Comments on Blogging Ultima: Ultima IX, Day 2

About Ambrosia not being a name that the Gargoyles...

2008-09-01T15:53:00.000-07:00

About Ambrosia not being a name that the Gargoyles would use: yes, it IS a named they would use. The gargoyles worship Exodus, and Ambrosia was the name of the island where Exodus resided. So obviously the gargoyles used the name as a homage to Exodus.

all this debate over the dialouge patch and the ga...

2008-02-08T17:43:00.000-08:00

all this debate over the dialouge patch and the gargoyle dome? if you want to play u9 like it was intended, you do not want the dialogue patch. it desrves to be played unmodified at least once b4 you play with the dialogue patch. my opinion of the dialogue patch is that its a bad idea.

The design of Ambrosia was indeed pretty cool. The...

2008-02-06T01:33:00.000-08:00

The design of Ambrosia was indeed pretty cool. The whole revised "Fals Prophet" plot however, that was cheap and cheaply done. Oh well.

Ah, I see what he was going for. Still, a word for...

2008-02-05T18:16:00.000-08:00

Ah, I see what he was going for. Still, a word for refuge would probably be 'terjuxark'. As follows
ter - place
jux - harm, damage
ark - hide, hiding
juxark - protect
terjuxark - A place of protection

Gargish is fairly ambiguous, but I would interpret tergres as "place of opening" or "doorway". Still, I'm glad to hear there was another intended meaning besides what I thought.

I was part of the Seer program in Ultima Online, and one of my proposed (and rejected) ideas was to play a gargoyle in-game that only spoke Gargish. I was willing to take on the task, which would be particularly problematic because you would have to use emotes to do gestures and indicate context, as spoken Gargish lacks qualifiers.

In itself, I'd call the trip to Ambrosia one of the better parts of the game. The music is really awesome (I had it as my default tune in UO) and the tie-in of the city's destruction due to pride was an interesting re-visit to the theme. The bad parts are the tying of Hythloth to Humility (why not create a dungeon called Pride?) and the relative shortness of plots in Ambroisa; the wingless revolution gets a few lines of mention but little else. I remember proposing the idea of a wingless revolution in seer chat once. One of our seers went on to be a level designer for U9. Hm...

I asked Evil Freak Dragon, who said that he intend...

2008-02-05T15:46:00.000-08:00

I asked Evil Freak Dragon, who said that he intended Baltergres to mean "refuge from evil". I agree that there are several ways to translate the name, though.

Concerning the dialogue patch... Yeah, I'm being a...

2008-02-04T12:35:00.000-08:00

Concerning the dialogue patch... Yeah, I'm being a bit nitpicky, but even in Ultima 6 the city at the other side of the world did not have a name in Gargish. (I remember they did refer to it as an English name, and a very odd one, but I can't find any references to it online.)

And if it's going to be Gargish, first you have to come up with a word meaning "city", since the original lexicon didn't include one. "urb" would fit, since Gargish is essentially simplified and shortened Latin. So for an underwater city, perhaps "desterurbmir". (Literally "below city water") Or if you object to me having the audacity of adding a word to Gargish, just "destermir", or "Underwater".

Point being, I don't see why they would call the place "bad opening"! And while the U9's original lines may be insipid and mediocre, the fan patch tends towards overstatement of old material. So I haven't really played through all the way to read it all and see what reasons they had to call it that.

You can find an extensive article on the Gargish language at the Ultima Web Archives:

http://www.uo.com/archive/

when you say deep, is it like "deep thoughts with ...

2008-02-04T05:52:00.000-08:00

when you say deep, is it like "deep thoughts with jack handy?" cuz to me depth is a lot of things. time to complete, variety, quality of design, strategies required, secrets,etc.... some games inflate their game playtime value with tedium. sometimes its random battles ala final fantasy, othertimes its too much dialouge/dialouge tree talkin. when i say deep, im meaning as a game. im not comparing it to movies or books. when a game is too much liek a movie or book, it sucks. being deep, for a game, means something a littl different. so maybe were using the word differently. im curious what games you enjoyed which you consider deep. a deep game should immerse you into it, right? all i know is i enjoy games that are immersive, and few are! or im growing out of them, or im just too smart for the developers! u9 was tolerable: i had never watched the cinemas so iplayed with that in mind to keep me goin. plus, i just had to finally finish my ultima career.