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.