x. Nothing much to see there. In fact there's nothing much to see in this game so that wasn't any different.

I have no idea how I had the presence of mind to type in "6-6-6" to return to earth but I sort of thought it must have been that. Back down I killed monsters up to about 5000 at which point I bought the ring from the old man (thanks to the oracle for pointing that out). With the rest of the money I finished upping my stats, maxed out my hit points and bought as much food as I could. See pictures:















At this point I was finally ready for Minax. Thus begins truly the only really fun part of the game. I went to the the time of legends with the plane ready to wage war. I didn't meet much resistance outside since I had already wiped out everyone but once I got inside it got a little bit more interesting. I headed straight up to the throne and was ASTONISHED that she wasn't there! I couldn't believe it! Had I forgotten to do something before going? I couldn't think of anything so I looked for her in the castle.


















I kept running around and couldn't find her. I was getting attacked from all sides but I was making mincemeat out of them. The castle is pretty messed up. You find all sorts of weird people like an insurance salesman (?) and a cleric who tells you to believe in the devil. Well I guess the cleric wasn't that strange but the insurance salesman sure was. At this point though I was on the verge of finding Minax but I had a problem...this invincible Balron was after me and he was literally taking chunks out of my HP every time he hit me! After running away from him I managed to trap him in a corner.















I was finally free to face Minax! The battle was sort of anticlimatic. I found her, hit her once, she teleported to another chamber, I hit her again, after five hits she dies. A weak game ends weakly, fitting isn't it? However the final line is pretty nice "All her works shall die!". Classic :)















Oh well. I'm done with this game and I couldn't be happier. I certainly don't regret playing, I had to. It's a game I played in my childhood and never understood but now I understand it. It's okay, there are worse games than that out there I guess. But I'll surely never replay it, once was enough. It will undoubtedly end up being the worse of all Ultimas I will play during my little journey. Now it's time to move on to Ultima III! Man am I excited about that one, Ultima III is probably THE Ultima of my childhood, it's the one I saw my father play all the time. I can't wait to finish it again!

Ultima II Day 2

Well I guess this will be the only day 2 post about Ultima II. Ultima II is certainly less exciting for me than Ultima I was, there is definitely a lot more tedium involved in this game. I take less pictures because of that and I guess I have less to comment on too. But there are a couple of things about this game I noticed:

- Dungeons are retarded. Compared to Akalabeth and Ultima I they're EXTREMELY complex so you can get lost really easily requiring you to map them if you actually want to accomplish anything. However, the dungeons seem completely useless. Everything I need to get I can get by killing monsters outside so why do I need to risk my neck inside? On top of that I just simply don't get enough torches off of monsters to go down even two levels, as a fighter I wouldn't be able to go back up. Maybe if I had picked a cleric I could cast ladder up and down spells and light spells making the trip feasible at least.

- This game truly rewards delinquent behavior. I don't see how someone could survive the early game without resorting to stealing food and even in the late game it's a big big help. Money isn't as easy to get than in UI so I'd like to spend the little I have on worthwhile stuff. Then there's the whole guard killing thing. How crazy is that? I was absolutely desperate to find some keys and since I couldn't find any I grew quite frustrated. At one point I blew a gasket and decided to go on a killing spree, I killed a guard and TADA that freaking gave me keys! Now are you telling me that I have to kill legions of guards to get keys? That's just plain retarded. I understand why Garriott received complaints from concerned mothers now :)

- This game just plain ain't that good. Well actually I already knew that but still. Honestly though it's better than I thought it was, it's actually playable which I didn't think it was but it's still pretty bad. I can't wait to be done with this. It just feels so random and there aren't any quests or things to do. You just run around kill stuff...that's pretty much it. Oh well.

At this point I have a plane which I am really happy with. I tried to take a shuttle but..I don't know what happened there seems to be a bug of some sort. The shuttle goes into hyperspace but then it sort of doesn't work? I briefly see the ztats screen and then I'm on the ground again with the tons of guard coming to get me. I guess I should try to get the power and reflect armors first in case it's anything like Ultima I (need to wear a specific suit of armor to go into space).

I'll leave you with a nice pic of me and my plane, talk to you guys tomorrow!

Message to Natreg

So where can I get the FM Towns version of the games? I suppose they're impossible to buy so I'd have to download them. Where can I do that?

Also what FM Towns emulator would you propose?

Ultima II Day 1 - III - and some more notes

Okay so I am sort of getting the hang of this. Thanks to Natreg for the tips, greatly appreciated :) And for your information, yes the patch fixes the 99-00 rollover so I don't need to worry about that.

At this point I understand how the gates work. I had read the manual before starting the game for the first time but when I read it again after playing for a bit it just put everything into focus. So now I can actually travel around without being confused which really helps a lot.















At first I created my typical male dwarf fighter character but I ran out of food. Everything was expensive and I couldn't seem to get anything done so that's when I realized that I would have to change my strategy. So I created a Female Elf Fighter instead. I thought about a thief for 5 seconds but I decided that the female elf was enough of a change for me. I also traded in some strength and stamina for charisma. The result is that stuff in towns is much cheaper, allowing me to get a great sword right off the bat instead of a sword. The added agility also allowed me to steal some food in towns.

Afterwards I went to the bar to ask some tips and wrote all of that down. Then I went out to fight monsters in the hope of getting a blue tassle..with no success. I'm not kidding I spent HOURS killing monsters and I was getting every freaking object in the game but never the god damn tassle. I was PISSED. Man this was so boring you cannot imagine (or maybe you can). Running around killing monsters, stealing some food, giving money to LB for HP, rinse repeat. There were boats everywhere trying to kill me and for my part I was just trying to avoid them to make sure that I could get one when I finally got my tassle. Well that moment finally arrived just when I was getting ready to go to bed. Wooo!

All of a sudden things got rosy. I was traveling the seas and totally blasting the hell out of monsters with the cannons it was awesome. I decided to check out to check out the hotel california in New San Antonio like some dude told me to in some backwater village and then I remembered that there is a guy there who can raise my stats if I give him money. However I thought for sure that he was a cleric and I could see a cleric behind a locked door..but I didn't have any keys! I ran around trying to find keys somewhere but I couldn't, so I guess you get keys by fighting monsters like with everything else but I never actually got any! At this point I realized something funny: There's nobody in this town. In most or all towns there's people walking around right? But in New San Antonio there are merchants locked behind their counters and guards. That's it. There's no one...except for this dude in Hotel California in front of the cleric's door. I thought that was suspect, he's the only accessible guy in the whole city. So I went outside, saved, then came back in and gave him some money. So I decided to give money to the guy in front of the door (I saved beforehand of course). And surprise he said ALAKAZAM! and raised my agility by four points! So it was him and not the cleric! So I gave him a bunch of money and he raised a bunch of my stats :)

At this point though I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be doing. I have the brass buttons for the plane...but since I have no idea what I am supposed to with it I haven't yet tried it. I have no idea what to do with the gems I'm getting nor with most of the other stuff for that matter. This is what my character looks like at this time:














So we'll see where I go from here. My plans for now will be to raise my stats at the hotel quite a bit, buy the best weapons and armor I can at the shop, try to find some keys, talk to everyone (I haven't yet really done that, I just don't have enough food and money yet to waste it walking around) and then use the plane. How come the horses are so useless? You actually use MORE food on horseback than on foot! Where's the logic in that?!

IN OTHER NEWS

There was a copy of Ultima IV for the Sega Master System on ebay and I almost bid on it but I decided not to in the end. It would have cost me $25-35 (depending on the shipping) which I thought was too much. I already have the best version of the game on the PC so to spend another $30 for another inferior version doesn't make much sense. I'll spend 20$ Canadian max on it, if I can't get it for that price I'll just play the PC version. It'll be easier to take screenshots that way :)

Ultima II Day 1 - II -

Wow this is as bad as I remembered it. I have no clue what's happening I can't even get my bearings.

Okay. So basically the way I understand this, the time gates don't only make me travel through the world but also through time. That means that I take a gate in present time North America it can warp me to Australia in the future or the past­. Now that I've understood that, how the hell am I supposed to get my bearings in there it doesn't make one freaking sense! :|

Ultima II Day 1 - I -

Oh my god, I'm scared. This game scares me. Of all the games I had for the Commodore 64 this had to be the most incomprehensible one, it just didn't make any sense! I had seen and played Ultima I, III and IV and at one point I asked Dad "hey how about II?" and at that point I think he told me "you don't wanna know" but of course I DID want to know.

Oh man where to begin? This game just felt OFF, it just felt FUNKY compared to all the other installments. I didn't really understand at the time how Ultima II could feel so much worse than Ultima I AND Ultima III. The only other time I can think of a an awful sequel sandwiched between two much superior version is the whole Devil May Cry debacle (great first game, awful second game, return to form in the third). Obviously I had no idea at the time that the Ultima I I played was a remake of the original thus it was actually an even more recent game than Ultima IV.

But really Ultima II was crazy. The colors looked funky as hell, the battle system was like so fast paced, you could miss your opponent 25 times and then hit him once and it just went by so fast. I missed the VVVVVVVVVVVVVV SHOOM sound in Ultima I when hitting enemies. In Ultima II it was basically like a ping or something.

And then there's the fact that the game was impossible to understand. WHAT WAS I SUPPOSED TO DO? The crazy part about Ultima II is that even with a freaking trainer I never could get anywhere! I think I was Minax's island but there were some invincible monsters on there I couldn't believe it I was maxed out and I couldn't kill em all! I never killed Minax. In fact I never did anything in this game.

This is what the game looked like on the commodore 64:


But now things look a bit more rosy. With the EGA patch the game actually looks like Ultima I which is a GREAT thing (well the PC Ultima II port anyway). It seems infinitely more playable. I'm scared but at the same time anxious, I've never really played this game I have no idea what I am supposed to do. This should be interesting to say the least. So I'll go try it and talk about it more later!

Ultima I Day 1 - Final -

I finished Ultima I yesterday before going to bed so that's why I still have Day 1 in the title. The game took a little bit longer than I thought it would but in the end I shut up Mondain for good, again. The endgame in Ultima 1 is slightly tedious, you run around from post to post getting your stats up for the final encounter and by doing so solve quests for strength. So all you're doing is traveling and killing monsters on the way which by this point is really useless since EXP is maxed out and you have no need for money anymore.

The space mini-game was simply awful, I couldn't believe how bad it was. It was also nervewracking because at first I picked the big ship with a lot of gas but no armor and I almost got shot down halfway through space ace, I had like 35 shield left on the darn thing. I managed to get back to base and get into the stronger starfighter with half as much gas and I finished it up that way. It truly was a pain, I was absolutely ecstatic to get space ace.

Plus that space thing doesn't make a bit of sense. A medieval world with some crazy futuristic technology? I'm happy RG reformed after UII and created a more streamlined medieval world for us to play in. I just don't like the idea of my character being in some kind of crazy reflective armor and running around with a blaster right out of Star Wars. He should have went all the way and made a light saber as the strongest weapon in the game :) At least I know he did something like that for UII.

I liked it when I saved the princess and she kindly informed me that I was ready for time travel. Now first off, what is a princess like that doing locked up in the castles of the supposedly benevolent kings? And where the hell does she get that information what did she take an engineering class in college or something? Talking of princesses, at one point I solved a quest and the king told me "If you are a space ace the princess will help you!" or something of the sort. So the king is basically telling me that if I want to proceed I'll have to kill his jester, a couple of his guards and run away with the princess locked up in his castle. Riiiiight. Plus the locked up princesses are all filty rich and they can somehow give me hit points and experience just like that. I have an idea how but I won't tell :D




So here I am next to my time machine. At this point I only had two gems so I couldn't use it :| When you get into it without all the gems it says "You have no idea how to use this thing".
That's funny because when you do get in with all four gems all of a sudden the hero gets a sudden surge of intelligence and immediately understands that he needs to put in all four gems. Right.





This time though I was ready for the time machine. In fact I was ready to go through hell if needed. This is the final screenshot I took of Sosaria before hoping in the time machine.

Here (upper left) you can see my final stats. I didn't max out strength because it was too much of a hassle to run around the castles again. I didn't bother about Charisma, Wisdom and Intelligence because as a fighter it didn't help me much. I was ready for Mondain.

See this is what I told you, he gets in and all of a sudden he knows what to do, but worse than that I can't actually get out even if I wanted to. I'm locked in ARGH! Man there should be some more safety features in those time machines this ain't right! What if there's a malfunction and it doesn't actually start!!? I'd be left in there to rot for all eternity is that it? I'm complaining to the manufacturer!

Here we are, face to face with the big bad dude himself. He probably thinks himself quite invincible at this point, but he has no idea what I am about to do...

VOILA! No more gem for you you son of a bitch now bring it on mano a mano I'm going to do you in BRING IT!

At this point I'm just blasting him up with my trusty Star Wars rifle and he's firing back with measly magic missiles that do like 5 points of damage. The only things that are truly dangerous in there are the darn walls, at one point I bumped into one and got hurt for like 110 points of damage! Those things are made of red hot lava I say! At one point I hit him so hard he started to backtrack and then transformed into a bat to try to get the hell away. As you could see in the first picture of this blog post it didn't work and I smoked him to ashes! SAYONARA ASSHOLE!















Voila. Funny that Lord British says that the entire realm of Sosaria would be at my service for all time henceforth. Didn't exactly work out that way eh?

All in all I enjoyed Ultima I. I actually liked Akalabeth more though, it was more focused than UI. There are some seriously tedius parts in UI such as the running around to get stat points and the space minigame. I'm still happy I took the time to go through it again, if you remember Ultima I is one of two Ultima games that I actually finished the other being Ultima III. This might actually be the last time I ever finish Ultima I which feels a bit weird. Maybe when I reach 60 or so and my life nears its end I might come back to the first game I played, to do a full circle like they say.

Next in line is Ultima II, and that game SCARES me. I will talk more about that in the first Ultima II post later on today.

Ultima I Day 1 - I -

Ah Ultima I, sure brings back a lot of memories. This might very well be the first game I ever played. Back when I was a kid my dad would jack up my character to all max attributes using a trainer and I would just run amock in the world of Sosaria. I honestly don't know how many times I killed Mondain but it must have been a lot.

I finally finished the game without a trainer in the early 90's..but by using a walkthrough :| I did the same for Ultima III. I was 10, 11 or maybe 12 years old when I did it. At the time I was pretty proud of it, thinking that finishing an Ultima without the aid of a trainer was quite the feat. Eh. I also remember being very surprised at the brevity of Ultima I.

So I remember somewhat the goals of the game. Get the four gems to put into the time machine. I just have no idea how I'm supposed to get the gems, but I guess I will have to solve a bunch of quests, rescue princesses and go in space to kill some baddies. That should net me the gems.

I started off by creating my trusty Dwarf fighter which I promptly called Shogun in honor of my dog of the same name. I'm thinking that my dog is already the greatest hero the universe has ever seen so I might as well put that heroic luck on my side and name my character after him. Even the Dwarf looks like him, a stocky well built little dude. Awesome. My dog is probably more Ranger than Fighter though but I didn't have a choice. Talking about my dog, he's currently complaining because I should be feeding him right about now. I keep telling him to give me five more minutes but he's not listening darnit.

Now I was a bit surprised at the astounding speed I was building my character up. One small little trip to the dungeon and I was already pretty strong when I came out of it. I just kept going into the dungeons and pretty soon I had a lot of money to spend so I bought weapons and armor you name it I was stacked.


Look at this dark knight to the right just missing. Logical he can't touch me I'm like a superhero. HIT AND MISS SUCKER.

Oh and am I the only one who thinks it's hilarious to be able to sink frigates with a measly axe? There's no logic in that but it's still awesome!


I already have a boat, in fact I already have an aircar and the red gem. I'm progressing very quickly at this point. I'm probably going to visit every sign in existence and visit every castle for every quest and then buy a shuttle and go do some 'Star Wars' dogfighting up in the stars. Yes I did say dogfighting go Shogun!

Akalabeth Day 1 - Final Post -

YES YES I WILL REPORT MY JOYOUS DEED TO LORD BRITISH!

Okay so I just finished the game on level 10. I will be honest with you guys, I actually liked it! I like those dungeon crawler type games, and I like 'em even more when they're simple like that. I loved being all jacked up going down the levels and putting the smackdown on the monsters. Lovely.

It was awesome to kill the balrog in one punch (or claw swipe I guess). Take that demon of hell!

So now I'm ready to tackle Ultima I after this surprisingly enjoyable trek through Akalabeth. BTW sorry for the lack of pictures but I couldn't take any because I was playing the ms-dos version (and not in dosbox). I will take some for Ultima I.

Akalabeth Day 1 - IIII -

What does he mean am I foolhardy enough to try level 2? Are you telling me that I need to restart a new character from the beginning? I thought it just scaled up automatically to 10.

Oh well, no biggie, it'll take me 5 minutes to boost my char up to 1000 points in every stat anyway. :D

Level 10 here I come!

Akalabeth Day 1 - III -

I would just like to mention that my strength, agility and stamina are all in the 800's with my wisdom and hp in the 500's.

The only thing I should have done though is to find Lord British BEFORE doing the lizard men thing because now for my first quest I need to go kill a balrog, or rather a balron :| When I played with my fighter my first quest was to kill a Carrion Crawler.

I miss that first quest now :(

Akalabeth Day 1 - II -

Man this game looks to be hard as hell. I entered a dungeon and one thing led to another I fell down like 3 traps and I had no idea how to get back up. Lovely.

Okay now I have no idea what's happening. I go in the dungeons, kill monsters, but when I go back out I'm not getting more HP or Gold so I end up running out of food. The hell? Oh no I do gain HP and I get the gold in the dungeon, logical. Okay okay let's play this thing seriously now.

I think I'll actually have to map this freaking dungeon :| Or maybe not.

Okay so I've played that game for a solid 45 minutes. At first I created a fighter with pretty good stats and played with him for a bit. It went well but eventually I started to realize the slow pace of my progression and I remembered Ophidian's comment about mages, amulets and lizard men. So I scrapped my fighter and started a mage.

First thing I did is get some amulets and cast Bad??. At first it backfired but I got it the second time. I was and still am overjoyed, it's really awesome to be a lizard my stats are awesome! On top of that I just realized that the Lizard Man's stats are STACKABLE, which means I can cast it over and over and my stats will just keep going up! I don't know if there is a time limit on being a lizard man but at the moment it does seem permanent which is awesome. In a couple of minutes (It is currently 7:18PM) I will go back to it and I will just use the amulet over and over to get my stats up real high, saving beforehand each time to make sure I don't become a toad or whatever.

Sorry about the lack of pictures, I'm playing the msdos version and it seems I can't take screenshots. Ophidian has a bunch of pictures of the game on his page if you want to check it out.

Akalabeth Day 1 - I -

Okay so I think my technique will be to keep the blog open at all times and just comment when I feel like it when playing the game. That will make for a natural sounding blog I hope.

So let's boot up the game shall we..oh just to keep you guys (and gals) in touch I'll be using Dosbox for Akalabeth, running it in Direct Draw and using the HQ3X filter. Not sure what good that will do to such an old game but we'll see. Let's start it up!

Okay just I just ran the setup and it detected my sound card (or at least the emulation of it). I had no idea I needed a sound card to play Akalabeth, are there actually sound effects in this game? Music even maybe? :| There isn't any music in UI and II so why would there be in this one?

Hey this is Ultima III's music, it was probably added at a later date, sort of like a 'remake'. Okay so here I am creating a character, it asks me what my favorite number is I type in 27 and the game crashes to desktop. Awesome, let's try this again.

And it crashes again. Okay so what is going on here? I'll check out the manual in case it is some form of copy protection, seems like a weird question to ask me.

Oh crap it seems that akalabeth doesn't run on the current version of dosbox. There is supposedly a dos remake somewhere that does work :|

I found the Dos remake. Seems to have added color to the game and some midi tunes. I'll download it and check it out.

I finally settled on the windows remake called Akalabeth 2k1. Seems nice enough, I hope there aren't too many bugs in it :)

God DAMN am I not lucky with this game or what? This thing is nearly unplayable it barely registers the keyboard for crap's sake! I'll try out that freaking dos remake version *grumbles*. Holy crap even that dos remake seems to be working funky, somehow once I buy some food the game freezes or something because I can't do anything. This is unreal can I please play this game? Someone? Please? Yep the moment I buy ANYTHING the game freezes. Awesome, simply awesome.

Okay let's try that Windows remake and jack up the keyboard sensitivy to like 10000.

Okay nothing's working I'm pissed off this sucks as all hell as ever sucked before. I'm not playing Akalabeth. It's not even an Ultima anyway grrrr.

OH crap. I managed to get it to work. After all that talk of playing the remakes in dosbox and whatnot I finally realized the akalabeth that comes on the Ultima Collection CD actually works in Windows XP simply by running the executable. Crap.

So I guess I'm off to play Akalabeth. I'll close this post for now since it's so long and convoluted.

So I've decided to try my hand at Ultima

Hey all, this is my first post on Blogger. This looks like a really awesome blog, much better than other similar sites such as myspace, xanga or livejournal. Looks clean and tidy, just like I like it :|

So yeah, this will be about Ultima and all about Ultima. I recently stumbled on Ophidian Dragon's quest to finish every Ultima game in existence one after the other and I thought it funny that someone had the same idea as I at pretty much the same time. I didn't intend to blog about it at first, in fact my goal was to end up doing a video review of each Ultima game which I would have posted on youtube and gamespot videos but after seeing Ophidian's blog I decided to try my hand at it also.

My blog will probably be quite different from his for many reasons. The main one is that I have not finished most of the Ultima games, in fact the only ones I have done are Ultima I and III. I have barely played Ultima II, V, IX and both Underworld games. I have never played the two games in the Worlds of Ultima series. I have played a lot of Ultima IV in my younger days but I never got anywhere and I tried my hand at both Ultima VI and VII in which I also never got anywhere. Finally I played a lot of Ultima VIII in the late 90's, I probably wasn't too far from the end. So when you look at my general inexperience with the series compared to Ophidian it's obvious that our blogs will be very very different.

Another difference will come from the desire to play the original versions or in fact the lack of desire from my part. To me, if I can make the game prettier and better I will. That means playing the UI remake and applying every patch possible to Ultima II,III, IV and V. In fact I'm thinking about playing the NES version of UIII instead of the PC one and hopefully the Sega Master System version of Ultima IV if I can find it. I have the console but the game might be hard to find. If I can't find it I'll just grab a copy of UIV for the NES, that one should be both easy to find and cheap to get. The logic behind this is that I already finished Ultima III on the Commodore 64 in the early 90's so it will be interesting to play another version of it and as for UIV, although I never finished it (not even close) I played it a lot as a kid so again it will be like a breath of fresh air to try my hand at another version.

Finally the other big difference will be our views on gaming. Ophidian is an old school gamer who feels like games aren't what they used to be but I disagree with that sentiment. In fact, I think Games today are better than they ever were before. I would be surprised if I found an Ultima better than something like Planescape Torment, Star Wars: Knights of the old Republic or The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It could happen, maybe when I'm done with Ultima VII I'll think of it as the best RPG ever, who knows. When I think about most genres in gaming I feel that they are all superior today to what they were 10 years ago. First person shooters, racing games, real time strategy games, fighting games etc are all better. Japanese RPGs lately haven't been as good as they were in the PS1 era but I feel that this might be about to change with the trio of games Mistwalker are going to put out for the 360. Western RPGs, although not plentiful these days I feel are quite healthy with Bioware and Bethesda at the top of the heap. All in all I am quite happy with the current state of gaming so this will affect my writings a great deal I suppose.

My interest in Ultima stems from the fact that it was my late father's favorite game series. I grew up watching him play Ultima III and as soon as I was old enough to touch the keyboard my dad put me on Ultima I. So I have a very strong nostalgic bond to the Ultima series. I didn't have a PC until 1997 though so I missed out on Ultima VI, VII and VIII at the time of their release. We had Ultima V on the Commodore 64 but the loading was brutally long and there was no freaking music so I never really played it. All in all we had Ultima I, II, III and IV. I thought II was horrible with its fluorescent colors and weird gameplay and although I liked IV it was much too complex for me to had done anything in it.

At first I didn't expect to play through Ultima I and Ultima III because I had already finished them but now I guess I'll go through them again just for old time's sake. I also didn't intend to play Akalabeth since you know...it's freaking old and horrible looking but now I guess I don't have much of a choice :) I will also try and get my hands on copies of the Worlds of Ultima games but that might be quite hard and I refuse to simply download the games without owning them so I'm not sure I'll be able to play those.

So I guess this is it, let's begin!

P.S: I understand that my English is pretty bad, especially compared to Ophidian's but bear with me English isn't my first language :)