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.