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.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Friday, March 7, 2008
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!
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!
Thursday, March 6, 2008
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!
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!
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
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.
Saturday, February 2, 2008
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!
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!
Monday, January 28, 2008
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!
I'll see you guys then!
Saturday, September 29, 2007
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!
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!
Monday, September 10, 2007
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!
Saturday, September 8, 2007
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:
"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."
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!
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!
Friday, September 7, 2007
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!
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
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!
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!
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