Martian Dreams, Day 2

Another day, another gaming experience. To begin with, I did sucessfully find Yellin, Duprey, and Sherman, the three xplorers who look just like Companions from Ultimas previous. Sherman joined me, and the others might as well were I to ask, I guess. However, I find keeping everyone with a good supply of oxium to be annoying. I did discover that smashing "oxium geodes" provides more of the stuff, but I will eventually run low I'm afraid. Rescuing those fellows was pretty simple, and after that i headed to Olympus, where I conversed with everyone and mapped a rather large mine (but nothing compared to dungeons from Ultima VI). I was surprised to find a fair number of secrets--stuff buried in corners, or hidden in holes underneath crates. I have gotten in the habit of picking up all the random objects that I find, from wrenches to rivet guns and hand drills, learning from my Savage Empire experience that essentially everything is useful. Spector is carrying around a carpet bag full of pliers, hammers, shovels, and all kinds of other junk.

The town was fun. I had only heard of some of the people I met, such as Marie Curie, the future president Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Edison, and William Randolph Hearst, while there were a few others, like some random actress, I don't know of. To my annoyance, Hearst is willing to sell me Martian junk, but is unwilling to buy it from me! And I had collected all that stupid Martian jewelry for nothing. Andrew Carnegie is also there, and expresses sympathy for the working man. Here's a random fact: When people like Edison were inventing sound recordings, what were the most important uses they envisioned? From what I can gather, the answer is...recording dead people's last words, and making talking clocks. The oldest surviving recording, from 1878, built by a French guy on a metal cylinder, is of the latter variety.

Where was I? Oh yeah, the town. I explored another mine, got a masonic symbol from a guy who was killed by unfriendly worms, killed a huge quantity of the same unfriendly worms, and gathered radium, eventually heading out and talking to a guy in Hellas, far southeast, about dream machines. There is one such machine in Olympus, and I got the impression I was supposed to repair it with the assitance of Edison and with some radium as a power source...Apparently not, though, since I could find nowhere to install a required panel. Thus I will have to continue with a few of the other threads of plot I have available:
-Get the power on Mars working again
-Go to the oxium mine that I was given the map to
-Fill the canals with water and use a barge to transport some iron
-Yell at Nelly Bly, the reporter who is following me, because her information is far less helpful than Jimmy Malone's was in the last game.

Tomorrow I will probably head off to have a look at the power distribution thingies in the northeast. This game may go faster than I anticipated, much like Savage Empire. I am keeping my eyes wider for non-plot related things to do in this game, though! I have also made my first backup, in case something goes horribly wrong...

Oh, I read someone's comment about my blog saying that they "can't wait" for Ultima VII, but I am going on with the spinoffs now. Sorry about that. But Underworld is much more famous, and there's lots of cool stuff to talk about with it. I think I also have what will be a brief, hopefully amusing surprise just after Ultima VII, too.