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!
1 comment:
LOL! U2 was the first computer RPG I ever played and I loved it SOOOOO much that it's weird to hear anyone talk smack about it. Somehow I just can't imagine anyone not being crazy for it, but if I look back on it, it WAS pretty nuts.
The whole "Time Bandits" timegates thing was genius, the way it turned four world-maps into MANY regional maps and kept you isolated until you were tough or rich enough to get a boat in each era. But OMG trying to get around was frustrating! I've still got my cloth map and I ought to get it framed.
Personally, I liked the different-eras structure because it allowed for some great inside jokes when you visited a town 1,000 years later. I think RG took that as far as he was interested in and then called it quits, but it's a swell idea and I'd love to see someone do it in a modern game.
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