Blogging Ultima

Fake Ultima 7, Day 5/6

2010-05-05T18:26:00.000-07:00

I'm back! I've played a few more hours of SNES Ultima VII the past couple of days. Among other things, I tracked down and destroyed the sphere and I'm currently--literally, right at this very moment--in a dungeon beneath Serpent's Hold where I am waiting for my magic points to regenerate enough to cast several Unlock Magic spells. This version of the game only has a few of the tunes from the original game, so I am listening to an endless loop of the music I associate with the taverns. The MIDI you can download has a particular name, but it's not coming to mind. I was sad that the Fellowship music doesn't seem to be present, which was always my favorite from Ultima VII. I even taught myself to play part of it on the piano, an amusing experience since I had not otherwise played piano :-P

I am getting off topic. Most of the past few gaming sessions have been spent in dungeons. It seems I never give up hope that I'll find something cool in them! I am specifically targeting the dungeons for which maps don't exist. However, I am beginning to understand why maps don't exist...For example, in the Britannian Sewers, I worked my way to the third level or so and all I get is a door with a brick wall behind it. In fact, the Guardian's head pops up and for some reason expresses his disappointment (see screenshot). I would have enjoyed hearing the Guardian voice from Ultima VII say that, actually. There's also some kind of system of caves by which multiple dungeons are connected, but I have such low confidence that the dungeons will be worthy of exploration that I'm loathe to figure it out.

I just took a break to play the game and discovered that instead of finding my way to the cube generator, I seem to have found my way to the Fellowship Meditation Retreat--And what an un-relaxing retreat it is, full of mongbats and giant spiders firing yellow spheres and green blobs, respectively. This seems to mean I need to delve back into the dungeon. Argh! I should probably create a map this time around...

I have attached some screenshots. These include the stupid brick wall (maybe I should have used a powder keg on it?), the destroyed sphere generator and a conversation with Zorn. Why Zorn? Well, I talked to him recently and it's probably worth seeing how the conversation system has changed. I feel like, but am not certain, that a bunch of the graphics were taken from the SNES Ultima VI. Especially the potted plants and cauldrons, which look suspiciously familiar! I'll need to include those next time.

Fake Ultima 7, Day 3/4

2010-05-01T20:25:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm back. I played an awful lot of Ultima 7 SNES the past couple of days, and a high degree of disappointment is beginning to set in. I feel like the broken-ness that plagued Serpent Isle and Ultima VII is showing itself in this release as well. I say this because I spent about an hour wandering around Dungeon Stonegate yesterday, and eventually had to give up and load an old saved state because the dungeon appears to be insoluble. Understanding why this was required entails some understanding of the absurdity of the SNES Ultima VII dungeon system: When you enter a dungeon, you are teleported to a beginning spot in a maze and are unable to exit until you find a usually-weakling boss, kill it, and retrieve the "dungeon key" which can then be used on a particular kind of door, teleporting you out of the dungeon. Most of the dungeons are fairly small and repetitive, but they frequently have puzzles including levers, switches that look exactly like Ultima VI's wall switches, and even Zelda-esque holes in walls created via powder kegs. This is all well and good, except a decent percentage of the levers and switches don't seem to do anything at all. There are also keys, most of which look identical, and each of them goes to a particular type of door. Sadly, it seems that keys don't even exist for some of the doors in Stonegate (also true of Conceit, and probably other dungeons). Sigh!

The other thing I don't enjoy about the SNES Ultima 7 dungeons is something that was also an issue with the dungeons of Ultima IV and before: There's just no reason to go in except for quest items. I spent another hour earlier in the week exploring dungeon Conceit, and found nothing except junk--small amounts of gold, potions, and weapons already available from monsters. One of the fun aspects of Ultima VI and to a greater extent VII was that you never knew quite what you would find hidden in the depths! In this game I've become leery of doing any exploration because I might be wasting time and mapping.

I attached some screenshots. One is of the sea navigation system in Ultima VII--Hope you like selecting destinations from a map! Another features the Time Lord with some special purple tiles created just for him. Another includes a stone harpy from the dungeon that replaced Sutek's castle, and the remaining image is of the ethereal monster, which brings to mind another irritant: One of the townsfolk in Moonglow commented that Penumbra had been asleep forever andno one knew how to wake her, but maybe I could figure it out! Well, guess what? The provision shop sells an "awaken" potion! I guess no one thought of that? Anyway, they sold it for 1000 gold, which is pretty absurd given that most monsters drop only a handful of gold coins, maybe 3 or 4. Or else a turkey or a lockpick or one of several fairly crappy weapons. Fortunately, just like Ultima III, you can engage in absurdity to load up on the gold by repeatedly casting "lift" on a big rock near Minoc, fetching a stack of gold, entering a house, exiting, and repeating. That's how I earned enough for the potion and for the boat, which required 3000 gold.

As a final note, I was vaguely aware of the guy on a forum somewhere playing through all the Ultimas with extra screenshots. I seem to recall there were also some blogs for Zelda and for Dragon Quest, but I am not sure if they made it all the way. There's also a masochist out there who is going to play every RPG, and insists on avoiding save states, which seems impossible for some of those early, poorly balanced games where you are wiped out by a tough monster as soon as you enter the dungeon. If life were D&D I think he'd have a higher constitution than I.

I think the blog project the world *REALLY* needs is someone to write about playing every single Tetris-esque game ever made!

Fake Ultima VII, Day 1/2/3

2010-04-29T19:26:00.000-07:00

Well, I did it. I began the SNES Ultima VII. My opinion is pretty torn. On the one hand, it''s much less fun a game to play than the original; it feels as if someone took the basic plot outline of Ultima VII and stapled it on top of a fairly typical console action-RPG. Here''s some of the similarities to the original and some of the differences:

1. Most of the monsters and character figures are the same as on the PC, with some strange exceptions. There are bouncing green heads as monsters in addition to the skeletons, scorpions, rats, headlesses and trolls. Similarly, the generic robed man has been replaced with a robed man with no hood, and the generic grungy townsperson is now a same grungy townsperson but with blond hair!

2. The world geography is quite similar, but on a much smaller scale. Most of the dungeons have shifted in position or ceased to exist altogether. Unlike the PC game, the dungeons are on a distinct map from the overworld (more like Ultima VI). All of the dungeons have been completely replaced inside; none of the maps are even close. They are much more combat focused than the original, with monsters being generated even if you walk only a few feet away! The puzzles at least so far are nearly nonexistent, besides the ocassional lever or object that needs to be lifted to reveal...well, another lever!

3. The towns are all there, but reorganized. The conversations are also generally there, but dramatically truncated, and most of the quests have been shifted around. For example, Skara Brae''s quest is largely handheld. Mordra allows you to speak to people; Trent gives you a music box; Rowena gives you a ring; Trent builds a cage; Rudolfo (!) attacks you; you put his bones in a cage; put the cage in a well; use the potion Caine gives you.

4. The game does not seem very dramatic at all. A typical example if Owen the shipwright--instead of killing himself, he just expresses mild annoyance that he won't get a statue of himself.

I suppose today''s entry is just a brief introduction. I have been a bit of a lazy bum and not captured screenshots...maybe next time. My next entry will describe some of the things I find entertaining and some of the things I find highly irritating. Overall, I don''t think the game''s horrible reputation is all that deserved. It feels a lot like Runes of Virtue, actually--less serious, more action-oriented, but still with a certain amount of charm. The downside is that it's a port of a very different sort of game, and it suffers badly for the comparison.

Ultima VII again, sort of!

2010-04-25T11:16:00.000-07:00

Recently I had a sudden inspiration: It might be fun to blog an experience of playing that infamous Ultima VII port for the Super NES. I remember trying it once and hating it, but at the same time being eager to see just how different the game is as you go further into it. It is interesting to me how the Ultima III and IV for the NES were in some ways superior to their PC cousins, yet the SNES Ultima VII was so much worse. I assume it has to do with the gap in time between their respective releases--NES graphics are obviously superior to the Apple II graphics, even if I always thought the NES versions were irritatingly cartoonish. I also recall how Ultima III for the NES had a little bit of additional game balancing by forcing you to get the gold and silver picks before you could go dig up the exotics. It's been too long since I played the NES version of Ultima IV to remember any major differences there. Well, besides the toilets in the hotels!

Anyway, I think I'll start that sometime soon. It should prove amusing. In the comments someone asked for my e-mail address. It seems like there ought to be a way to send a message to me through Blogger that provides your email such that only I can see it...but I can't find any such method, so you can send me an email at zacwbond@hotmail.com. I'm leery of getting new messages from spambots, but on the other hand I get so much spam already it won't matter much.

Defunct?

2010-02-19T05:53:00.000-08:00

A commenter recently asked if this blog was defunct. I guess there's two answers:

1. Yes, because the stated objective was completed long ago. Consequently, there is nothing compelling me to come back and add posts.

2. No, because I remain alive and periodically have the urge to do Ultima-related stuff. See the replay of Underworld.

I hope my non-answer was useful :-) I have some other possible blog topics I could do. I tried doing one on the books I have been reading, for example, but it proved too time consuming and too reminiscent of schoolwork.

I do need to go in and delete all the spam comments on this blog, though. SO there's at least one more thing to do!

UW, again

2009-12-05T20:48:00.000-08:00

Turns out I had a backup copy of UW in, not shockingly, a subdirectory called "backup" in the UW directory on my laptop. I think I had simply corrupted some files or something because the backup played fine. Playing as a mage wasn't terribly different from playing as a fighter, though--except that virtually every skill is obviated by magic. The exception is combat! Most of the offensive spells are ranged, and the others like flame wind and sheet lightning seem kind of random in their effectiveness. One thing to keep in mind during the game is that a decent number of the harder quests can be ignored until later in the game, when they become almost comically easy. My favorite example is Rodrick, whom I ignored until I'd fully explored levels 5 and 6. Then I took him out with two fireballs. The gazer in the mines was also very easy with a couple of lighning bolts.

Here's a few random thoughts for some of the spells:
--detect monster, much like the tracking skill, seems pointless when there's a save game feature. The rune of warding also seems pretty dubious.

--You get a lantern early enough in the game that there's not much need for most of the light and night-vision spells, unless of course you want to ditch the lantern. I might have late in the game when I had to lug around those talismans, but instead I just dumped them by the level 8 staircase.

--poison could be a good spell, but it's too hard to tell what its effect on the target is.

--Remove trap and the equivalent skill are the most worthless in the game. I can't even remember any traps that they worked on.

--By contrast resist fire may be the best spell in the game because fireballs are so incredibly powerful and those fire elemental in level 7 really blast you with them.

--Open is of limited utility when the only doors that open with it are ones you can bash to bits with your fist anyway. The same goes for picklock as a skill.

--gate travel could have made life easier in a few places (like going all the way back up to see Shak) but I never really bothered to use it.

--I could have sworn there was part of the game where telekinesis was required, but apparently I was wrong. Must be remembering most of the other Ultimas :-P

--ally and summon are cool in concept, but it's a bit of a nuisance that the creatures don't start attacking immediately. It's also kind of pointless since they attack you after beating the enemy.

--invisibility doesn't seem to be all it's cracked up to be. Monsters don't seem to have much trouble seeing me.

--reveal is a weird one. Is there anything invisible out there? It's hard to know where to cast it unless you know something is invisible!

--Fly is very helpful in navigating big areas quickly, especially on level 8 when I want to go back to the stairs.

-flame wind and sheet lightning seem kind of inconsistent. I enjoyed using flame wind to blow away a gazer and four goblins during the trek to the key of courage, but sometimes it didn't seem to do much of anything.

--Sheet lightning and tremor were even less effective. I don't think the few times I used them that they hurt anybody!

--roaming sight is a lot of fun but very hard to control.

This time I also played as a mace user, but there's a lack of great maces. Maybe I should play as a ranged weapons user instead! That might be impossible. lol, or maybe unarmed!

As I mentioned a year or two ago, when I first wrote about the game, the thing I wish most were different is that the major quest items, the talismans, are almost all useless. I don't know exactly what I'd have them do, but it's annoying to lug around a bottle of wine I can't even open.

Enough ranting! I enjoyed replaying the game. I think I'm going to go amuse myself with roaming sight. I can get the same sort of effect from the Underworld map viewer out there, but it's not as fun because roaming sight also shows the items and creatures.

UW

2009-11-09T20:29:00.000-08:00

I just spent about an hour and a half searching google to no avail, when I decided I should use the blog instead! I was feeling the urge to play some Underworld as a mage for the first time, but DosBox fails. The graphics on the "looking glass productions" screen are totally garbled, but the "Ultima Underworld" with the flaming letters looks fine. The next screen, with journey onward etc. does not appear at all. The sound works great and I can even select the intro and hear (but not see) my dream and subsequent visit to Britannia.

I haven't played the game or, as I recall, changed any settings since my blogging back in 2007. It's very strange that it spontaneously quit working. Any suggestions out there? I also brought the game to a different PC (I wanted to play UW on my 28 inch monitor just to enjoy the absurdity size mismatch) and had the same problem with v0.73 of DosBox as I had with 0.72 on the laptop. Perhaps the game itself is corrupted. Too bad the CD is a few hundred miles away at present!

Kind of sad I might not be able to play the game again. For what it's worth, though, UW2 works fine.

Sigh! 9.

2009-10-18T16:18:00.000-07:00

It's finally that time! Finally time, that is, to say some words about Ultima IX. The decade since the game's release has softened my opinion of it quite a bit. I'm going to zip through some of my biggest complaints about the game and at the same time mention the way in which my opinion has gotten softer over the years with respect to each issue. I'll start by mentioning the most-voiced complaints, ones which I can't say much to soften. First, the game is extremely buggy. I have no doubt this will unleash a torrent of comments saying "weird, I never had any problems" but I think such problem-less folk are in the minority. For me, on three different systems I've used over the years, there were frequent crashes to the desktop, especially in the Stygian Abyss and in Covetous. The game has the feel of a rush job, even though it spent something like five years in development; the multiple patches (even an unofficial patch!) help a lot, but are imperfect. I don't really care about bugginess in my overall view of the game (I try to think of what a non-crashing game would be like when I give these overviews) but I need to acknowledge that the quality was very low--Ultima VIII had serious gameplay problems, but I think there weren't so many complaints about crashing. The other main complaint is one I tend to dismiss--that it's too slow. All I can say is that it's not too slow anymore! Time heals all slowness issues, though I have to say their choice of the dead-end Glide API over DirectX definitely mirrors the old Voodoo memory management system from Ultima VII days..In short, Origin went a direction different from the rest of the world without initially realizing it, and now it's a bit of a pain to get U9 working perfectly. The Stygian abyss semi-cut scene with Lord British fighting Blackthorn and the earthquakes in the caves of Covetous are pretty much ruined by the need to repeat them over and over due to crashes, whether or not I used the Glide wrapper that was so effective with other game problems.

In any case, as far as the actualy game is concerned, there's really only a few things I don't like, but they're pretty major things! First, the world feels extremely tiny and very static. The sprawling city of Britain has shrunk, and I don't feel as if there are many landmarks surviving from the previous games. The towns seem completely off (especially Moonglow and Yew), and there's a strong since that each of them is just a set-piece, entirely disconnected from the rest of the world. They cities also seem utterly disconnected from the history of the world, especially the island of Minoc and Valoria, the city of like six people around a volcano that hadn't previously existed. The fact that most of the cities are on islands that you can't reach until certain points of the game adds to the sense of disconnectedness. The lack of some of the features we've come to expect from Ultimas such as NPC schedules and sometimes-over-dense conversation trees are also absent. In summary, Britannia of Ultima IX feels like set pieces populated by cardboard characters--almost the feeling I got wandering around the thousands of randomly-generated cities in Daggerfall (except in Daggerfall, most of the NPCs were also LOOKED like cardboard cut-outs). You could also compare the characters to those in Ultima Underworld I, most of whom were also generics.

I appreciated the efforts that went into referencing earlier games, but some of them felt like they were simply stapled on top of a game that was basically complete. Ultima IX was one of the only games to acknowledge that Ultima II took place on earth! I don't understand how the British museum managed to find Khorgin's fang, though. More absurdly, the skull of Mondain was sitting there! Paraphrasing Erethian from the Forge of Virtue, "I thought someone let that artifact slip into a volcano..." These 'skin deep' references to earlier games are good, but the big ones you would expect (cities and characters having some relationship to their past incarnations) are mostly absent.

So what do I like about the game? Well, the plot's pretty neat. It's no really as 'epic' as I might want in the final game of the series, but the whole idea of city-corrupting anti-virtue pillars popping up out of the ground is cool for several reasons. First, it ties back to earlier games and puts the shrines to good use. Second, it conveniently sets up a nonlinear dynamic, whereby you could travel around the world and fix each pillar whenever you wanted. And third, it provides a sense of graduated accomplishment, where each act you complete changes the area where you completed it. Serpent Isle was pretty good about this--when you did stuff, there were consequences. The plot as used in Ultima IX does a good job with the first idea, barely attempts the second, and tries for the third but falls short because cities of cardboard remain cities of cardboard even if the generic characters say nicer things. I've read the famous Bob White plot but I don't think the plot change is really the big problem--that plot overlaid with the game as it stands would still be problematic. The re-use of the original cut scenes for other purposes, does grate with me, though, especially the absurd summoning of Pyros to gain entry into the Stygian abyss. Ridiculous!

The visuals, on the other hand, were pretty awesome. I remember looking out over the ocean near the shrine of Compassion and thinking, "Wow." There are a few places like that in the game where you can experience a sense of Britannia in way you only might have imagined in previous games. And in spite of all the flaws and bugs, the game's pretty fun to play, with some cool puzzles and awesome, if misplaced, special effects. The real complaint I have is that it 'could have been' so much better, and I feel like the series went out with a whimper instead of a bang. The last few paragraphs seem really bitchy compared to my claim in the first sentence that my opinion has softened, but you should read all the complaints as sighs of regret rather than cries of anger.

So that's all I have in my head on Ultima IX. Sorry it took FOUR MONTHS to write this! I actually wrote part of it, shelved it for a few weeks, wrote a little more, shelved it, etc. until I reached this absurd point. However, this isn't the end because I still need to take some photos of the lovely crossbow Lord British sent me quite some time ago! Then I guess that will wrap up the blog. I have the strong desire to replay Ultima Underworlds I and maybe II as a mage (I never made much use of magic in those games!), but I'm not sure I'll blog about it when I do or not.

As a side note, I seem to have been spelling Khorgin's Fang wrong all this time because the only hits I get in Google are my own blog! But I trust everyone knows what I mean :-)

Till next time!

-Zac

U8 / ROV

2009-05-31T13:55:00.000-07:00

So it seems I'm not going to make my deadline, as planned last month, to finish U9 by today. But I am not upset; I'll try to do it this week. Still, it's good to squeeze U8 in here while it's on my mind!

As I've always said, the Ultima series kind of went out with a sputter. The way I see it, there are two issues at hand--First, the desire to take the series in a new direction and increase its appeal to a wider audience. Second, the propensity for the games being rushed and/or interrupted by other issues. To my mind, the first is worse, but the second is more depressing. We see elements of the second clearly in the second half of Serpent Isle, where everything just seems to fall apart with clear hooks for a much grander plot left in but unutilized. The random bugs and problems that occur in that game also seem to my mind symptoms.

Ultima VIII suffers a lot from this as well, from the infuriating jumping system (before the patch) and the absurd quest in which you are sent to the birthplace of Moriens, which doesn't even exist (before the patch). Most of these problems can, well, be corrected by the patch! I think Ultima VIII's bigger problem--and importantly, not one shared by Ultima IX--is the desire to go in the new direction towards a more action oriented gaming experience. You can't fix that via a patch!

But I'm getting ahead of myself. What were some of the neat ideas about Ultima VIII? Well, I liked the fact that Pagan is an island and thus the rest of its world is basically unknown. The plot is also fairly creative, with the elemental Titans each having distinct personalities and a distinct style of magic. I also enjoyed the shift of emphasis; in the earlier games, the goal is always directly attached to Britannia in some fashion, and is basically finished by the end of the game. Ultima VII was the first to have an uncertain ending, since the black gate's destruction did not also destroy the Guardian, but the immediate existential threat is gone. By contrast, Ultima VIII is mostly about getting off Pagan and at its end really nothing is resolved except for the almost incidental fact that you liberated Pagan, for better or for worse, from its elemental overlords.

So the question comes...how did the design choice mess up what could have been a good game, and how was this made even worse by the lack of testing and general sense of being rushed that pervades the last games? I can point to a few things I really didn't like about Ultima VIII...First, there was a heavy emphasis on the smoothness and realism of its graphics, which produced severe restraints on the possible variety. That's why we end up with, what, only eight or nine distinct monsters? How many did Ultima VII have, by comparison? What strikes me as even more disappointing is that I didn't think the graphics were that impressive. Everything seems dull, gray, and blurry. NPCs are particularly smudgy, and the absence of character portraits robs them of the distinctiveness that otherwise they would have had.

Ultima VIII is also short. Much of the game seems to have been torn out, including an exciting-sounding jaunt through an underwater city to find the Tear of Seas. It seems the game instead is padded with inane jumping puzzles and obstacle courses that while amusing in small doses, get old fast. The worst are probably the sinking-stone puzzles or the impossible "floating rock" puzzles associated with Stratos--they even have the old platform game standby, floating rocks that fall when you stand on them! Oy. I don't know to what degree these aspects were conceived of to begin with, but they feel like ideas that were added later merely to fill out the game which otherwise would take only a few hours to complete.

I don't feel like I have much to say otherwise. I don't like being too bitchy, and this entire post is bitchy, lol. But it's hard not to complain about Ultima VIII given what went before, even though it does seem to have some pretty intense partisans out there in favor of it. I can't even do what I will probably do in my Ultima IX discussion--talk about how the game could have been a lot better--because I think Ultima VIII's problems arose from some pretty fundamental design choices and I can't guess how a game based on its premise might have been otherwise.

On a more positive note, I'd like to stick in a comment about Runes of Virtue! I'm not sure how positive or negative my playing of those games came across, but overall I enjoyed them. They felt like a clever mix of elements from the first Zelda game and Lolo-type puzzles, plus a lot of humor tossed in. I still can't believe there was a pie factory. I also enjoyed the fact that ROV2 was so clearly an improvement on ROV1; I don't think there was anything at all that I missed from the first game. I guess that's the advantage of re-using engines! It's like the first and second Underworld games--there was nothing in UW1 that I missed in UW2, really. Sometimes I have wondered if some of the Ultima games might have been better had they been created with older engines; then again, half the excitement of a new game was seeing how Brittannia a new design.

Anyway, one downside of the way I wrote this blog is that I didn't experience some of the more innovative features of Runes of Virtue. I didn't need the save-game feature thanks the the emulator, and I wasn't really able to enjoy the game link multiplayer feature. In fact, I didn't even realize it had a save feature; evidently it saves to battery at every screen instead of having an explicit means of saving. The ROV series' team lead, Dr. Cat (whom fans might recognize for his various cameos as characters in Ultima games), posted a helpful comment to this effect to one of my blog entries:

http://bloggingultima.blogspot.com/2007/07/runes-of-virtue-day-4.html

U7s

2009-05-19T15:18:00.000-07:00

Hello, world.

The best way to start an Ultima VII blog is probably by answering a recent question--what happens when you start if you don't have a mouse? As I recall, Iolo whispers to you advising you to purchase one. It's kind of an amusing and rare fourth wall moment.

Over and above any of the other games, Ultima VII is far and away the most immersing, in my opinion. It results from a combination of factors, many of which derived from earlier games. An obvious example is the NPC scheduling, which originated in Ultima V but by VII is massively expanded upon to include very detailed NPC activities. Upon first playing the game, it is pretty amusing just to wander around town and observe people going about their business--children playing tag, cooks baking or filling pots with mysterious green sludge, bureaucrats dropping letter openers and other sundry junk at different locations around their offices. I especially like the way NPCs react to the weather, opening shutters and making comments. The size and detail of the game world also aids immersion--from the wide assortment of different kinds of trees to the random corpses in the forest with magic items and the caves with imaginary walls. You can, and I think many of us did, just spend hours wandering the terrain, playing with the interactive objects, and collecting treasure from the endless streams of enemies (especially in the Great Forest, where I tended to hide my booty in the mysterious wisp castle full of books). There are also plenty of little details that I appreciated--the way your companions leave you or even attack you if you steal too much, or the way NPCs react when you move objects while you are invisible.

Other aspects of the game were a bit less popular. At first I was sad at the lack of typed conversations, but I have to admit it improved believability since characters no longer say "I don't know anything about that" to obvious queries. The most disparaged aspect of the game was the combat, and it's understandable considering your companions' propensity for killing you with their weapons (particularly anyone with a firedoom staff--ye gads!). It's true that there was no strategy involved, but frankly I found the older strategic combat tedious, and the fact that the game freezes when you open up your inventory makes up for it at least a little bit, since it's possible to take a breather and change strategy mid-course. Probably even more disliked was your companions' incessant whining for food, which I have to say got pretty annoying. It seems like it would not have been too difficult for your party members to feed themselves with whatever is available! I guess maybe the designers didn't want them eating your special food or something, but surely there could have been a way. Interface-wise, the randomly reorganizing inventory objects proved very frustrating, especially with respect to the inevitable Gigantic Bag O' Keys That All Look Similar. I suppose saving the exact location of every item in any container might have been challenging, but at least the game could have displayed them in some coherent order.

But that's about all the grips I have. The leap between Ultima VII and Ultima VI was at least as giant as the Ultima V to Ultima VI leap, which itself was very noticible. Even today I still am fond of the graphics of Ultima VII, which seem to have just the right mix of sharpness and detail--Everything was bigger in Ultima VIII, for example, but NPC faces and such just looked like smudges. They are smudges in Ultima VII too, but since they are also smaller it seems more appropriate. I also find the Ultima VII soundtrack to be perhaps the most memorable of any of the games. Unlike Ultima VI, each location has distinctive music, and unlike Ultima VIII the tunes are very individual and it doesn't feel like a movie soundtrack, to the point that I can enjoy listening to the music (as I am right now!) outside of the context of the game. LOL, I can even play part of the Fellowship Theme on the piano. Too bad all the recordings of this stuff seem to be MIDIs (even the nice soundtrack CD).

So now let's move on to the other side of the coin--Ultima VII Part 2: The Serpent Isle. It's amazing to me that originally Serpent Isle was conceived of as its own game--That would have been a truly gargantuan effort to play through. On the other hand, I would have enjoyed being able to equip my party myself! It always struck me as absurd that you show up in Britannia with some of the companions wearing no shirt! Or at least I think Shamino isn't. This is one of a wide variety of minor but noticeable problems that crop up in the game: It'd never clear what exactly the Ice Wine replaced; the serpent teeth owned by the Mages in Moonshade seem to just magically appear; after Monitor is destroyed Harnaa talks like nothing happened; etc. I attribute these problems, most of which occur late in the game, to its rushed delivery, a problem that also resulted in many issues with Ultimas VIII and IX and lots of other games.

But let's focus on the things I like! Serpent Isle took the 'real-worldness' of the game to greater heights in a few ways. Most obvious are the gigantic and very attractive character portraits; more subtle is the fact that the portraits largely look like the figures on-screen! On a related note, only rarely is the same figure used to represent different people in the same town, even though this entailed a large number of new types of bodies. The inventory paper-dolling was also very nice, and I was a big fan of the overall design of Fawn with its crisscrossing walkways overhead and so on.

I also appreciated the fact that the world changes upon y our interaction with it, sometimes for better or for worse. Ultima VII and earlier games always bugged me a bit because it was uncommon for someone to notice that you finished anything; an extreme example is the fellow who tells you to retrieve Lord British's crown in Ultima V and doesn't notice that you've returned with it. In Serpent Isle, however, even random people notice things you've done, including new conversation wordings that arise after your become a knight to the wholesale destruction of the towns by your companions. The world is decidedly non-static.

The Guardian...In general, I'm positive. His introduction was pretty impressive, speaking to you from a computer monitor! I loved how he'd make random comments in Ultima VII, especially. He's threatening yet also foolish, so some of the oddities of his plans didn't bother me much. Ultima VII was an especially effective presentation of him, because you only slowly learn the truth over time and it presents a fun mystery. The same is true in Serpent Isle, where you arrive to chase Batlin only to discover that what's going on is vastly more significant than chasing down one guy, even if I get a bit muddled on a few of the details of how the order and chaos serpents ended up where they are and how it is that particular actions solve the problem. The storyline in Serpent Isle was brilliant, tying an already epic quest (stopping the Guardian from destroying the Universe, more or less) with extensive or minor references to very many of the previous games, producing the sense of continuity that I loved so much playing the game.

The downside of such an effort is that it's hard to follow up on; there's the sense that the next game must necessarily be as epic, but in a lot of ways Pagan is non-epic and requires very pragmatic choices.

A few words about the add-ons! I consider Forge of Virtue excellent. It was coherent, the quests were fun, and it tied itself into the story of Ultima despite not strictly relating to the plot at hand (which is good; it needs to be self-sufficient). Erethian was a lot of fun to talk to. Silver seed also had a lot of fun quests, and the notable advantage of variety. Unfortunately, being structured as a time travel adventure leads to some confusing questions (where is this place in the modern-day Serpent Isle? Did planting the silver seed actually accomplish anything?) so plot-wise I liked it a bit less. I also got the sense that it was more of a rush job--which is the sense I get from Serpent Isle overall.

To end this meaty post, I'll just toss out some of my most memorable moments in the two Ultima VII's. There's plenty of them to go around, so I'm sure to forget a few:

-The situation of the Mages, comic but sad.
-Almost every aspect of the Skara Brae quest
-That strange serpent-shaped landmass on Ambrosia
-Destroying any of the generators
-Confronting Batlin with the Cube.
-Shattering the daemon mirror on the Isle of Fire

-The Mountains of Freedom, especially the dream-like sequence where a woman is killed by her nightmare and a man is struck by lightning after you put flowers on a corpse nearby
-The test in Furnace
-Confronting Rabinrath in the dream world
-Shamino and Beatrice
-Confronting Batlin and your companions' speeches
-Speaking to the dead Heirophants

There's plenty more. These are probably why the game has so much replay value, besides the fact that you can pretty much ignore the plot and have a great deal of fun exploring and interacting.

That's enough for today. I still have a few games to go! See you next time.

UW

2009-04-13T15:37:00.001-07:00

I apologize for disappointing the person who was enthusiastic about hearing my thoughts on Ultima VII, because today's post is going to be devoted to Ultima Underworld! Not one, but both.

It's hard to remember now, but by far the most remarkable thing about the original Ultima Underworld was its free-flowing, smooth movement. It's hard to exaggerate how game-changing this was, pun intended, in terms of the variety of things you can do and ways of looking at the world. In the older Ultimas, where you had first person perspectives but were limited to "block by block" motion, the environment felt constrained. Even though Ultima Underworld's maps are small, the fact that you can wander freely throughout makes them seem enormous most of the time, especially considering the random secrets you find lying about. One of my favorite examples is in level three with the Lizard Men. One of the quests you must go on is to fetch the bones of Osaka--and it feels like a difficult quest to an out-of the way spot. Yet if you load up a map viewer and just look around the level, it seems horribly claustrophobic and small, and Osaka's bones seem literally within sight of the Lizardman who asked you to retrieve them! Somehow, when playing the world seems much larger and intricate. I feel that's a consequence of the challenge involved in getting anywhere, the ability to swim, the dark and opressive lighting, and the mood set through some of my favorite music in the series.

What's also exciting is the variety of ways in which you can play Ultima Underworld, due to the wide array of skills available. That also greatly adds to its replay value, because each type of play style results in a different experience. The 7th level, where magic can't be used, was certainly a breeze for me since I as usual had mostly eschewed magic! However, I expect other parts of the game would benefit for a more magic-savvy character, especially since at many points magic obviates the need for other skills such as lore and swimming. I have also never attempted to play the game as an expert in ranged weapons or fist-fighting, but it might be worth a try.

Ultima Underworld is highly divorced from the story of the rest of the series--you are captured by a Baron you've never heard of and have to save a Britannia that is unaware of your presence from a monster you never hear of again. This fact has its pros and cons; personally, I think it adds excitement because the game doesn't have to meet expectations with respect to characters and locations, and there is more surprise. Also, as any fan of almost any franchise knows, trying to retrofit the story to what we already know about the history of Britannia is entertaining all by itself. I particularly enjoy trying to determine the year of the events based on the brief clues provided by characters in the game, although sometimes these seems a bit inconsistent!

Some parts of Underworld don't fair so well in the end. I think the bartering system is overall fairly weak, and almost no characters in the game ever seem to have anything I actually want to trade for besides the occasional required quest item. I also find that, although every level of the abyss has its own personality, that fact seems to overshadow a unifying sense of place; that is, every level could practically be its own world or even a separate dungeon. I'm not sure how I feel about the combat system. It was pretty fun to run, dodge, run, dodge, but it's hard to tell if and when you're in range of your opponent, or when you are in his range. The fact that the 2-D opponents also move in a jumpy manner can also be confusing. To round off my small stack of complaints, in spite of being designed for free flowing movement, the world seems awfully box-like to me. In some places this makes sense since people tend to construct with boxes, but I enjoy the more natural seeming environments and wish there were more of them. Oh, and one more thing--I wish more of the virtue talismans actually did anything! The taper of sacrifice, the sword and the shield are quite nice...the bottle of wine and the standard of honor? Not so much.

So this brings me to about the end of my Underworld I comments! As usual I'll pick a few memorable moments, though there aren't a whole lot that stand out in Underworld I. Playing the flute for the cup of wonder is pretty interesting, as is that mad dash for the key of courage. To me, the Lizardman level is the best in the game, though it's tough to explain why. Whenever I think of Ultima Underworld, that's what comes to mind. And of course, there's re-burying Garamon, fighting off Tyball, and tossing away all your useful (and sometimes useless) tools in the abyss.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Ultima Underworld II when I played through it; I remembered liking it, but I didn't quite remember how fun exploring the wide array of worlds was. Not a whole lot changed from the original Underworld, but all the changes struck me as positive. Conversations are a lot more useful, and there's a much stronger sense of having an impact on the world, from the slow decay of Lord British's castle and the murders committed therein to the fact that you can free a friendly troll in the goblin tower, and feel both amused and depressed as he slaughters all the goblins who had been harassing you. There's also a certain bizarreness to the whole experience of playing--no one seems to notice that you literally just walk out of a wall and into their home, a fact that's especially glaring in Killorn.

In terms of atmosphere, I'd call Underworld II perhaps the best in the series. Playing this game can be a very depressing experience due to the overwhelmingly oppressive atmosphere virtually everywhere in the game, from the lonely wasteland of the ice caverns to the forgotten irrelevance of Killorn Keep or the emptiness of the Scintillus Acadamy. This all reaches a head in the Tomb of Praecor Loth, where you're forced to fight with the three companions of the dead king, who manage to be utterly self-centered in their unwavering loyalty. It would be extremely sad if the combat weren't so painful! The constant theme of the Guardian destroying everything ties all these worlds together, aided by a soundtrack in which the game theme is reapeated in a variety of ways throughout each realm.

Underworld II is also notable for its variety of in-jokes and game references, from the fake version of Akalabeth in which you fight stick men in the ethereal void to the random comment by Mayor Patterson that he found a key from "the days of Minax" or, on a related note, the comic references to Mondain having a nice wife by Pracecor Loth's wizard. Finally, Ultima Underworld II features one of only two references that I'm aware of to the World of Ultima series; you see yourself on Mars in a crystal ball in the Ice Caverns (the other is Spark referencing the dinosaurs of Eodon in Ultima VII). It also includes a forward reference to Dupre's death in Serpent Isle and even provides an item for that same game--assuming you do something totally unanticipated while playing by speaking to goblins you had dealt with in the beginning of the game towards the end.

In terms of memorable moments, Underworld II is pretty chock full of them--many of which I mentioned above. I also found reading the note planning a meeting to deal with the approaching Guardian by the wizards of Scintillus pretty chilling, as is the act of jumping into the Guardian's mouth in the purple section Ethereal Void.

As much as I like Underworld II, though, I can't pass it buy without one glaring, absurd problem...

Lord British, where the hell is your throne!?

I'm glad I got that off my chest. In a way Underworld II is also a bit dissappointing--I think it succeeds largely because its interface and game system was perfected to some degree in the first Underworld game, and the team building it could concentrate on the story, the atmosphere and so on. This also seems to be the case with Martian Dreams and Serpent Isle, which feel like more epic games than their predecessor using the same engine. Yet, the expectation of a whole new way of playing with each sequal drives the series. I guess there could be a happy medium somewhere.

Hope everyone's glad I finally posted! :-)

Hi!

2009-03-26T20:00:00.000-07:00

FYI, I am still alive! But as you may guess I am preoccupied with other projects, mostly musical. Someone said the first days of U1 and U8 were messed up, but I don't have any trouble viewing them on other machines when I am not logged in. The probability of a Blogging Zelda is nil, but I will probably play that U5 remake one day when I feel inspired to play games.

So I did a pretty good job of updating this thing when my goal was to finish all the games in a year. I have done a less than inspiring job of writing my "final thoughts." Perhaps that is because I lack a goal. Therefore, all my Ultima final thought postings on the final eight games will be posted by the end of May. They will probably be combined posts for the Underworlds with a brief note for the Runes of Virtue games. Then I will write individual comments on the other four games; Black Gate and Serpent Isle will have brief notes concerning their respective add-on games. Faithful readers are welcome to take a "I'll believe it when I see it!" view of this plan.

Then I need to post photos of the lovely crossbow Lord British kindly had Iolo create for me! And maybe some photos of myself if I go to the RenFair this year. After that I have no idea what to do with this blog...I'm a bit sad that I don't think any of the blog-the-whole-game-series efforts finished. The other Ultima guy gave up, and I think the Zelda and the Dragon Warrior blogs died out, too.

An idea for someone else who, like me, is cheap and who hasn't kept track of gaming since the mid-90s and wants to create a blog...write a collection of game reviews of PC games released 10 years ago, as if they were released today. To my mind, they'd be as fun as "new" games because they are "new to you," and they would have the advantage of playing great on recent PCs and incorporating every patch made over the past decade, so you would see each game in the best light possible! Well, there's probably some that won't run correctly...but I bet there's workarounds. If U9 works, surely everything else does...

SE & MD and some fluff

2009-01-10T21:59:00.000-08:00

Ah, I really need to spend a week and finish the last few games up so I can start a new blog. It's pretty fun to recall my experiences with the Ultima games and comment on them, but it's hard to do it very frequently because it requires a degree of inspiration!

First I want to make some notes. One of the amusing things about blogging is that other people sometimes post comments about your blog, so I can go search for "blogging ultima" on Google and find that people are talking about me. Ah, the rush of Internet pride! Anyway, I wanted to address two comments I ran into on bulletin boards:

#1
Someone commented, "You know, in reading through the "My trip through Ultima" blog and the blog for "Blogging Ultima", what struck me is that both chroniclers resorted to cheats at various points to get through the games."

I did? Well, I guess it depends on what he means. If save states are cheating, than I cheated all day in U1-3, especially 3 because its natural savegame system is so punitive. If that doesn't count then I don't think I did. I never even used a hex editor to change double-capital letters in my character's name in Underworld II (ZAchary)! I did consult walkthroughs on a number of occasions, when I was hopelessly stuck (usually it turned out I failed to set some game flag somewhere). Maybe I did do some other cheating somewhere along the line, but I don't recall it.

#2
Someone else said, "Heh... when Ophidian Dragon gets to it, he'll probably complain at first. Then after he finishes 9, I bet he says "You know, in retrospect, Ultima 8 was actually pretty decent." We'll see if I'm right, eh?"

For what it's worth, I think I complained about both Ultima VIII and IX (and all the rest...it's easier to complain than praise) but in the end I believe I had a much more positive attitude towards IX than VIII. I am unsure if that is reflected in the blog.

PS: If you wrote those comments...I apologize for my failure to give you attribution!

Anyway, now it's time to talk about Savage Empire and Martian Dreams! Because these are fairly peripheral, I expect my discussions to be pretty short.

Savage Empire is most notable for incorporating more "adventure" elements. These come in a few specific ways--the puzzles that require specific, non-obvious solutions (such as tossing a bomb to knock a tree over a chasm), the comedic elements (the Three Stooges tribe), and the brevity of the game overall. I really liked the more realistic scale of the game; you are in a very tiny part of the forest rather than supposedly wandering across an entire planet. I also enjoyed the emphasis on ancient cultures, even though it was sort of confusing to have such a mix of times and places in one spot. On the other hand, the combat was pretty rough, or rather, it was too frequent and that prevented me from wanting to do much exploration outside the roads, and I missed a lot of interesting features as a result. It was also disappointing to see so many "generics" wandering around, all saying the same thing. Overall, I also found the end of the game, specifically wandering through the underground city and then enterying the Myrmidex caves, to be frustrating, mostly because both feel like a "whole lot of nothing," e.g., gigantic maps with little of interest to see or do. I guess the underground city did have some cool elements, but I had to make extensive maps, which didn't seem to jibe with the otherwise-simplified structure of the rest of the game. Except for those extended sections, I thought it all tied together well, and some of the world interaction, such as mixing chemicals to create gunpowder, was impressive. I found it a light diversion, for the most part, with an inventive back story. I guess there weren't any particularly striking moments. Perhaps when you shut off the power to the underground city and your golden robot friend expires? That was pretty cool.

Martian Dreams is similar in a lot of ways. It features some of the same characters, has the random appearance of guys that look and act like Iolo, Shamino and Dupre, and it has a strong science-fiction background. I thought the diverse elements of 19th century characters, H.G. Wells-style fancy and alien life on Mars were brought together extremely well in this game. If someone were to tell me, "Hey, I've got this game where you save Mark Twain from his own nightmares on Mars" I would have thought it absurd, but the way the game is presented it actually makes sense. Kudos to the storyline team! I also thought the music in this game was spectacular, especially the character creation sequence and some of the outdoor music; far superior to the Savage Empire music which I barely even remember. This one was also a bit combat-heavy, and I got really sick of those damned jumping beans! Finally, I was especially impressed by the dream sequences; they were well-attuned to the characters involved and I particularly loved the Shadowlord sequence. The Avatar's conversation with Astaroth, the Shadowlord of Hatred, is particularly memorable. I even got a bit of a tear in my eye as the game ended and all the characters were lined up in a row to wish me well (or to tell me to hurry up...). A very vivid game! It actually bothers me some, too--one of the things Lord British always did with each new game was to recreate the engine from scratch. But Martian Dreams and Underworld II were both, in my opinion, both much better constructed in terms of story and its relationship to the engine than the games from which their engine derives. The same could be said of Serpent Isle (if you imagine it in its completed state). So does one of the most fun aspects of the Ultima series, being surprised by a brand new presentation of (usually) the same world, detract from the quality of the game? I think it probably does.

Well, those are my late-night comments for these two games. It's harder to scrounge up enough interesting thoughts with the spinoffs, I'm afraid! I should have better luck with the Underworlds, though, since I was very fond of both of them. Do not expect insightful essays when I discuss the Runes of Virtue games, however...

6!

2008-12-06T19:43:00.000-08:00

Well, I didn't post anything over my vacation, but I don't suppose anyone actually believed me when I said I would, so perhaps it's all good. Tonight I'll talk about Ultima VI! I'm lucky to have extremely vivid memories of this game, not the least because I played it many, many times before my blogged experience of it. Let's talk about the more technical stuff first--this is a beautiful game on many levels. This was the first Ultima game to focus on its PC incarnation, and consequently there's a massive change in the look of the game. All previous games were limited in their pallete and the proximity of colors due to the limitations of the Apple II; in VGA mode, Ultima VI looks more vibrant and alive than any of the previous games. I think this creates a different mood--in the old games, there was this almost constant black background no matter where you were, whereas in Ultima VI the grasslands seem lush; I especially loved the animated flowing rivers when I first played the game! The perspective is also somewhat more logical--walls have a slanted appearance (though this is misleading since you can't walk under walls that are in perspective as in Ultima VII) instead of a square appearance, and other people are not always facing you as if they are lying on the ground. In short, the more realistic graphics really helped bring the game to life for me when I was first introduced to it.

Of particular note is the conversation system, which is made much more enjoyable by the large and attractive character portraits given to every person in the game. This is the first Ultima where I find it easy to attach personalities to particular characters, just because I can remember the face of, say, the dishonest ruffian who accosts you outside Lord British's castle, or the dog with a dish in his mouth, or the horse-seller south of Trinsic that inexplicably says "Later!" if you mention sex to her...

I didn't say anything about the music of Ultima V, which was foolish since that was certainly one of my most favorite aspects; that game had some great tunes, especially the Grayson's Theme and the outdoors theme. Ultima VI has some good ones--I especially like the combination of Gargoyle Theme and "Rule, Britannia!"--but in general, the score is not memorable because much music is straight out of Ultima V, and also particular pieces are usually not tied to specific locales. Hence, few stick out.

I think the game is most famous for its level of interaction and the wide array of objects which can be collected and use, and the seamless world which presents the cities and outdoors at the same scale, albeit shrunk compared to the (apparent) long distances of previous games. Of course, Ultima VII took the interaction to almost absurd heights, so I guess I don't need to dwell on it here.

Where the game doesn't work so well is in the plot department. The idea is very attractive--The gargoyles thought the Codex was theres and you just destroyed the Underworld--but it's pretty hard to fit the gargoyle realm of Ultima VI as the other side of a flat planet with the Underworld, which was obviously an underground realm on a round (actually toroidal...sorry for preventing a nitpick, nerds) planet in Ultima V. That confusion aside, pretty much no one in Britannia seems to care much about the gargoyle threat except Lord British and some groaning dudes in Cove (Why can't someone just cast heal on these guys, anyway?) The music hall director in Minoc even demands you go build some panpipes and play a tune before he lets you have the rune required to save the world! In another odd game design decision, you are given instant access to almost everywhere on the planet with the Orb of the Moons in the very beginning of the game, obviating the need for a huge bulk of the plot (namely the map pieces quest to get the pointless silver tablet). As a result, Ultima VI can probably be finished without cheating in perhaps under and hour! It also had the amusing effect, the first time I played, of confusing me when I teleported to the Gargoyle world, killed everyone, and didn't understand why the game hadn't ended. In any event, the game may be a bit too easy and I sometimes wonder if it was intentional or an error.

Among the more interesting and memorable events in the game are your interactions with the ghost of Quenton, which remains unresolved in this game, your submission to Lord Draxinosom (accompanied by a question, "Why?" whose answer took me absolutely forever to figure out the first time), and, most curiously, your strange, ambiguous interaction with the disembodied spirits of Mondain, Minax and Exodus, who speak of their atrocities in a bizarre, detached manner. I would say that was my favorite, and the most surprising, aspect of the game.

Overall, Ultima VI has a special place in my heart as the first game in the series that I played. It was a big step forward in a lot of ways, and I can't help but like the abandonment of the tiresome combat from earlier in the series, though I know a lot of people who were upset by some of the changes. Still, it remains a favorite, though it's not in as high esteem as it might have been before I went and played through the series over again...I think it would come in slightly ahead of Ultima Underworld I were I to rank my favorites, but behind VII, Underworld II, and Serpent Isle. However, I'm not sure, and those are all extremely stiff competition anyway, so the A+ I give to Ultima VI might be slightly below the A+ I'd give to the others, lol.

Up next are the spin-offs, Savage Empire and Martian Dreams. The former is so short I may combine the two into one entry. Soon I will also need to come up with something to say about the Runes of Virtue series, but that's going to be tough...

In Which I Say Nice Things About Ultima V

2008-11-23T14:32:00.000-08:00

Well, reading my comments indicates i totally failed to address one aspect of Ultima V that made it vastly superior to all the previous games--namely, the storyline. Ultima 1-3 had stories, but the events and impact of them were contained almost entirely within the documentation. Ultima IV was strangely plotless--it was a quest of self-improvement, but there wasn't really any compelling need for the world to have you as Avatar. I would summarize the back story of that game as, "Everything's going OK I suppose. Let's find someone to be the Avatar!"

In Ultima V, by contrast, the first thing that happens (granted, in a cutscene) is that you get attacked by a Shadowlord. They also take over towns, and Blackthron harasses you on a regular basis; guards demand bribes, and so on. Unlike the previous games, there's the sense of impending disaster and the well-being of the world hanging in the balance. The illusion breaks at points (like any game), but it's there for the first time. Ultima VI's major failure is in this regard; I still can't get over the moron that makes you build and play some panpipes before letting you save the world; moreover, hardly anyone cares about the Gargoyle threat in general. At least in Ultima IX, Katrina apologizes for wasting your time!

I would also disagree with a commenter who said Ultima V's combat was insufficiently strategic and thy preferred Ultima IV. I thing the opposite; for most battles at the end of IV, I just repeatedly hit the A key and the up arrow because the massive barrage of magic arrows and wand bolts and whatever pretty much cleans the board of all enemies. As for the argument that a Shepherd or a Fighter is the best character class in IV because you can ge them to level 8 more easily, I say there's no particular reason to bother. Even in the abyss, everything was dead before my uber-Shepherd gets in melee range, and besides, touching those orbs is tedious.

I also got some other comments! Someone said that the item in Serpent Isle which trades for the ice wine was "obvious" but can't remember what it was; I say that such an item does not exist. Finally I was attacked for not showing Ultima Underworld sufficient love, but I maintain that I was fairly positive in my comments :-P If I'm overly critical, it's only because criticism is more fun to read than positive comments.

Hope everyone has good holidays, or at least those of us in the United States. I am on vacation so I may publish more this week.

5!

2008-11-05T18:04:00.000-08:00

The time has come at long last to tackle Ultima V. I can probably cut and paste my last intro here--it doesn't feel like it's been long since I wrote the last one, time flies, etc. etc. At this rate I won't be done for another year! Then again, I'm not too concerned about that.

I have a pretty mixed view of Ultima V. When I originally played it, after getting the Ultima Collection back in 1994 or so, I found it extremely painful to play. The combat sequences are pretty long, and you get fewer hit points per level than in IV, and it seems monsters hurt more than in IV. Since generally I find combat to be the least enjoyable part of any of the Ultima games, I gave up pretty quickly. I did eventually see the endgame via cheating, but I think that doesn't count!

Since I'm already enumerating downsides, I'll mention another. I felt like the towns in Ultima V were a lot less distinctive than they were in Ultima IV, though it's hard to explain why. In Ultima IV, when I think of any town I can imagine its map in my head today--and the same is true for Ultima VI and VII--but this is not the case for Ultima V. I think it has to do with the fact that almost all seemed to have walls, which limits the space for character per town. Finally, the Underworld was intensely difficult, especially the section which involved very tedious blink spells to go from one small hole in the mountains to another--mapmaking in other parts of the Underworld was actually fairly entertaining, but here it was simply a chore and I never got distances quite right.

Now I can enumerate some of the points I liked. Dungeons were vastly improved, as was your ability to interact and affect changes in the world otherwise--you can move objects and use things, and monsters leave rational treasure instead of just the gold you found in most earlier games. Of course, I exploited game mechanics heavily! I noticed that invisibility rings have the curious side effect of bringing monsters' hit points to near zero so that one hit kills them. I also noticed that leaving one monster alive in a dungeon room brings them all back to life if you return. Thus, an easy way to amass treasure was to become invisible, kill a bunch of dragons in a room, leave one, then exit and return to the room, over and over again! This probably qualifies as cheating, but the game in its initial stages was difficult enough that I didn't feel bad about it. This was a bit of a side track from my main point, which was that the dungeons were vastly more interesting to explore than they were in Ultima IV, where I largely dashed to the treasure with down and up spells and then immediately exited.

The most impressive change between the games is the improvement in the way the world exists independently of you--there is a day and night sequence, characters have specific schedules, and I am told seasons also occur. There are also astrological phenomenon that cause Shadowlords to invade towns! I mentioned this change in independent existence of the game world as a key theme in how the games developed over the years; the other key theme is how the world treats you as a person, and how your actions have an impact on the world. There's less evidence of this in Ultima V, or at least I didn't notice it, but I did notice glaring problems. For example, a member of the Underground tells me to head to Blackthorn's castle to get Lord British's crown, which I do--and when I return to get a new quest, he doesn't acknowledge the completion of the old one. Similarly, if you give up the names of the Resistance to Blackthorn there's no effect; indeed, you can get trapped by him over and over again and no one seems to care. Most hilariously, you can wander through his throne room and so long as you don't touch anyone, they are oblivious to you. I attribute most of these flaws to the small size of the game, and they certainly exist in every other early RPG, but they are more glaring because the game is so effective in presenting a realistic "breathing" world in so many other ways.

Overall, I would say my memories of Ultima V are weak, even though it took me something like 35 hours to finally finish. It's hard to explain why, because my memories of Ultima IV and Ultima VI are fairly vivid--there's just something about this game that did not sear it into my brain; maybe some of your quests are repetitive (shrine quests *extremely* so), and maybe I didn't find characters as charming or memorable as in the previous game. Maybe the long conversations without portraits made keeping track of who was who a lot more difficult? In short, my impression of Ultima V has never been very high, despite a neat plot and a far more realistic world, yet I don't know quite how to explain why.

On to a few of the most memorable moments of the game! It's easy to start with the very obvious--killing the Shadowlords. Tossing the shards into the flame and yelling a name and they are destroyed; I like imagining how that would play out in some kind of cutscene. I am also quite fond of meeting Captain John in the abyss and learning the origin of the Shadowlords, which I had never understood prior to encountering him in his unexpected fort! Ultima V also contains one of the most bizarre and mysterious sequences in any of the games, too--the strange, backward-colored realm that Lord British is trapped in. Why is he totally lacking power here? Why is it furnished with a bed and clocks and books and all? British proposes it to be an ancient location, and thinking about how it got there and what it was used for is one of the pleasures of finishing the game.

That's all I've got on Ultima V. I'm curious if anyone else feels the way I do about it--On paper everything about the game is good, but the experience never really seemed that great to me.

4!

2008-09-12T18:12:00.000-07:00

Holy guacamole, I thought I posted my last one in August sometime, but evidently it was way back in July! Man, time is zipping by. So, I'm going to spontaneously write about Ultima IV without having though about it much in advance. Here we go!

Ultima IV is commonly considered one of, or sometimes the, best RPG video games ever made. The argument usually goes that instead of trying to kill Foozle, you are trying to improve yourself and become something greater. I always found this a little bit misleading. It's true, there's a basic theme to the game of being nice to people and not stealing their gold (a necessary tactic in the previous games!), but in terms of quests, the game is pretty much one long scavenger hunt, and although you don't kill any Foozle, you do kill an enormous quantity of orcs, dragons, ghosts, gremlins, zorns (or is the plural zorn?), brigands and so on. I'd go so far as to say that perhaps as much as 90% of the human population of Britannia consists of brigands, evil wizards, and other bad guy types. So in terms of actual gameplay, I don't think the thematic shift from killing lots of things to becoming a paragon of virtue while killing lots of things is a very big shift.

Instead, what makes the game work are the incremental shifts forward, which continue until Ultima VII, in two areas of immersive gaming experience. First, the sense that the world you are gaming in can exist without you. Second, the sense that your presence in the world has an impact. The first item is brought to mind by some of my favorite features of the game--the moons which, albeit comically fast in changing, guide your travels, and the new conversation system such that most characters spout off several lines, and you are forced to interact with them. For me this is a gigantic difference from Ultima III, where an NPC is just a signpost; here, the options for talk are limited but the fact that I am forced to treat them in a more human-like manner makes the game immersive; I don't particularly enjoy lying to them. In some ways I think the future version of this, where you pick a topic from a list instead of typing it, is an improvement, because I see insulting or cruel responses I COULD make, but which I actually feel kind of crappy making, even though I realize I'm talking to a few blocks of text in a computer program.

As a side note, I am a big fan of the style of conversation in this game. Everything you do in Ultima IV has a sense of importance attached to it, and the sparse, direct dialog add to that. The goofiness is limited to skeletons in the woods and the occasional ghost; everyone else is relentlessly serious.

The virtue system is the primary mechanism for the improvement in the second area of immersion. Although almost none of your actions in the game have a permanent impact (slaughter a town and they're all back when you return) on the game world, they *do* prove to be a significant impediment to your progress in the game. In short, the choices you make in the game, tied to a particular ethical system, matter. I guess in Ultima III, they mattered too--but in a more crass way. In Ultima III, you killed guards to improve your experience score, while in Ultima IV you give to beggars to improve your compassion score. On the surface these are pretty much the same--actions with consequences to your stats. However, I think the former is a huge breach of immersion because you can't take the game seriously when you are hacking guards to death by the hundreds. Giving gold to beggars, though, forces you to treat the in-game characters as more "alive" than those burly guards, and therefore your choices seem to impact them (even if they never cease begging). In the end you can take more pride (ironically, since you are supposed to be humble) in your actions in Ultima IV than in Ultima III, and it makes the game a more memorable and immersing experience.

The above paragraph is a bit meandering, mostly becuase the "you have an impact on the game world" only really becomes significant later in the series--Serpent Isle being the best, albeit flawed (and enormously depressing!) example. But...baby steps!

Well, what else can I say about Ultima IV? My favorite version is always the PC version for the improved colorfulness of its graphics (I'm talking the old graphics from the original PC release--same bitmap as the Apple II version, as far as I can tell, but with added colors). I especially like that the background remains black, which is key to the atmosphere of all the original Apple II versions of these games. The music patch also does a pretty good job--I say pretty good because at the time I played the game again, the best version of the music patch is tied to an annoying (to me) graphics upgrade, and I had to revert to an older, slower, slightly glitchy version to avoid the graphics upgrade. So anyway, when anyone plays this game I advise the PC version with music patch, as it gives you the "best of both worlds." I don't understand Garriott's faithfulness to the Apple II platform after Ultima IV...But I guess I still have a 5 1/4 floppy drive on my present PC, so maybe I can't criticize.

I really enjoy the music from Ultima IV, and in fact all the games until Ultima VIII where it mostly became "mood" music that did nothing for me. My favorites from Ultima IV are the castle theme and the outdoor wandering theme.

As always, I've reserved my final thoughts for the most memorable moments of the game, or the most "moving" elements, even if I feel odd using that word in the context of a video game. Probably topping the list is that strange moment just before the end of the game where you meet and slaughter a mirror image of your own party, except of course that the mirror Shamino immediately flees! Of course, the anticlimactic ending is pretty impressive, where you answer questions from a booming voice, see some nice line art, and are tossed back into Earth. I guess most of my favorite moments are centered around the abyss, aren't they? It's understandable...that IS the final quest, after all--and entry into the Abyss also appeals to me; some stolen ritual with the bell, book and candle (where was this from originally?) and tossing the skull of Mondain into the volcano. Wow!

What about some notable scenes outside the abyss? I guess since the game is mostly, as I mentioned, a scavenger hunt, there's not many plot events (or even much of a plot) to take note of. I would mention that speaking to the water in Lord British's castle is kind of surreal, and the grove in Empath Abbey comes to mind. Maybe the Ankh in the midst of the mountains? I remember being rather puzzled the first time I played this game and viewed a gem and saw a strange random dot hidden in the peaks...I'm also fond of the ruins of Magincia and the curious disparity between attitudes of the ghosts--some angry, some sarcastic...and help coming from the oddest places; a daemon and a snake who attacks you after you converse. Strange.

I think that's enough on this game, though I could probably go on (I barely touched on combat and I ignored character creation, which was shockingly different from the usual procedure we'd come to expect). In short, I think Ultima IV deserves its lofty reputation. I think playing it is still quite an experience, even if it's less fun now than it would have been in the past--I think this is because its ideas were expanded upon so much in later games in and out of the series; I see it basically as a gigantic milestone in video game, particularly as a game that can be taken seriously as a creative enterprise (e.g., art) rather than simple entertainment

3!

2008-07-22T19:14:00.000-07:00

So I thought my last post was a lot longer ago than it actually was. Barely a month!? I should wait a longer time before I talk about Ultima IV!

Actually, I've gotten a lot of comments lately. One person called me a retard for thinking "Pagan World" (whatever that is) is not a good game. This buffoonish insult made me almost skip several games and go ahead and talk about Ultima VIII, but it seems to me I can't offer any good reasoning without going through the previous five or six games and show why I think Ultima VIII went totally off the rails in terms of the direction the series had been headed.

Other comments included yet another request to play the remakes, which if I were to do would need to follow my completion of all my per-game discussions, which will take another decade or so. But I won't rule anything out...Finally, someone asked what games to play without having to start at the beginning. To my mind, you should play 4, probably 5, definitely 6 and 7 and Serpent Isle. This assumes you're only interested in the "main series." Ultima III is a fun game, but hard to play today, and unless the situation has changed lately I don't think there are any really good ports. All of the games before VI may be more challenging, or at least more repetitive in their challenges, than any of the later games. A big chunk of my time in Ultima III was spent stealing from the same treasure chests over and over again, for example.

On a total side note, it seems to me that if video games are to be considered as art I think we should abandon the criteria of "fun." There are plenty of works of literature and music and film which are decidedly unpleasant or disturbing to experience, but which are acclaimed. So there's a lot not to enjoy about Ultima III, like many early video games, it can be repetitive and unrewarding, but I don't particularly care.

Oh yeah, I think someone asked about which versions to play. The DOS versions of II and III are trash so forget them. The DOS version of IV has much better (well, more colorful) graphics and there's a patch to add the Mockingboard music from the Apple version--although I would add that you have to go to work to get it because it's currently bundled with a dubious graphics upgrade that I find detracts from the atmosphere. The Apple version of V stinks unless you really get a kick out of disk swaps, and after that there's little choice. Someone said that the Sega Master System of IV was enjoyable, because it gives it 2D dungeons, but IMO you're not even playing the same game anymore after that sort of edit.

Now, let's talk about Ultima III! The most substantial change between II and III is the inescapable sense that Ultima III actually takes itself seriously. You don't have anachronisms like space ships and air cars, and the characters in the game seem for the most part to be in character, insofar as they can be with only one line of text to say. That being said, the world itself is pretty damned loony. Death Gulch is a typical example--It's a ridiculous maze of mountains and trees, and really the only thing worth doing there is looting the armory. This is such an efficient way to gather gold that most likely you'll end up repeating the process over and over again. Most of this gold ends up being spent at shrines in Ambrosia where, oh by the way, you inexplicably find the cards used to destroy Exodus.

Still, the much-decreased amount of silliness in this game is appealing--except for one item, the name ("Exodus") which is totally inapt and nonsensical, almost as if Garriott didn't know the meaning of the word. There are fewer stock characters who have nothing of interest to say, and the dungeons no longer seem quite as randomly constructed as they literally were in Ultima I and seemed to be in Ultima II. Most of the locales in the game also have some value in existing--the dungeons even if they lack marks do have fountains and gold in them, and some of them are themed, such as the "Time" dungeon in which (also rather inexplicably) the Time Lord resides. We also see an increase in the number of puzzles and quests to figure out--there's the hidden city of Dawn, there's the whole continent of ambrosia, and there's hidden commands such as BRIBE and DIG that you only learn about as you progress in the game. In Ultima II, it seemed as if the puzzles were almost undocumented. I don't recall any hint to anyone that you needed to give money to the old man for him to give you the ring to enter Minax's castle, whereas Ultima III is far more effective at providing clues to the solution of the game.

Ultima III also features a boatload of new features, including an extensive character creation system, lots of character classes (some being a bit dubious, like the Barbarian and the Alchemist), and other standard RPG features like the concept of leveling up, restricted armor and weapons, and so on. There's also a fresh new party-based combat system, much of which would persist (with increased complexity) until abandoned in favor of the much-derided real-time combat of Ultima VII. The layout of the screen itself (party on the upper right, commands on the lower right, and a game view on the left) would also survive that long. Finally, I can't write this commentary without praising the music, which give the game a more exciting atmosphere. I much prefer the Ultima 3 through 7 style of specific, non-atmospheric melodies associated with activities and locations; with a few exceptions I don't go around humming the music from Ultima VIII or IX, despite the fact that they get more praise for their scores.

There are also ways in which Ultima III reminds me of its predecessors. First, it's still hard to survive the beginning of the game. You start with few hit points, and though the food situation is not so tight as to DEMAND stealing the way it did in Ultima II, there were still times when I trudged back from some adventure basically starving. On the plus side, magic is actually worth having in this game; in fact, it is utterly essential once poisonous monsters begin showing up. By the final castle I was casting the various mass-death spells with every single combat.

All that aside, the best feature by far of Ultima III is that it's chock full of memorable moments for a game of its age. One of the things I love about playing the early games is that the primitive graphics force a vagueness to the artwork, and the lack of memory prevents the text from explaining things you see except in the vaguest terms. When I play these I feel like I'm experiencing the story through the lens of some old, fragmented text, like reading Sappho, or like deriving a society's mythology through images on potsherds and sculptures. By far the best example of this is the Time Lord, who resides in the cave of Time, shows up as a "?" on the gem-map, and who appears in his stick-man form for a split second to announce in distinctive ALL CAPS the order of the cards to defeat Exodus (with the warning, "ALL ELSE FAILS"), and then vanishes. Even knowing the future of the series and his role in Ultima VII, this was pretty jarring. I've written extensively, previously, about the endgame, the first of a series of fairly anticlimactic endings, but with this made up for by its distinctive mystery--answering the series of questions posed by a booming voice in Ultima IV and drawing a Codex symbol in the process, and the visit to Lord British's distorted underworld "prison" in Ultima V. Ultima III takes the cake though, bringing you face to face with a computer complete with a card-reader defended by the very floor around it. It was a weird twist that was fun even though I already knew about it from long ago, much superior to fighting some random powerful boss.

So in summary, I think Ultima III was the first in the series of five games that really define the Ultima series for me; we get our first look at some of the styles and themes that would develop as the series continued. Its sense of immersion and 'seriousness' set it apart from its predecessors; the charming and mysterious experience of the world of Sosaria make Ultima III a classic.

2!

2008-06-22T10:07:00.000-07:00

So in response to the anonymous comment, no, it's not over. Or yes, it is. It depends on your perspective. I will not be posting much, but I do want to finish my slow review of all the games at some point. Most likely I'll post a new one whenever someone adds a comment saying, "Hey, where'd you go!?"

So with that in mind, a few words about Ultima II. To my mind, of the official, canonical games, this one is clearly the worst. I explained a lot of reasons back when I wrote the original blogs about the game, but in summary I think it's just the unused potential. The game world in Ultima II is much bigger than Ultima I, at least in terms of what I would call "density of interest," eg, how much stuff on the map is interesting to see and how much is filler. In Ultima I, the towns, for example, are largely clones of one another, whereas here they are distinct, often have special features, and contain at least a few distinctive characters. However, many of the towns are nonetheless superfluous to the game, as is the entire exterior solar system, which was one of the game's more interesting features!

It's probably necessary to draw a distinction between the wide array of irrelevent side plots in, say, Ultima VII and the towns and planets of Ultima II which are simply devoid of interest. Since Ultima II does not take itself seriously, most of the excess towns are devoted to some pretty silly gags--whether it's the town of Le Jester, where you find it hard to get in and out because jesters crowd you to the point of being unable to move, or the town of Computer Camp, which is one big 1982 joke. I spent a couple of hours exploring all those places, but gained nothing of value from it--no special weapon or item or even any plot hints, as I recall. The dungeons were equally useless, and since magic was only used in dungeons, the whole magic system disappears from view! I'm not sure I even entered a dungeon. I know you could get fuel for your ship there, but why, just to visit the superfluous planets in the solar system?

Another issue which isn't the game's fault is that Ultima I got remade sometime in the latter 80's, and it looks and plays like a vastly superior game as a result. So today, most people who play these games at all will end up playing the remake of Ultima I, and then move to Ultima II and wonder, "what the hell happened!?" because, as you would expect, the remake is so much more playable than Ultima II. But just to blast those illusions away, I will say that after struggling through hacking the code to play Ultima I, Ultima II is a dream! Some additonal changes--Ultima I had only one or two monster types (although the get various names), whereas II has something like eight; Ultima II's dungeons are not just clones of those of Akalabeth; Ultima II has bigger towns, distinctive conversations, some animated graphics, and other advantages over the first game in its original form.

With Ultima I I talked about how the final fight with Mondain is a distinctive "moment" in the game, one which I found very interesting because all the hype is built up, but then we see an all-black room and a little man with his little gem causing all the world's havoc. Neat. In Ultima II, I think the only similar moment is when you arrive on Planet X and talk to Father Antos, and get his blessing; there is the sense that he's the only real character in the game, sticking out like a sore thumb from the insanity surrounding him out in space. Then there's that old man under the tree who gives (well, sells) you a ring. Pretty much inexplicable. I suppose I am projecting excessive significance on these figures, but I have to choose something! I also like the violent and abrupt endgame; "ALL HER WORKS SHALL DIE!"

What else needs to be said?

I can throw in a comment or two concerning Escape From Mount Drash, though it's not really worth the effort. It's just a bad, amateur maze game, almost unplayable, especially in the latter stages where you're not even allowed to see in front of you the keys you are looking for to escape the maze. Because of the time limit and the seemingly random nature of the combat, the game is just an exercise in repetition, hoping that with the next iteration chance will go you're way and you will succeed. It's worse than Akalabeth, because you can take advantage of that games silliness, whereas here, it just gets in the way and makes playing tedious.

That's all I have to say. I'll talk about III and why I enjoy it in a few weeks or months or years! :-D

1!

2008-05-05T17:02:00.000-07:00

Today is a day of finally accomplishing things--I set up an appointment for an eye doctor after about three years, and now I'll talk about Ultima and Ultima II after about three weeks of nothing!

Of the first group of "learning" games I think Ultima I (technically the name of the game is Ultima, but that will just get everyone confused, so I'll stick with Ultima I) is the most successful. The game has essentially three components: Dungeoneering in the depths of various continents to solve quests, exploring the continents to solve quests, and flying into space to shoot down aliens! The dungeon section seems like it was ripped directly from Akalabeth, but with the addition of a few monsters, and a significant improvement of the gameplay and interface. The exterior world is a tremendous improvement, abandoning the goofy vector-drawn huge squares of the first game for a much zoomed-out view of the world, with distinctive albeit repetitive towns and castles.

The new graphics and the carefully sculpted world abandon the absurd randomization of Akalabeth and make the game world seem larger. In fact, that's the main advantage of the multi-scale game world that persisted from Ultima I to Ultima V, in that the world feels gigantic even if the size is essentially illusory (as it is, for that matter, in the single scale games...but we'll talk about that later). Ultima I also strives for a grandiose time scale, where as game turns proceed, new weapons, armor and modes of transport become available, beginning with horses and ending with air cars and rocket ships. Technologically, the game is almost impossible to play today without substantial hacking. On an Apple II emulator, it runs abysmally slow or incomprehensibly fast--I'm not sure how it behaved on a real system--and is prone to game-stopping bugs if you die or go into outer space. It's no wonder it was remade later into the game most people have played!

Bugs aside, the game is really quite attractive for its time; I especially appreciated the speed of the outer space sequences, which utilize a few assembly routines as compared to the shockingly slow BASIC of the rest of the game. I enjoy how Lord British crammed so much into this game at the very beginning of the series. All of the early games up to and including Ultima IV barely have a plot in the sense of a storyline that grows as you learn more; in Ultima I, what you know in the beginning is the back story (Mondain is evil, kill him) and this doesn't change at all. That's the main reason the early games get to feel so open-ended.

There are two really interesting moments in Ultima I, in my opinion. First there is the insanity of the princesses trapped in jail cells in the castles of the land. The requirements to beat the game are truly strange--you must kill a clown, rescue the princess (presumably the king's daughter, in spite of the total lack of queens), she tells you where a time machine is located (in plain sight, but apparently invisible before) and you go back in time to kill Mondain. Of course, the princess only does this...if you've shot down twenty ships in space! I think this is one of the more oddball quest sequences in any of the games, but yet there's something charming about it.

The second favorite moment is that final confrontation with Mondain. I guess a lot of people would view it as a total letdown, because his domain is just one big square with Mondain and a vaguely diamond-shaped gem in the center. Yet there are also random blasts of multicolored lightning about, and I enjoy imagining what the primitive graphics might represent. I prefer to take it very literally--an empty void of space, with nothing but you, Mondain, and a gem surrounded by nothingness. No doubt a contemporary version would render the final chamber as some cliché evil fiend's domain with blood here and there, some tasteful torture implements, maybe a skull...So for that reason I enjoy the Ultima I ending quite a bit! It's almost as mysterious a chamber as the one which Lord British resides in at the end of Ultima V...

I think Ultima I is clearly superior to Akalabeth as it contains all its predecessor's major features, and Ultima I feels like a much more complete game than Ultima II. In spite of the strangeness of some of the game elements like space tracel and time machines, it doesn't feel like one gigantic joke the way Ultima II does, and the game play and the path to victory while strange are not as counterintuitive as those of Akalabeth, and there's a much stronger sense of accomplishment once you finish the game.

I should get back to work on that port of the original version of the game. The remake borrows far too much from later games in the series and loses the sense of excitement Lord British obviously felt as he tossed all these interesting game elements into one big soup. It's not great game that stands the test of time, but it was a very successful experiment, so it would be nice to bring the original version back to life in a playable form.

Yes, I am lazy

2008-04-16T19:30:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been a month since I posted a note about what I would do during the subsequent week! But I'm still alive, I have merely suffered from writer's block. I can think of a fair amount of things to say about Ultima 1 & 2 and the other early games, but I have not had the patience to put it into some kind of cohesive statement. As an alternative, perhaps I will just ad-hoc write about each of the games, and call that a review overview.

But for today I want to fill in a loose end, concerning Lord British's reward. Turns out I was merely impatient because a few days ago an attractive medieval crossbow arrived in the mail. I had forgotten that David Watson aka Iolo actually builds crossbows in real life! Here's some free advertising:
http://www.crossbows.net/

I have not *yet* shot any holes in my walls, but I've come close. I should probably find an archery range. I also got a nice certificate, which at some point I'll scan.

Well...I guess I'm here and I'm writing, aren't I? Might as well write about Akalabeth.

Ah...The World of Doom. Originally sold in a ziploc baggy in a local store, then eventually picked up by California Pacific. It's hard to think of much to say about Akalabeth for several reasons...First, it's so old and simple that it's almost like writing an in-depth discussion of Pong. Second, it was (and feels like) an experiment in game making; it does not have the feel of a game that was well-tested or which was designed with much game balance in mind. Finally, the game is pretty much entirely subsumed into Ultima I, which has much of the same dungeon interface, and the dungeons serve more or less the same purpose.

In fact, Dragon Magazine (not sure if they are still around--they're an RPG magazine) has a review of Akalabeth in one of their 1982 issues! They were pretty down on the game, complaining of its bad graphics and dubious game mechanics, and reading it I had to wonder whether to take them seriously, considering the fact that it was a couple of years old when it was reviewed and games on home computers were pretty much in their infancy.

In any case, in Akalabeth you see a fair number of seeds of the later series, especially of the first five games; there's some tile graphics in the outer world (albeit with gigantic tiles), and maybe you could even argue that the presence of irrelevant tree tiles is a premonition of not-plot-essential locations that show up in later games!

Or not.

One of the things that distinguishes Akalabeth from a random assortment of similarly-old games I've played is the sense that you can actually finish it. I've always found classic arcade games, for example, rather depressing because often they are just endless swarms of enemies that will eventually kill you, no matter how long or hard you try, and even the greatest has nothing left in the end besides a trio of letters and a number stamped on an electronic gravestone that will be erased as soon as someone pulls the plug. So they are ultimately an exercise in futility. However, you can eventually win Akalabeth, even if the game encourages you to keep playing.

The biggest problems with the game lies in its bizarre game mechanics, where absurdities abound--the most inane being the fact that thieves regularly steal weapons right out of your hand! This is enormously counter-intuitive. In the same ballpark is the shockingly enormous quantities of food that gremlins can eat, or the fact that dungeons are infinite. Winning the game then entails immersing yourself into the bizarre structure of the game, repeatedly following the exact same steps to acquire gold and weapons, and eventually you realize the game probably can't be won in your natural state, then note that becoming a lizardman makes you close to invincible, and boom! It's all over.

Akalabeth tosses you into an insane randomly-generated world, with the utterly primitive graphics accentuating the atmosphere, and the only way to survive is to take advantage of the way the world is rigged against you, and turn the mechanics to your advantage. When you win, in a bit of unintentional silliness, you are invited to call a disconnected phone number to report your deeds to a vanished company. In short, its charm today is as an amusing diversion, and much of the charm rests on the artifacts of its age.

Next time I'm home I'll dig up that Dragon magazine article and try and post some quotes. They also had reviews of Ultimas III, IV, VI, and VII I think. I seem to recall they were unusual in panning IV.

Review Overview!

2008-03-12T16:43:00.000-07:00

Well, first some notes. I haven't posted in about a month. My original plan was to make a post about a curious surprise that a certain Lord British mentioned he'd send after I did as suggested by comments and informed him of my feat! However, he may have forgotten about it since nothing arrived, and if I wait too long to make a new post, it's possible no one will be reading, lol. So my plan is to make a few posts. One today will wrap up some responses to comments.

Then I'll write some summary posts going over each group of games. I figure overall they can be divided into several groups. The first is the earliest games, which were more experiments in programming and not anywhere near as cohesive (or worth playing) as the later games. The second is the sequence Ultima III, Ultima IV, and Ultima V, which to my mind seem like very similar games, although the late rone is far more sophisticated. I mean they seem to be evolving in one direction. I think there's a bit of a change in focus in VI, VII and Serpent Isle, as the style of gameplay changes significantly between V and VI and then massively between VI in VII. I'll also slide in three other discussions of the place of the spin-off games. I'll talk about how the Worlds of Ultima games in some ways were better than Ultima VI, the immersing gameplay of the Underworlds, and...um...I guess I'll talk about the Runes of Virtue games at some point. I'll wrap things up on a sour note by talking about why I think VIII and IX were failures.

The more I think about it, the more it seems to me my best Ultima experiences were in VI, Serpent Isle, and Underworld II. There are moments throughout the series that I think are highlights or just interesting to think about, and these three games had more than their fair share. Thinking about Underworld II also leads reminds me of how unrelentingly depressing that game is.

But some comments! First, I probably won't review any remakes. I've never been a big fan of remakes unless they are intended as ports or something sort of like ports (eg, Exult). To me, Ultima V isn't just a story about a kidnapped king, but it's also a spellcasting system and a combat system and a collection of tile graphics and some music, etc. That's not to say remakes aren't cool, but only that I probably won't feel the urge to play them as a part of this blog.

I was also asked about blogging other games...Probably not, lol. The most ridiculous thing about me blogging a year of video games is that I'm not actually much of a video game fan. I play Ultima. I also sometimes play Age of Empires online with a friend. That's pretty much it for me and games, besides the occasional NES jaunt (love that Solstice and Battle of Olympus). My next blog is most likely going to be on some other form of entertainment, e.g. a TV show, or maybe literature (but so many people know so much more than me about the latter). I've also contemplated going to every restaurant (alphabetically, via the phone book) in Lexington and discussing my thoughts on each of them. But for that I'd need a date or, possibly for some places, a bodyguard.

We'll see. But I'll make a note here on the off chance anyone is interested.

Ultima IX, Day 10

2008-02-10T19:03:00.000-08:00

Time to begin the last post for the last game!

Before heading off to Terfin to confront the Guardian, I had a brief chat with my Companions in castle British. This part of the game was notably more lame than I'd expected--a few made dubious claims about their past help to me (Mariah didn't do jack fighting Batlin...), but most just told me to keep in mind whatever virtue they represent.

From there, I hit Terfin. I was hoping to avoid a cheesy conversation with Raven, but it turns out her telling you about a secret cave causes a giant rock to move out from in front of said cave. From there it was into the dungeon! And what an amazingly longer-than-expected dungeon it was. This time I had to find a big stack of power cubes, as well as kill off a lot of monsters. The gargoyles towards the beginning were the hardest because they did a huge amount of damage with each hit. Later on, it was just endless Wyrmguard that get sliced down in one or two hits from my lightning sword.

I encountered three other people. One was a girl who was searching for treasure and asking for help finding the key to the treasure room. Of course, she never goes anywhere or does anything with the key. Another was an insane guy in blue who thinks I caused the Guardian to turn away from him. He tried to punch me but died rapidly. The third was a woman who was poisoned by some gargoyles in a torture chamber, and demands that I kill her; I politely refuse and tell her "just go cast cure." Well, it didn't give me the option of doing that, but that's what I imagined!

There weren't that many exciting sights in this place. There was a room full of aquariums that was kind of cool, and some severed heads, but for the most part it felt like a barracks, with weapons around and books you can't read. Eventually, I finally made it to the Guardian's entirely black chamber. I put the sigils around on some highly convenient pedestals, causing him to pop through the nearby black gate. Here he is! Boy, he might actually be a little shorter than me. And he does look like a muppet. The Guardian was much more threatening in Ultima VII, somehow, particularly because he puts his dukes up like a boxer when you attack him. Yeesh. In the end, I create a "barrier of life" and then cast Armageddon, destroying the Guardian and myself, and making an ankh appear in the sky. The end!

Well, that's it for 20 years or so worth of gaming. Ultima IX was not as terrible as I remember it, but it was just as disappointing in terms of what I would have expected from an epic conclusion to the series. The failure to emphasize the cool characters the series had developed is a prime reason for complaint, as well as the poor manner in which the various set pieces, mostly designed for an unrelated plot, were all tied together haphazardly with the modified game. I tend to think the complaint voiced in comments about the bad dialog is related to this. I understand the difficulty here--it is very easy to fall into a trap where every conversation is "insider" stuff, that only the guys who've played all the games will get. Ultima IX went the opposite way and we we end up with "What are gargoyles?" and other idiocy from the Avatar.

Still, it's clear that they had a pretty cool world-building tool to play with in creating the Ultima IX we have now. My thinking is that if they'd stopped development on the engine and spent, say, 6 mos or a year creating a world and filling it with people and stories, we would have had a much better game. However, it's unlikely this could have happened without budget being slashed or people yet again being pulled away to work on the internet version of Ultima.

Note my weird phrasing--I've discovered that if I say the actual name of that not-off-line version of the game, I get piles of stupid spam comments. So I'll resist. I particpated in both the pre-alpha and beta test of that game, and got the "charter edition," and you can even find Ophidian Dragon mentioned in the original version of the hint book! But I really didn't like the game at all, or any MMORPGs for that matter, so I've ignored it here.

Did Ultima IX invite you to kill children? A missing feature!

One fun thing to waste more blogging time might be to reflect back on all the games, and see if I can decide my final "ranking" of the various games. I am pretty sure the main canon would fall in the order of (worst to best) 2-1-9-8-3-4-5-6-7, but working the spin offs in would be hard. Except for Drash, we all know where it ends up!

Well, thanks for reading. Maybe someday I will have UW2 screenshots posted! The person I thought was interested in the giant screenshot collection was actually interested in pirated games, so no, I won't be providing those. I own all the games I played, save Drash and Akalabeth; if you really want to grab them illegally, Google makes it easy enough.

If you haven't gotten enough Ultima over the past year, someone else is running a similar blog, in a somewhat less purist manner (I think it's called "My Ultima Journey"). And if you like video game blogs generally, check out Blogging Zelda and Blogging Final Fantasy and other similar blogs; I don't read them (not being into those games or, frankly, any non-Ultima RPG) but it's cool to have started something of a blogging trend. Actually, probably someone did this before me, so I'll rephrase and say it's cool to think I began a trend I may not have actually begun!

If you just dig me, I'm probably going to begin some other totally unrelated blog project soon. My CageBlog was cool, and I learned rapidly how to (not) write a topical blog; I wish I had not finished it so soon. Blogging Ultima has been a big improvement over that project. I'm glad it took a year to complete; I almost wish I had dragged out the earlier games a bit longer, in fact! Hopefully the next one will be even better. It's been a blast especially due to the quality & quantity of comments I get, so thanks to everyone who contributed in that way!

I also encourage you to start your own blog on whatever peculiar topic interests you, since there's always a few other people out there. And if you're a nerd like me, nothing attracts dates and money like a giant video game blog. Just kidding. But it's fun anyway.

Go in Virtue!

-Zac

Ultima IX, Days 8 and 9

2008-02-09T17:42:00.000-08:00

Well, the Stygian Abyss proved to be pretty hard! Well, some parts of it did, anyway. Getting there has to be the least coherent part of the game by a mile--you summon Pyros--PYROS--from a different planet (also, I thought he was dead), and he opens the Abyss for you.

Hey, wait, this is Day 9. I need to discuss Day 8. Let's backtrack...

In order to get to the Abyss, the final dungeon you have to clear, it is necessary to visit the now-destroyed (again?) city of Skara Brae. There, I spoke again to a statue of Shamino, who told me I needed to fetch the Bell, Book, and Candle and bring them back here, put them around him and use them to bring him back into this world. He also suggested that I fetch the Ankh of spirituality and visit the nearby Temple of Souls, a nice reference to the Well of Souls from Ultima VII. In order...

Book: Easy. I visited the oracle in the Lycaeum. It asked me who was to blame for Britannia's Guardian woes. I said the Guardian. The oracle told me to piss off. I reloaded the game, said it was me, and I got the book. Yay!

Candle: Off to the ruins of Empath Abbey, where a monk spouts platitudes and a dragon stands around on an ice floe about 50 feet away. A few ignite spells later, I have the candle, and swim back to Yew.

Bell: This proved more complicated. The ruins of Serpents Hold are, well, sparse. And much of it appears to be underwater. I swam through a force field (it took me forever to realize I needed to try this--I assumed I needed to do something to make the field go away), and faced an evil arch mage! He killed me rapidly with fireballs, and I tried again several times but could not reach his platform. Then I realized it was actually the swampy goo UNDER the platform he stoof on that was causing me such harm. From there I stepped outside the doorway and shot a dozen arrows into his head until he died. A lady who apparently never needs to go to the bathroom opened a wall she was hiding behind and gave me the bell.

Ankh: Ah, memories of Ultima V. The sandlewood resides on Lord British's desk in his bedroom. The king had since vanished to face off against Blackthorn, and I learned I needed to follow him. The box vanished after some harpsichord-ed Stones, and I got the ankh!

Back to Skara Brae, where I put the items around the statue of Shamino, and nothing happened. Hmm. Eventually I realized when Shamino says "bring them here and put them around me" he meant where he actually was, not where his voice came from. I leapt into the well of souls, chatted with some fairly cool characters about truth, love, and courage (though I never found the baby...) while in the background was some garbled, echo-drenched words similar to Robert Ashley's "Automatic Writing." I found Shamino in trance, then woke him as instructed.

The next part is, as I said in the beginning, totally off the wall. Shamino brings up Malchir for no reason (I think I missed a line of dialog somewhere), and I nearly scare him away. Shamino tells him his pain after death is a consequence of the hatred he holds for me after I caused Pyros to destroy him. I do not get the chance to say, "SHAMINO, YOU MORON, PYROS DIDN'T KILL HIM, I DID BECAUSE THE JERK ATTACKED ME!" From there it's off to the Isle of the Avatar, and the beginning of this post, summoning Pyros with a very conveniently placed demon skull on an equally convenient pentagram...

The Abyss itself consists of a long vertical drop, and four levels corresponding to the elements of earth, air, fire and water, bringing to mind Pagan. It would be cool if someone were to design a game based on our modern understanding of elements, with levels devoted to Hydrogen, Helium, Nitrogen, Boron, Lithium, and all the other hundred-something. I guess that would be a lot of work. In any case, you beat each of those levels, and teleport to some lands where you fight each of the elements to subdue them.

Air: Lots of floating pillars and a dragon. This one was tedious because it's easy to fall off the floating platforms, but the dragon is weak.

Fire: Hard! There's lots of daemons and even more lava. At the end, I faced a gigantic demon I must have hit with my lightning sword 100 times before he finally expired. I'm not sure what the issue was there; I may have needed to killed him inside the pentagram on which he appeared, because the final blow took place when he walked back in.

Earth: This was pretty easy. The big earth golem crumbled under my attack. I also picked up some nice armor.

Water: The plane of water was very attractive, with waterfalls everywhere, and raindrops splashing. The bad guy there was a big sea serpent, who flopped around a whole lot when I whacked him, but who died rapidly.

From there it was a quick walk to watch the extremely crash-prone sequence where British battles Blackthorn. I watched it about 9 times before I finally got through it without crashing, and the crashes dramatically lowered the drama. I found it amusing that Blacky's last words were, "Why won't you die!?" which is a question I think we've all asked about Lord British once or twice! I headed back to Raven, who took me to the Castle, and British sent me off to cleanse the shrine of spirituality.

So I guess this last dungeon was something of a Pagan homage. It seems like a lot of the Ultima games get a mention or two, or at least an homage, at some point during Ultima IX, from cleansing the shrines, the (granted, TOTALLY misused) gargoyle prophecies, Malchir, the well of souls, the sandlewood box, words of power, the bell, book and candle ritual, and even, dubiously, the city of Dawn. Too bad the spin-offs and earlier games don't get very much, especially U1 and U2. I was grateful to have an Ultima that finally acknowledge U2 took place on Earth, though!

To a commenter--no, I won't be listing all the pages dealing with a particular game on the right-hand side; it's easy enough to look at the archive listing below that. I just thought having the games by title or group rather than chronologically would make it easier to find the beginning of the posts dealing with each game.

Tomorrow, I will narrate the final visit to Terfin and the defeat of the Guardian. That, I guess, will end the blog. I'm not sure what I might do here after that...I could play the SNES Ultima VII at some point, but there's not much else. Sort of melancholy weekend I guess. For what it's worth, Ultima IX is not a 10-day game, unless you play an excessive amount during those 10 days. I estimate Ultima IX all in all took me 36 hours, basically as much time as Serpent Isle, which stretched out to 17 days. Take that how you will!

Oh yeah...

2008-02-08T22:45:00.001-08:00

So I noticed a very old comment where I said, "maybe I'll add a list of links to each game on the right side of the page." Well--there it is! Enjoy.

Ultima IX, Day 7

2008-02-08T14:09:00.001-08:00

Well, my blog is more interesting when I make random contreersial statements. But more on that later! First, I must cover the Ultima. Today's quest was to visit Destard. Actually, it was to visit the town of Valoria (I guess Jhelom was eaten by the volcano?), discover that I am not allowed to get in without slaying a dragon, and then going to Destard to do so. Getting to Destard was a bit of a pain. I tried to get to the ice-capped mountain with a secret entrance through an area west of Britain, but without a great deal of luck. It turns out that the easier way is through the city of Dawn, a ruined town southwest of you. The name Dawn amuses me--although everywhere on the game map is east of somewhere, I would have imagined dawn would be in the far east on the usual orientation of the map of Britannia. But maybe the sun rises in the west here? I never checked.

Anyway, Destard has one of the more bizarre quests around--like several dungeons, a major part of the quest is to gather items that serve as keys to unlock another locale. In this case...it's broken dragon eggshells. Glad to see dragons are still in Destard! Several of the pieces are scattered in a Wyrmguard hideout where a cult worshiping the giant dragon living in Destard is located, too. Her name is Taloria, right? Aren't Talorians the big headed mind-reading people who Captain Pike meets in the un-aired pilot of the original Star Trek? Anyway, the main thing you have to do is collect the eggshell bits, which I managed to do. One of the most memorable encounters in the dungeon was with this utterly gigantic zombie torso what I think yells "Boo!" and attacks me when I open a grave.

There's also a liche defending an eggshell chunk and some bone armor, a helmet I think. Throughout the game, I encountered several pieces of bone and/or blackrock armor, but it always bugged me because they always seemed to be either boots or helmets, but due to my swamp boots and my helm of radiance, I really don't want those kinds of armor, lest I lose the benefits of the old stuff. Oh well.

The end of the dungeon came when I confronted Taloria, who offered to join me and fight the Guardian to rule Britannia. You've got to be joking, right? This dragon is a fool. And I was very was not to agree to her terms, because I simply drank an invisibility potion, and killed her in like three slashes from my lightning sword. Weakling! After returning to Valoria, I was allowed in, and I saved the life of a wizard, whom the Guardian suddenly killed. This I found very confusing, because if he can just arbitrarily undo all my actions, why did he only undo this one? Weird. Anyway, I convinced the townsfolk to help be fight off a trio of demons, got the sigil as a consequence, and cleared the shrine. Tomorrow, the Stygian Abyss! And a weak "arch" mage.

Onto comments. With regards to plot construction, I guess I wasn't clear. I find the game highly disjointed, especially the Ambrosia->Hythloth jump, and the Buccaneer's Den->Deceit jump. Or the summoning of Pyros(!) that occurs tomorrow--the feeling you get from these is that chunks were sort of haphazardly spliced together to make a storyline, and that's pretty much what happened.

I disagree with those who say you get the main elements of the game working, then add the details. To my mind, what made Ultimas good was the style in which they were made--a world editor with lots of cool features, and then the world created to exploit those great features. Ultima 9 had several versions of this game world, it seems, and again, the game is spliced together from elements of all of them. Had they started with one world editor and then developed the whole game with it, I think it would have been great, even with something very close to the present story arc.

As to art...I don't believe I said art was operating within constraints, but rather that the desire to do that is a trait I associate with artists. In any case, the statement that "...it has virtually no validity when applied to other art forms" is just silly. I don't know anything about painting, but there are enormous numbers of very specific forms, structures, and systems in music that serve to limit the materials used, and/or the way in which are used, from large scale structures with required movements, to rigid systems dictating the ordering of tones or allowed harmonies. People experiment with new forms, new instruments, etc, but there is also a strong conservative movement in music.

But that's beside the point--The reason many people might not consider games as art is because gaming is an experience, in the same way that cards cards can obviously be artistic but solitaire, the process by which someone uses the cards, would not be art. Similarly, a play is considered art--but the experience of an actor as he performs in the play, is that itself art? To my mind, that's the root of the problem. Obviously I have a broad definition of what art is (see my John Cageblog; lots of Cage's music is in the form of processes to be carried out to structure and create a performance rather than objects to be performed). Using art as a value judgment is also idiotic; just because some piece of art is terrible doesn't make it not art.

I think that covers it all for today! Great comments. I guess playing a recent game draws people in more than the ancient stuff, though I enjoyed the oldest ones that rarely get airtime the most; I felt I was offering a service to them in some sense!

Ultima IX, Days 5 and 6

2008-02-07T18:47:00.000-08:00

First of all, let's start with a link:
Games as Art

I'm generally skeptical of the concept. Games, to be games, are necessarily entertainment, but I don't generally expect art to entertain me. On the other hand, sometimes it does, and much art is made for ulterior motives besides just desire to make art. All the games it discusses are relatively recent. Which reminds me, one thing I think of when I think of art is the concept of purposeful limitation--choosing to write a sonnet because the limitations of the form forces originality. But to my knowledge, game designers don't normally choose platforms that are limiting because of the limitations.

Back to the blog! I've combined these two days because, like the last two, I can't think of anything really exciting about the dungeons involved. There were two--Wrong and Shame. Actually, there were a lot of neat details in Shame. Wrong was also pretty creative, in that being touched by a guard in this prison (quickie backstory--Raven's falsely accused; you must rescue her) sends you back to a jail cell without your equipment. Fortunately for me and unfortunately for said guards, it was not hard to sneak up behind them and kill them pretty rapidly! Wrong is overall pretty small in size, but there's large numbers of doors between the discrete chunks of the dungeon, and it is maze-like despite the small size.

Escaping feels sort of exciting, because Wrong has a fortress surrounding its entrance, and a gigantic bridge separates you from he mountains nearby, so looking over the edge of the fortress walls seeing a bridge disappear in the mist is pretty cool.

Getting to and from Wrong is a bit of a nuisance, since there's a lot of mountains. On the way there I stopped and picked up the Quill of Justice (an odd sigil!) from a big static bird of some kind, who asked me some very dubious justice questions. The one that bothered me the most asked if it was just to hunt down a wolf who had killed a child; it claims the answer is no because it's unjust to kill a wolf merely for being a wolf. This seems incoherent, because since anything a human does is being human, it would seem that punishing someone for his crimes would also be unjust, for the same reasons. Moreover, if killing a wolf because it is dangerous is unjust, wouldn't it be even more unjust to kill, say, a corn stalk merely because you want some popcorn?

After cleansing the shrine of Justice (and clearing Raven's name, and handing off the gargoyle queen egg to Vasagralem), I hit the sea to Trinsic. The dungeon shame is one of the most fun in the game, but since it's all a series of puzzles (and lots of eyeballs with squishy eyeball noises), I don't think I'll go into much detail. The Trinsic quest proves to be probably the most compelling in the game--Blackthorn accosts you in Shame, and destroys the Sigil of Honor; however, you learn that the sigils themselves are irrelevent and merely embody the virtuous energy of the townsfolk. By risking his life to defend others, the cup of honor is re-grown. I have never much liked honor--it seems like it depends on the other virtues, such that something that is unvirtuous is necessarily dishonorable (I think U4 may agree with me here). But that is higher criticism! The way honor is used here is pretty good, though it would have been a bit more compelling had Dupre not shown up to explain everything in detail, like the guy at the end of a TV show who explains the moral of the episode.

Now, on to comments. I got some weird ones. Two people said that changing the name of the gargoyle city to something gargish instead of Ambrosia would be highly un-canonical. This I don't understand. Why would the gargoyles, acting out of racial pride, choose a name for their great city that has nothing to do with gargoyles? Mjs says that the blog was more fun to read before the U9 hate. I didn't think I was particularly hateful towards the game--in the last post I praised the music; in other places I said the dungeons were well designed. Most of U9's problems are based on the disjointedness of the quest (being rewritten at least twice definitely did not help matters here) and the fact that it's been dumbed-down to not intimidate new players.

If you discount the crashes and another annoyances, it's not a terrible game, it's just a dissapointing end to an otherwise (well, mostly) fine series. I don't "hate" the game, because it doesn't make sense to hate a video game.

Also, I agree with Justin, who says the original Guardian-homeworld plot would have been good. I agree, but I don't think it would have been appropriate for the final game in the series. At that point, of course, it wasn't conceived as being the final game! I tend to think the famous Bob White plot is way, way too epic to possibly work and be believable. You would have been stuck on a linear course worse than anything in the present U9 or Serpent Isle. The present ending is pretty good--the Avatar makes the ultimate sacrifice for Britannians who have realized they must be self-sufficient, British finally admits he really needs to get out and do things, etc. There are a lot of things that disappointed me (Blackthorn proving that mercy is stupid, for example), but even with something like the present plot the game could have been good with proper execution, and had it not been restarted so often.

Ultima IX, Days 3 & 4

2008-02-06T19:08:00.000-08:00

So the next two days of my game playing were not very thrilling, especially the second. They deal with my brief visits to the dungeons of Deceit and Covetous. After my completion of Hythloth, I headed to the dungeon of...Hold the presses. I feel the sudden urge to make fun of stupidity come on!

hythloth
pride, leading to death by one's own deeds. Also one of the anti-virtues in the world of Ultima
"Hythloth caused many many deaths when Hitler tried to raise up the Nazi's, his master race."

Ohhhhh boy. Even if the writer were correct in the definition, the usage doesn't make much sense.

Continuing.

From Hythloth, I returned to Buccaneer's Den, where Blackthorn captures me and tosses me into a dungeon! Specifically, the dungeon of Deceit. Which, strictly speaking, isn't a jail. Escape involved the use of a phase spider statue, which allos me to enter a parallel universe exactly the same as the present one, but where I can pass through tables, chairs, gates, and other non-door items. Manipulating levers there causes equivalent gates to open in the real world.

I'll just let that paragraph pass without comment, because there's no hope in trying to make any sense of it. Just let it pass, because the rest of Deceit is fairly entertaining, with weird timed-arrow shooting puzzles, some lava draining and filling, and so on. Eventually I met Mariah, though y ou don't seem to be able to avoid her via conversation; instead, i just ran past her. Outside in Moonglow, I am sent on random quests by a wizard who wants me dead, and whose quests are simply wild goose chases. In the last quest he sends me to...a cave where I find the item to control his soul.

....

....

OK. Continuing...Another wizard wants Mariah's shield. I go into her house and down to her basement, and flip some switches to retrieve the shield. Mariah appears out of literally nowhere, tells me to watch out for the mage, then vanishes as if she never existed. Trading the shield for the sigil lets me cleanse the shrine, and I'm done! Oh yeah, I made the "Lycaeum," which is now a floating building with a dubious oracle in it, appear. It told me the mantra that I already knew...

Cove...erm, Minoc...uh...Cove...that is, Minove was next. It seems like Minove was the least-thought out portion of the entire game. Blackthorn is in the town hunting for the lenses with which he can view the Codex; when the townsfolk refuse to hand them over, he puts a curse on the town using some really ridiculous magic words (I think "klunk" was one of them), which I assumed to be fake because before he said it, he added "You folk are a supersticious lot..." But it turned out to be real! Ahh. The dungeon on the island was Covetous, where I retrieved a blackrock crystal ball which always tells the future, but which for whatever reason I can't use to, you know, help me in my quest. The dungeon itself was a fairly tiresome one, with multiple levels and some fairly tough monsters (Skeletons that come back to life unless you steal a bone--I had about a dozen skulls in my backpack at the end).

Oh yeah, it had the worst enemy of all--massive numbers of crashes. Maybe every 10 minutes. The experience was so thoroughly miserable that I used a walkthrough to get me through it in as little time as possible. That allowed me to find a powerful bladed staff which actually doesn't seem very tough, and a helm of radiance that there is NO way I would have found on my own! Maybe I'm missing lots of other magic items, too.

That done, I headed back to Britain, hoping to never set foot in Covinoc again. I did learn one random plot detail--Julia, the guardian of the glyph of sacrifice, is in love with me. Poor girl. Is that why she'd always be seriously mad at you when you asked her to leave your party in the previous games? Hmmm...

Moonglow also posed a lot of problems for me--saving my game there and then reloading did not work, so I had to go back into Deceit every time. This was quite frustrating. I also experienced crashes, but switching to emulated Glide let me get through without a problem. I anticipate finishing the game tomorrow, but the blog will continue for a few more days. This is a LONG game and I have spent an enormous amount of time playing it!

One of the troubles of this blog, of course, is that it's so goal centered that I don't feel compelled to spend as much time just exploring and seeing what's around in this or the other games. Actually, I guess I did in the beginning (I remember visiting all the planets of Ultima II), but this late in my effort I am honestly pretty eager to be done! I can't believe it's been a year.

I have written on my hand a note that occurred to me at work yesterday, while writing interrupt routines for some printer firmware and listening to music--The song "Hope Road" by Anne Clark has some cheesy electronic music that for some reason brings to mind the castle music in Ultima III for the NES. My brother played that game for many hours when I was much younger, and listening to the MIDI version of the game music now brings back a lot of memories. Plus, the tune itself is fairly wistful. Which leaves me to think about Ultima music generally. Ultima IX's is very nice; a variety of presentation, with each town involving the melodies of its requisite principles of Truth, Love and Courage...I need to figure out how to extract it. Ultima IV and V have some good songs as well, and I also like the "Bane" theme from Serpent Isle. The most cohesive music is probably in Ultima Underworld II, where there's this attractive recurring theme in all the music, most notably in the haunting tune from the Tombs of Praecor Loth and the one from the ice caverns...

I wish I had a better MIDI synth. In fact, I don't know why it's not possible to just go buy some gigantic wavetable, store it on your hard drive, and then let your PC generate extremely high quality waveform files directly from the MIDI. Or maybe it is easy to do that. Whatever the case, you could end up with some sweet versions of the Ultima music.

Oh yeah, Ultima IX's cutscenes have suddenly quit showing. Not that it's much of a loss.

Forgot a comment!

2008-02-03T22:47:00.000-08:00

I forgot to make a note re: Hacki's Ultima Nitpicking page. I've never been a fan of it, largely because the description of all the Ultima games contains at least one dig on Ultima IX, which is sort of amusing because I don't think it's a good game, but which makes me almost feel sorry for the poor thing from the pile-on. Also, there's a lot of "just plain wrong" in there, e.g., I was "off to kill Malichir" in Ultima VIII--dude, he attacks you--or, "Erethian doesn't notice the magic problems" in Forge of Virtue, when in reality there is specific dialog for that very situation when he tries to magically create a forge. I am amused by the effort (I fondly remember a "Star Trek" nitpicker's guide of the same genre) but the way it's presented rubs me the wrong way.

Ultima IX, Day 2

2008-02-03T15:14:00.000-08:00

Well, my second day went pretty well, still no significant crashes. I have discovered that I *DO* get sound effects, but that they are inexplicably quiet. If I shut off music and speech and turn the volume on my receiver all the way up to the point I can hear static, then I can hear the Avatar's "Ahh" when he punches the air, and the sound of smashing barrels, etc. Very weird. On the other hand, that doesn't seem to add much to the game, so I am not upset at its lack.

Day 2 comprised four events--probably there was some overlap with Day 1 and 3, but shh, it's convenient to break it up by dungeon.

1) Buccaneer's Den
Raven takes me here to meet Samhayne, who wants me to go off to Hythloth and fix that column, offering the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom (!!!) as an incentive. I guess he just found it laying around somewhere. And why not? In Ultima VI, the vortex cube was possessed by a cyclops family! In any case, I leave him behind, and go to Magincia through the tunnel. The password through said passage was "keelhaul," which Raven considered to be a pirate joke, but which I don't get. Outside of the passage is this annoying ghost who wants rum--annoying because every time you come within several feet of him, he asks "Have ye got the rum?" Ahhh, it drove me batty trying to explore the area.

2) New Magincia
In echoes of some of the Ultima VI rune quests, before Katrina (the lone inhabitant) will give me the rune, she needs me to accomplish some inane quests. including setting fire to a buzzards nest and killing a wolf who guards a shepherd's crook, a weapon oddly more powerful than anything I have thus far, including my flaming sword. Did I talk about the flaming sword? It was in the hedge maze near Lord British's castle. I got it the easy way, by climbing attop the hedges, ignoring the maze, and leaping to the center. That's one of the nice things about Ultima IX--if some aspect of traveling in the outer world seems annoying, you can often ignore it completely and find a way to climb over the mountains or another way around. Anyway, Katrina finally gives me the sigil, and then I get sucked by a whirlpool into Ambrosia!

3) Ambrosia
This quest and the stuff in New Magincia proved to be very brief, as compared to some of the quests in other towns. In Ambrosia, the gargoyle city, all I did was turn on a crappy sculpture on a tower and shatter their underwater dome. Sorry, guys. I then killed the queen and disappeared with a queen egg using a teleporter. The city is one of the more attractive locales in the game, with lots of floating buildings and some guy who built a boat out of rocks. I forgot to rescue a gargoyle from a prison (a side quest I have forgotten the content of), but after I smashed the dome, he showed up anyway, and a rock fell on him.

4) Hythloth
After Ambrosia, for some reason I end up in Britannia's sewer system, which is, again "for some reason," located in the middle of the ocean. And it has scattered magic statues to open up the exit back to Magincia. I guess you could argue that the gigantic towers on Magincia (all since fallen) suggest that they might also have had an extensive sewer system...In any case, Hythloth is divided into two parts--the part that leads to the exit, and the part that leads to absolutely nothing of value. I did not take the second leg of the journey, and opted to head back to Magincia directly. I started on it, remembered the "use tiny levers to turn on colored lights" puzzle, remembered hating it, and then ran back to the escape teleporter. I remember you have to turn them in a certain order to get gates to open, right? Is there any hint as to the order, or is it all trial and error? I've noticed that in Ultima IX I tend to overlook books or signs that are hard to see and which offer tips and explanations for this sort of puzzle...If there was anything, I missed it.

Once I cleansed the shrine, that was that.

As to comments...

I feel OK criticizing Ultima IX for spontaneously inventing a giant tower, because in Ultima V I don't remember there being more than one floor to the Shadowlord's keep, and because Ultima VII had a book documenting its history--inhabited by cyclopses, knights, a mage, then overrun by a swamp. I don't mind the fact that it's in the mountains again--I guess the swamps receded, and the mountains grew back(!?!?)--but it was weird that the history specifically made for it in VII was tossed out.

I don't understand the complaint about the fan patch renaming Ambrosia. They obviously wanted a gargoyle name for a gargoyle city; why would they choose something that sounds like Ambrosia if the point is they think gargoyles wouldn't name something Ambrosia? I've never used the dialog patch, so I can't say how much I agree with the changes that were made.

Another commenter insists Zelda is deep, though I still don't see it. Things which are "deep" are things which can be understood on multiple levels, or whcih consist of multiple layers; Ultima VI had this because the situation as it appears when you arrive is not the reality you uncover later on. Although I can't think of any games that I would call deep throughout, there are many aspects of the Ultima games that think have depth to them, beginning with the ending of Ultima III, where you discover that the supposed child of Mondain and Minax is some kind of machine to be destroyed a punch card program. It's something that I find interesting to think about once the game is over. There's other things, too, like the inexplicable presence of the Time Lord in one location in one cave in order to say once sentence and then disappear. It seems as if Garriott must have made this person for some reason as opposed to just making it a sign or plaque or something telling you the order of the cards; presumably, he ties into the fact that Exodus is actually a machine, and the Time Lord is the only person around that understands it.

Of course, depth does not equal fun, and plenty of decidedly shallow things are quite fun. I consider Zelda, whether considered when I played it in 1987 or today, to be in the latter category.

Ultima IX, Day 1

2008-02-02T19:23:00.000-08:00

Well, my gaming of Ultima IX has begun; in fact, it's continued for several days. It seems that in general I either am in the mood to play the game, or to blog, but rarely do I do both in the same day! In any case, the past several days I have made much headway, and I have to say I'm pretty eager to wrap this up. I'm hoping I can do so before Feb 14th, marking the end of a year since I started this effort!

This blog concerns day 1. With a few exceptions, it seems that I can cleanse a shrine in about 2-3 hours worth of gameplay, from my first arrival in the town to the cleanse. This first day is probably about 2.5 hours; Despise is short, but there's a lot of pre-emptive stuff you have to get out of the way. The beginning of the game is terribly incoherent, in my view--for some reason, you're back on Earth. At the end of Ultima VIII, you had just appeared on a bleak landscape with fire everywhere, right? I guess starting on Earth makes some sense (you have to learn how to play). but it's still pretty disconcerting. The game really begins when you are tossed into Stonegate (after a brief appearance on a mountaintop--again--you are whisked away).

Someone apparently decided to rebuild Stonegate into a freakishly gigantic tower, and also to create some Shadowlord statues from outside. So Stonegate hints at one of the things I find generally annoying about Ultima IX--it tries to pay homage to previous games, but it does so in ways that are just kinda disconcerting, like this spontaneously rebuilt Stonegate.

But before I rip on the game too much, I should probably mention some of the good points. I think the dungeons are, by far, the highlight of the game, the early ones, at least, are well designed and challenging without being frustrating. The puzzles are interesting and inventive, and make good use of the 3-D engine. The outdoor world is also interesting, with lots of nooks and crannies to explore with unexpected items laying around. However, the outer world is pretty darn cramped, and feels tiny. There's a brigand living right behind Lord British's castle!? The fact that monsters re-spawn forever, at least outside, can also be tiresome--I must have killed that thief near the east gate of Britain at least 30 times; you'd think the thieves would quit lurking there. I know the older games had this problem too. One of the interesting things about the cramped world, also, is that it's accentuated by the 3D view--because you can look in the distance, you can see the island that you won't get to any time soon, or the goblin on the mountaintop, or whatever' Ultima VII was also a pretty crowded game, but since you were stuck in the overhead isometric view, it didn't feel as much that way.

But that's a long digression from the plot points! Britain has been corrupted by the column and its inhabitants are not quite so compassionate as they might be, shipping the poor off to the swamp town of Paws. Things reach a head after you finish up Despise and the mayor's daughter is carted off. He eventually learns his lesson, as you would expect. What's interesting is that his compassionate-ness seems to improve even before cleansing the shrine. Each shrine requires the glyph from the column and a virtue-themed artifact from the town (in this case a big blue crystal heart--which seems to be as big as my head; how do I fit this in my backpack!?) to be cleansed, after which the music (sometimes) changes to a happier (and IMO a worse) tune. Despise is a simple dungeon to work through, but it has some interesting features, such as a non-essential magic shield quest (which I never completed--you need four crystals; I found three and learned all the shield did is improve your magic and gave up), and a lot of log books and other such things that indicate that Lord British has sent expeditions into the dungeon and has almost created a little town there, albeit a totally self-insufficient one (all the guard posts have been abandoned...)

In the bottom, you meet Iolo, who has been corrupted but who is a weakling. Fetching the glyph apparently cures him and he goes back to stay with Gwenno nearby.

So one of the more interesting places in the game is the big museum in Britain, which collects a wide array of miscellany from previous games, from the obvious like the cards that killed off Exodus (they are playing cards, but I envision them as more akin to old computer punchcards) and the vortex cube (which does not seem to be cubical) to the obscure, like Khorgin's fang from Ultima VIII and the blue tassel from Ultima II.

Once upon a time there was a website which had 3D representations of a bunch of the magic weapons from various games in the series; a similar effort at making representations of some of the interesting quest items could be worthwhile too.

A word on screenshots...I'm not posting any for now because they come out so terrible. I'm going to have to ponder what I will do about this.

Runes of Virtue 2, Day 4

2008-01-29T15:30:00.000-08:00

Welcome to my final blog for Runes of Virtue 2! Yes, I am writing it something like a month after I finished the game, but oh well. I am fortunate in that temporal proximity to the game wouldn't have added much to the blog, because all the levels are basically puzzles and thus I only need to say anything about the entertaining highlights!

First some awards:

Most Annoying Monster: Djinn Man
I don't know what this guy actually is supposed to be, but he looks pudgy and turns into a spinning tornado. I've had some very strange luck with him--when I hit him normally, he takes absolutely forever to kill, but he seems to not take so long when I attack with a weapon and a ping pong paddle in tandem. In any case, his most annoying feature is that in his spinning mode, he outruns you and then suddenly stops spinning right in front of you, and does an enormous amount of damage with every hit. Once you have the magic paddle, thse guys are easy but before that they are a serious pain...

Most Useless Item: The Snake Staff
With this staff, you can summon a pair of snakes who die. Yay.

Most Insane Level: The Pie Factory
OK, ROV1 had a boulder factory in one of the early levels, as I recall. Or was it the rock factory? In any case, for some reason the center for pie production in Britannia is halfway down the Great Stygian Abyss. I really enjoyed this level because it brought back fond memories of Ultima VII, except pies taste better than bread. I think you can make pies in Ultima Online? These pies are made with flour and milk, so I suspect they don't taste very good. The puzzle in the level is to manipulate levers so that the pies go out for delivery rather than landing in a dumping area. Quite amusing, and appropriate for a Nintendo game I think.

The other parts of the Stygian Abyss were not that incredibly hard compared to Hythloth; there were a few tough rooms, but nothing like the endless barrage of spinning deaths mentioned in the last post, and overall the game seemed more puzzle-ey than Hythloth. The final room was a bit anticlimactic. The black knight pops out, swinging his sword, and you stab him till he's dead. The guy does a lot of damage and moves fast, but as one might expect the ping pong paddle and boomerang combination make quick work of him.

Well...

They would have, had some fool not dropped his boomerang by accident :-/ As a result, I was stuck using the crappy whip, which does good damage but is not really a ranged weapon, and it has a long lag time before you can whip again.

Also, there were some dragons in the Abyss. The dragon is of the multi-tile monsters, but it's so fat it can't get up and move or be very dangerous.

And so ends the second Game Boy adventure! British thanked me for my service, and then offered to let me continue playing the game, an offer which I politely declined.

So my Ultima IX quest has since begun in earnest. I'm currently hanging out in Magincia. If you're bored, you can go read some bizarre glowing reviews on Amazon and elsewhere. One guy says it's a great game like Ultima VIII, and almost as atmospheric. (Was this actually a comment on the blog? I can't recall where I read this). Another guy tells us that it's one of the greatest games everyone made, and everyone needs to play it.

I will concede that it's atmospheric; it's very fun to peer out over the ocean near the shrines at night, and looking at the world from above in a tower or whatnot is always fun, too. But what else is good about this game? I mean, good atmosphere is like step one of a good game. As a long time fan, I am disappointed by the disconnect from the rest of the games (even the attempts to include history are fatally flawed...what the hell is Mondain's skull doing in the museum!?), but just as a regular old gamer I found the combat pointless and most of the quests predictable or so cheesy I can barely stand it. The game has a certain condescension about it, too, whether it's the Avatar's brainless journal comments or the linearity of the story.

In any case, I will persevere! I did encounter the flying-rune problem, but it turns out I can grab them out of midair without cheating, so it's not a big deal. I do not intend to cheat my way through the game, since I have been trying to avoid even walkthroughs unless I get terribly stuck (having a good memory of previous play-throughs helps...), though i have sympathy on the commenter who used the fly cheat because, yes, the Avatar is TERRIBLY slow. Aggh.

The game runs extremely fast. I guess that's what almost 9 years does, lol. The biggest problems I have are:
--Raven's boat and most other wooden objects are a hideous purple
--Lots of shop walls render as totally black
--There are no sound effects. Zero. No combat sounds, no monster sounds, no door sounds, no footsteps, nothing. I get muic and voices and sometimes weather sounds, but that's it. I guess I get magic sounds too. So it seems random...Are there supposed to be other sound effects?

Dunno when I will begin blogging U9. Expect the screenshots to suck--I seem to not beable to get good ones; sometimes, the result is just a black square, sometimes I lose all the on-screen objects, etc. I think it's got to do with whether or not the items on-screen are moving around.

As a final note, i think Tseremed or someone else nearby clues you in on the nude guy and gal in Ultima VII. And yes, Ultima III NES is different from the Apple version, but I liked the Apple's music more, and I didn't see much depth to Zelda or to Ultima III. They're just two cases of kill-the-foozle-who's-evil-cause-the-manual-says-so. I guess Ganon kidnapped someone. I like both games because the gameplay, at least for their respective times, was excellent and fun, but I don't see them as deep.

U9 notes

2008-01-26T16:37:00.000-08:00

Well, my copy of Ultima IX finally arrived today--mosre than two weeks after ordering it, as I recall. In any case, the game runs with D3D, with two oddities--
a) Is there supposed to be any kind of sound from beasties and combat? I see a wold howl, but hear nothing, but other assorted sound effects come through fine (fires, etc)
b) Weird colorings on the doors to my pantry and on the boat in the lake behind my house...They're purple! And the waterfall is black...

Other weirdness includes the "pressure plate" that a vase is sitting on in Stonegate looks more like a shelf, and items I throw seem to fall to the floor in moon gravity. Weird.

I tried using the dgVoodoo Glide emulator to play U9 as it was meant to be played, but when I ran the game, the floor of my house was missing. Eeep.

Has anyone had success with other Glide emulators & Ultima IX? I am thinking about buying an old video card to play this on, though I fear it would not work in my machine. It seems like Ultima games experience software rot faster than others I've played, but I guess that is a consequence of being cutting edge.

Oh yeah, I never wrote the last ROV2 blog...need to hop to that this weekend!

Runes of Virtue 2, Day 3

2008-01-16T19:03:00.000-08:00

So after I finished the three dungeons mentioned in the last e-mail, I was somewhat at a loss as to what to do next. I knew that the last dungeon, the Stygian Abyss, was in its usual spot. I also knew that Pride was not in its usual place; that is, it fails to not exist in this game. But how to get there?

I've played enough Ultima to know the following statement:

if (there exists a whirlpool && you have a boat && you have nowhere to go)
{
sail into the whirlpool;
}

Sure enough there is a whirlpool. Sailing into it took me where I expected--the city of Cove, which is unreachable through anyother means. Cove is a bit different than I remembered it, as all the townsfolk of the city of Love have been murdered by beasts foul and ferocious. Hacking my way through spiders and skeletons, I found a stairway down which leads to, you guessed it, the dungeon of Pride!

I just took a detour to see if the word "hythloth" had an actual definition. It shows up in the Urban Dictionary (!?) as a synonym for pride, which surprises me, but nowhere else. I guess it's invented. Hyth is a small haven; loth is a variant of loathe. Haven of loathers? Beats me. I am quite certain it is not intended to be the "cave opposite to humility" though, and I think Ultima IV states that explicitly.

Before I go on to pride, I should mention that Lord Quenton of Skara Brae is imprisoned here--somewhat backwards from the usual dungeon/mayor association since he is neither mayor nor from the town of humility. In any case, his kid is obviously a lot younger than in Ultima VI, so I speculate this is something of a prequel. Quenton offers an in-joke, when rescued, saying his experience "will haunt [him] for the rest of [his] days." Ho ho ho.

Anyway, pride is both extremely hard and very silly. I'll highlight things that are hard and then the thing that is silly. First off, the dungeon is HUGE. It's got four tracks you can follow; one for the mayor, and three for other items. I never tried the fourth; the third was the mayor, and my second effort I abandoned. After descending through some unpleasantness, I reached a room full of spinning black saws that do an enormous amount of damage with each hit, and black tiles on the floor, that when crossed, generate more spinny death things. But avoiding those tiles and not dying was hard enough that I gave up; even when I finally made it to the end alive, there were far too many more saws blocking the exit! I failed to note that the increase in saws would cause some clogging in front of the stairs to the next level.

The first track I took was the most interesting that I tried. It also featured an outrageously annoying teleport level, which was composed entirely of tiny rooms with teleport pads. I made a map of these pads (a leads to a; b to b; etc), but got very frustrated when I hit my 26th teleport pair and had to switch to greek letters that I remember from statistics. Eventually I finally won, but it took forever.

Later, I encountered the serious absurdity--a giant level full of trolls playing ping-pong. No, this was not the most insane thing I have ever seen in a video game. That belongs to either the whole premise of Decap Attack (the title is quite literal; your attack involves tossing your own decapitated head) for the Sega Genesis, or the bosses in Monster Party, which include dancing zombies, a kitten, and a large fried shrimp. Yet, ping-pong playing trolls does come pretty close. I was amused that when you killed one troll, the other would continue, and the room would soon have ping pong balls flying all over.

Unfortunately for the player, these ping pong balls freeze you, an you are prone ntil they wear off. Fortunately, you soon thereafter acquire your own magic ping pong paddle,which can be used to open doors and switch levers from a distance, which is cool except that all future puzzles are designed specifically to prevent this. In any case, freezing fast-moving monsters is very helpful. Also, when you open a door without going through, the monsters exist "underneath" the roof, but they cannot exit and attack you, yet you an throw your weapons and kill them from outside. This is very handy for the painful magic-bolt shooting reapers.

The other items in the dungeon were a magic sword and magic armor, both of which I did not go after. It seemed like a lot of work when my paddle + boomerang was extremely potent, and non-range weapons suck in this game generally as too many beasties either move fast or shoot ranged weapons themselves. I also found a whip, which is an OK weapon, but you can't walk away after attacking with it, so it's no good for a attack-dodge-attack strategy.

So from there I freed the mayor, and took him back to Skara Brae, where the game messed up and I was stuck inside the city, unable to leave. Eventually, I manged to rescue the soon-to-be-ghost with his annoying puns, and also leave Skara Brae. I'm unsure what caused the problem.

Next up, the Great Stygian Abyss!

I think i should put up my UW2 screenshots sometime as well, but I have been procrastinating since September; why stop now?

Because it allows me to procrastinate from Ultima IX, of course! :-D

Runes of Virtue 2, Day 2

2008-01-12T20:34:00.000-08:00

It will be awhile before I get Ultima IX done so don't hold your breath. My enthusiasm is so low for it that any excuse I have to not play it I tend to take, lol. In any case, I still need to finish up my discussion of Runes of Virtue 2.

Day two was spent in three more caverns--dishonesty, selfishness, and cowardice. The former is on, as expected, Verity Isle, next to the lyceum, which now has "the orb of the moons" at the top, which has turned essentially into a collection of moongates that send you to the various towns. For what it's worth, Yew also has a moongate that sends you to Moonglow, though I think it's the only town that does. None of the caves had anything in them of any great interest. Well, aside from 1) a boomerang, which turns out to be a pretty powerful weapon, and 2) a snake staff thing that when used summons two snakes that rapidly die. Impressive. There are similar weapons for summoning other mosnters, including cyclops (cyclopses?).

One other random side quest in this game is that I am sent to new Magincia to give a letter to the mayor Anton, warning him about being kidnapped. I am given gold for this effort, though I already have so much gold I have reached the limit of 99 and cannot carry what I am given. Ooops.

They key to Runes of Virtue II is the food; the only bad thing that happens in the dungeons when you have emulation-enabled save feature :-P is that you can run low on health and not quite be able to complete the room; however, if you have a huge number of bowls of soup in you inventory, you can just blithely run through enemies without bothering with the puzzle. But this does not always work; we shall see in Day 3 that there are some areas that are simply so insanely difficult that no amount of eating and saving would get me through, and I simply gave up on them.

The neatest feature about ROV 2 is the ships, I think. You need a boat to get to the various island dungeons, and like the older Ultimas you have to sit around and wait for some pirates to approach you and capture their boat. However, in this game, the battle sequence is much prettier than any of the previous Ultimas, with three types of pirates; some with swords and some with arrows, and on each ship, two that fire cannons at you. The arrow guys are pretty dangerous. Once you have the ship, you can kill monsters on shore or at see with your cannon, like the old games. Pretty cool.

Now I'll make fun of this website.

I choose it simply because of the line:
"Interestingly, the Game Boy versions of both Runes titles support two-player cooperative/competitive play, predating Ultima Online"

First of all, the game would predate Ultima Online whether or not it supported two players. They probably meant "presaging Ultima Online." But that seems pretty silly as well, because if two player cooperative/competitive play was a hint as to the future of gaming, then that old Mario Bros. arcade game was the same way. There's really no relationship at all between the two, and I'd guess that was stuck in the description for the sake of tying it to a popular game.

I also disagree with the site's characterization of the game as combat heavy and light on puzzles. Unlike the early Ultimas (which WERE combat heavy). the ROV games have a lot of very weak monsters, many of which only serve to accentuate the puzzles, which are far more Lolo-esque than anything in Zelda, the NES game that the site compares these to. Additionally, I don't believe rooms reset when they are left; I think that like ROV 1, ROV 2 has a small cache of recently-visited rooms whose contents stay as they were left.

Yes, the last tqo paragraphs were filler because I had so little to say about the game itself, but it's so very similar to ROV 1 that there's just not much to say. The last two dungeons are a bit more interesting, though, so I may be able to work something out of them...

PS: he whorlpool screenshot belongs on the Day3 blog based on my description, but it fit here niely and technically I sailed into it on Day 2...

Runes of Virtue 2, Day 1

2008-01-06T14:16:00.000-08:00

For my Runes of Virtue II gaming experience, I chose to play the Game Boy version, for two reasons--first, I am pretty sure it was first. Second, I've heard bad things about the SNES version, although it might be substantially different. If I do as a commenter suggested and play the SNES version of Ultima VII, I'll probably do ROV2. But both are not likely at this point! After a year, finishing this blog up seems appealing :-)

Runes of Virtue 2 is an awful lot like Runes of Virtue 1, but with a number of enhancements to make it seem, on the surface (literally--the surface world of Britannia) much more like the canonical games. In particular, the map looks pretty much like Britannia and all the towns are in the correct spots. Those towns are inhabited by equivalent characters from Ultima VI, including the mayors, whom a bored Black Knight has decided to kidnap. The Black Knight is one of the lone characters carried over from ROV1, but by my recollection he played very little part in that game besides blocking a bridge.

The mayors are kidnapped in more or less the expected order, slowly getting farther and farther away from Castle Britannia, where you, the Avatar, are summoned. Actually, it seems the Avatar was busy, because you really play Iolo, Maria, Shamino, or Dupre. Just like last time, I chose Shamino, because he has average stats and begins with a ranged weapon, the throwing axe. Just like the first game, I uncovered a second axe in the first dungeon, which was useful for pumeling enemies into submission during the first several levels.

My memory and enthusiasm do not permit a complete description of the first three dungeons (renamed as usual for the vocabulary-impaired NES crows: Hatred, Dishonor, Injustice), but I can say they have not changed a lot from the first game. Most of your time is spent moving rocks, barrels, and vases. The latter are slightly different because you can move more than one at once. There are plenty of chests, but also plenty of mimics that zap you ith lightning when you try to open them. The other major block of your time in ROV2 is spent with monsters, usually snakes, rats, mimics, wisps, and sometimes skeletons in this first part of the game. The more challenging beats include panthers or hyenas or something that runs fast, looks like a cat, and bites you. Reapers are omnipresent, but easy to kill. There's also some kind of goblin thing that runs away as soon as you hit him once--coward!

One curious detail is a side quest after finishing these three dungeons--Lord British asks you to clear up a Liche haunting Empath Abbey. Indeed, when you visit the place, it is totally infested with monsters! Yikes. The liche proves and interesting beastie, because one hit kills it, yet it comes back to life a few moments later and is much more difficult to kill. Most of the dungeon differences in this game are minor improvements to the original, such as this additional complexity.

A few random thoughts...

1) I believe whoever built this game must have been inspired by Gateway to Asphai, an old Coleco and possibly other system game, basically a dungeon crawl. I say this because a lot of the sound effects like the ghosts and the squeals of panthers are eerily similar to Gateway, as is a lot of the basic game structure. The thought immediately leaped to mind as soon as I began playing. Anyone else remember Gateway?

2) There is a very limited bit of NPC scheduling in the game, which was impressive! For example, townspeople in Trinsic will walk from one place to another, from the kitchen to the center of town, etc. Later in the game you can observe townsfolk picking up crops, and in Britain there is a blacksmith you can observe forging an axe.

3) The magic rope that somehow creates a walk-across net(!) over water is in this game, just like the last one. I still don't really understand how this works.

Ultima VIII, Day 6

2008-01-02T17:06:00.000-08:00

Well, I hope everyone had good holidays; mine was spent with quite a bit of Ultima-ing, so that I now have all of ROV2 completed and ready for a leisurely blog-through. Actually, it may not be that leisurely, because geez, I don't know what to say about the ROV games because their plots are not, shall we say, overly dense.

But before that, I have to zip through my final gaming in Ultima VIII. I'll upload screenshots later because I seem to have forgotten to prepare them--this blog was not really planned, I just happen to need to kill time while a gigantic number of files copy. Anywho--

There were really three parts to this day, actually about three hours worth, of gaming enjoyment. The first was very brief, but required wrapping up the sorcerers. I knew I needed the Tongue of Flame, which our good friend Malichir possessed, so i went into his house (well, cave) to see about getting it. He was not thrilled to see me, and summoned two daemons, and launched fireballs at me. Holy crap! I used my focus of invisibility, waited a REALLY long time, and finally turned invisible inside his flame circle. Then I smacked him with Flame Sting until he was dead, after which I banished the two local daemons. Well, that's one way to get an item. I deny the claim of murder here, since he attacked me first, in spite of what one "List of Evil Things the Avatar Does in Pagan" says. In fact, very few of my actions are questionable. The only dubious one comes about ten minutes after obtaining this flame tongue, when I go take the Breath of Air from Stratos. I guess I stole it, but on the other hand she did nothing to stop me, and I seem to recall at least one of the Theurgists being OK with it. In any case,I dumped a bunch of red potions around to save them the trouble of casting healing spells in the future.

The second part of this day was titled, "How the hell do I get the Heart of Earth?" A book I read suggested visiting the Pit of Death. Boy was this ever a mistake. I spent a good 45 minutes wandering around a maze devoid of any valuable treasure (though there is a cheat room...) and full of zappies, spikeys, and flamies. As it turned out, all I had to do was either create a golem or use a key or climb over a wall, then cast Open Earth in a big chamber with a zobie or two, and take the Heart of Earth for my own. At least I got a free (minus effort) map of the Pit of Death out of it! I then hit
Tenebrae, after a quick trip to the Sorcerers to stand inside the Pyros Pentagram in order to free him. Oh no, flaming rocks falling everywhere!

It's clear now that I need to become Titan of Ether, gaining unsurpassed power to...basically do nothing with! Yay! The only missing piece is the Tear of the Seas, which is Hydros's blackrock object needed for teleporting. What great quest will I need to do to fetch it? An underwater city? Oh boy!

No, turns out Devon found it in his nets one day and he gave it to me. Then Mythran taught me the ethereal travel spell, and it was off to finish the game! First, to kill all the titans by using their own Blackrock doodads against them in their own domains!

The domain of Earth was first, which was full of blowing-up mushrooms and cliffs inside a dank cave. Overall, it was boring, save one "oh, screw this!" moment in which I am standing on a ledge before a bunch of lava, and I had previously read a book saying to toss some rocks to find my way across. I did that for a bit. All the rocks sank into the lava. So I just cast Endure Heat and ran across.

Waterland was just changelings, curvey bridges, and water. Hydros zapped me with lightning but died quick. Air was even shorter; besides some falling hovering rocks, it was only a few steps before I could kill the Air god, who just abruptly vanished--no cool death scene.

The final elemental plane was that of fire, which was also rather tough because getting to Pyros requires a lengthy gauntlet of daemons and floaty eyeballs and other meanies, just when you ot finished exploring an ultimately worthless abandoned house. But evnually, your each Pyros's gigantic pot that he calls home. Why does he live in a giant pot? I do not now. In any case, I kill him, though maybe he's not really dead since he shows up later.

On a different planet.

And somehow he helps me get into a dungeon.

Man, Ultima IX is crap. But you already knew that.

With all the Titans dead and the Pagans free from being turned into zombies for eternity, being exploded by sorcerers, and subject to the will of Tempests (and from the oppression of good health) I was free to leave and go to...Mystic White Pillar Land! And then Guardian Head on a Hill Land! And then I get to wait six year for a garbage sequel. Man, thinking about it still makes me mad!!

Now my final conclusions. Wait, first, a comment on a comment--the blue pentegrams that crash the game are not the regular old pentegrams, which are not blue; they are the ones you collect in order to get out of the Obsidian Fortress. Also, the default on my installation of DOSBox did not match yours.

The two things that annoyed me most about Ultima IX were the removal of great features from the earlier games, and the severely restricted choice of actions. A moral dilemma is not much of a dilemma when you have little freedom in your actions or, especially, choice of words. Curiously, the jumping puzzles and the other action game detritus distracted significantly, for me, from the more interesting aspects of the game, such was the overriding question of, how do you behave when thrust in an unknown situation? You could tak Star Trek approach, and refuse to interfere with the natural delopblah blah blah, as in that stupid episode where Wesley is going to be executed for stomping some flowers on the planet of random nakedness. I think even Captain Picard himself would be OK with undoing the havoc wrought by an arch enemy on Pagan. Except for an hour or so of falling flame rocks and some mist, I think overall Pagan is better off after my departure. The Theurgists can quickly learn to heal the natural way (red potions!) and the Sorcerers can learn to blow townfolk up the natural way (mushrooms!), and the guards in Tenebrae can continue interrogating peasants for all eternity.

So ends the game. It's not the worst in the series--I'd put it slightly behind Savage Empire, but ahead of Ultima I and II--and in terms of the concept and "what could have been," it's a very good game--a compelling but not epic plot (necessary after the insane scope of Serpent Isle), a new locale, and so on. So Imaginary Ultima VIII is probably in the realm of Ultima VII or VI, but sadly my imagination, though vivid, isn't what I actually played.

Ultima VIII, Day 5

2007-12-22T17:20:00.000-08:00

I suppose I should take a few moments to specify my blogging goals going forward. Obviously, ultima VIII is nearly done, leaving Ultima IX and ROV2 to play. I tried a little ROV2 today, and I'm betting on < 8 hours of gaming to finish this guy up. Ultima IX will be more difficult, but new copies of the discs are on their way, and I have begun looking into Glide emulators so that I can play Ultima IX without huge numbers of crashes that result from using its normal Direct 3D support. Note that I have really not played games much in the past, oh, six-to-ten years, so I am far from an expert--as I understand it, Ultima IX used Glide, and then Glide died. Way to go guys. According to Random Website, Glide was particularly for Voodoo graphics cards, which I find curious considering a certain other use of "Voodoo" that caused Ultima-related headaches sometime before :-P

I guess I will probably need to be playing on my new desktop instead of my laptop as well...

Back to 1994. My last blog left off with me mastering the extremely easy magic of the Theurgists, and I subsequently decided to go see the sorcerers. I got there and spent a good half hour or so wandering around, trying to find a way over the giant lava river. A note on lava in this game--if you touch it once, you will probably die, because the Avatar just says "Agh!" and does his pain animation, and moves a step back...usually into more lava. So you get him saying "AghAghAghAghAgh" over and over until he's dead; you cannot run away due to the tiresome pain animation needing to run its course. In any case, I eventually gave up and went back into the cave from which I came, a very large cave off of the catacombs, full of water and random zapper traps and a few ghosts. I recalled one other door, and this one led to Carthax Lake, which is the home, sort of, of Hydros aka the Lurker, who controls Tempestry. She lives off of a big white platform with a dolphin on it, and she talked to me briefly, promising that she'd give me Tempestry powers if I freed her. All right! So I did so, and spoke to her again. Turns out I'm an idiot, and she'd rather go kill Devon--"Let's see who can reach Devon first!" Granted, she is (?) the sea, but I bet I reached him first by double clicking on my recall item...Devon was mildly upset, but to my surprise didn't seem to care that I freed hydros, saying that I have an odd luck about me. Then he tells me "Go see the sorcerers" but "Dude, I just CAME from there" is not a response option offered. Incidentally, freeing Hydros causes random fog. So if some of my screenshots seem washed out, that's why.

This whole sequence raised a few questions...
-If Hydros is trapped, in what sense does someone who dies at see "rest with the Lurker?"
-So when i first played Ultima VIII, I thought Hydros was some sea creature, and her tentacles rose from the sea to speak to you. But this time, playing on a gigantic screen, it occurs to me that these might actually be extremely long, thin waves. I propose a vote--is Hydros manifested via tentacles, or long thin waves?

I then continued on to Daemon's Crag, the sorcerer's domain, and home to a huge amount of lava. I chatted with two of them--Bane the Friendly, and Vardion the Jerk. Thinking that these guys are a bunch of liars, after speaking to Bane, I used the "Speak Truth" spell before talking to them, or at least before talking to Vardion. Bane had previously informed me of my and her truenames, and she asked me to help get Vardion's. Ah, what a dilemma! But since the "Speak Truth" spell had no effect, I assumed that Vardion was genuinely concerned about Bane, and therefore gave him her "truename" which he promptly used in order to kill her with a daemon (I guess she didn't have "banish daemon" prepared?)

With her dead, and me surprised, the Sorcerer leader Malichir comes by and tells Vardion to hurry up and train me. I will skip over the training, except to say that sorcerer spells are a pain in the rear to set up, but nowhere near as annoying as before the patch is installed. I had assumed that, much like Necromancy, I would be wandering around with the spell reagents in a container, but since the reagents do not stack, this didn't happen! In any case, with that training done, he sent me off to the Obsidian fortress, which is worthy of a new paragraph.

There are basically 5 things to note about the obsidian fortress:

1. Arcadion, the black sword daemon, is there. He's been trained as a sorcerer, but he doesn't recognize you. Apparently this is him back in the past or something.

2. Much of the rest of the fortress is spent wandering around, collecting pentagram symbols. These symbols are blue, and you should avoid at all costs single-clicking on them, because your game will crash. Apparently someone didn't bother to give them an official name.

3. Flame Sting, a nice weapon which causes bursts of fire when you use it, is hidden, well not so hidden, in the Obsidian Fortress. It's probably my favorite weapon, even though i was also fond of the thunderclap produced by the Slayer mace.

4. At one point, you are attacked by some random children. So this game has at least two cases of kiddy attacks! Wow.

5. Vardion is also a jerk--he never bothered to tell me I need an ignite spell prepared, though he did tell me about the candle I needed. After you pass the Obsidian fortress, you summon Pyros with the assistance of Malichir and some other sorcerers. But since I did not have ignite prepared, I tried to light my candle myself. Silly me! This made Malichir mad, and he began shooting fireballs at me, but I was wise and dodged behind one of the other sorcerers. Thus began a massive sorcerer battle royal, in which everyone summoned daemons and send blasts of fire at everyone else, while I hid myself away. I assumed this was not the way the game was supposed to proceed, and reloaded.

I still was unable to create an ignite spell, because of the paucity of Malichir's reagent selection, but at least P survived this time. Pyros is not as violent sounding as he ought to be; I think the voice is not so great. Afterwards Malichir expresses his irritation wit me via a flame bolt. Jerk!

I quit at that point, having played for more than the usual two hours. The next thing to do was to go speak to Malichir about the tongue of flame, which I need to escape the island...

Ultima VIII, Day 4

2007-12-21T21:25:00.000-08:00

COME YE SEEKING TREASURE? WELL IT IS DEATH YOU HAVE FOUND!

Thus says the spiderwebby skeleton of Khumash-Gor, just before his ghost arises, which in turn is just before I cast "grant peace" before he can toss an exploding skull my way. Stepping back twenty minutes, and I'm wandering around the Zealan temple. This part of the game was one of two or three that required a walkthrough, due to this one annoying part where you have to toss a tiny little rolling sphere to activate a pressure plate that I did not realize existed. This part of the game also featured a multi-colored laser beam that kills me if I walk through it. Odd.

Speaking to the Zealans was interesting. I don't remember their names, but there was a generic woman, a Klingon-sounding warrior, and a guy that sounded like he was extremely bored about the whole process. In any case, they instructed me to steal a pyramid tip for the purposes of getting off the island.

From there I headed to the Argentrock Isle, where the Theurgists hang out. I encountered a few old guys, some generics, and one young fellow who had done a great job passing the theurgist test, except for the final one, where all you have to do is cast heal on a Torax. Humorously, I never did figure out how to get out of the pit with the injured Torax in a legitimate way, and I then used Mythran's recall item to get away. The first test I passed was a series of simple questions, and in the case of the second test, it merely involved collecting lumps of silver from underground. In fact, the lumps were large enough that with each one of them I had to dump some other object onto the ground, beginning first with my mass of "destroy trap" scrolls, followed then by yellow potions.

The metal was required for creating spellcasting focuses--and in fact, I am happy to note that all that's needed to cast the very useful Theurgist spells (notably--"Aerial Servent" to grab objects from afar, "Restoration" to...well, restore you, and "Wings of Air" to allow you to leap over obstacles and land far away from here you intended, usually drowning in the process.

So apparently, about an hour of training allows me to become a Theurgist, blowing away even the young fellow I mentioned earlier (Torwin) in my speed of learning. It's cool that in Pagan, becoming a high powered mage takes a few minutes. Of course, I have the sizable advantage over other students of being able to save and load my game. Ever considered how useful such a feature would be in real life? In any case, creating the focuses required a trip back to Tenebrae, where I decided to take the time to rescue poor old Devon from the jail. A cinematic encounter later and Mordea is dead, and the two other Tenebraean characters are laying on the dock groaning. With the focuses I headed back to the island where i discovered that Brother Xavier's healing touch focus was stolen, and he was too stupid to cast "Hear Truth" and talk to the other three people in town about who might have it. Turns out it was the young fellow Torwin, who intended to use it to resurrect his father, the guy executed at the very beginning of the game. Of course, his father's head is in the sea, so resurrection entailed that Torwin jump off the cliff and into the water and die. Oh well. He dropped his ring on the way, and I took it back to his mom in Tenebrae. Actually, I did that waaaaay later, but pretend it was now.

From there I spoke to Stratos, the maternal whirlwind sitting on a rock nearby. She told me I could not have the breath of wind which was too bad, since I had only just then realized that the breath of wind would be a cool artifact to have.

Now I will agree with a comment: Theurgy sucks. In fact, I only ever bought the very first spell, the confusion blast, which I never used because the damned reagents were so insanely expensive, though I almost felt I SHOULD use it because otherwise I have no use for obsidian in the game. By the time I hit Stratos, i was almost covered in magic armor, so the stores in Tenebrae were not much use, and I don't need to eat either. Oh well. I

Comment

2007-12-21T09:35:00.000-08:00

I feel compelled to reply re: "Have you ever played Zelda?" I was thinking specifically of the side-scrolling palaces/bridges/etc in Zelda II where, as I recall, leaping around bridges suspended in midair, jumping over chasms, and crossing collapsing rock-bridge were all common requirements. Maybe Castlevania would have been a better comparison. I was trying to think of an analogy with some other RPG that involves lots of jumping around traps that are difficult to imagine actually existing.

Ultima VIII, Day 3

2007-12-20T19:30:00.000-08:00

So the game continues in the third day! As mentioned last time, the quest involved in his day was to seek out some corpses, talk to them, and then jump across lots of dopey Zelda-esque platforms. Well, actually, the latter was not specifically sated, but I've learned that it is implicit in all quests in Ultima VIII. The necromancers, of whom I took several screenshots which I have no room for (due to the need for an absolutely essential two-shot sequence later), were mostly friendly, except for one who did not trust me, and called me "meat." What an insult. Just what are you? Rotting meat! Not very logical, Necromancer. Anyway, they taught me some spells one or two of which I actually used. Specifically, I used "grant peace" to banish some ghosts. There is also an "avoid death" spell that the necromancer who told me of it said I would need at some point, but which I do not seem to need. Leaving the necromancers put me on the roof of the catacombs, and leaping off required some extra healing potion because they are very tall indeed.

From there it was off to Tenebrae to be confused wondering what the heck I did wrong, and then subsequently off to the catacombs again in order to go talk to Lithos, the Titan of Earth, and connoisseur of corpses: "Her rotting flesh will perfume my garden of delight" was most definitely his most memorable line. The way there was riddled with danger, mostly in the form of more Zelda transplants, including mysterious rocks floating in mid-air for no reason, rising and lowering stones, and everyone's all-time favorite--Vanishing platforms! I also had to explore this annoying area where pillars produced dangerous blue fields between them, though once I got to the end, I received the treasure of the appropriately named, "Blue Field Passage Gem." Ever wonder how the Avatar just knows the names of stuff you click on? It was particularly silly in Serpent Isle; click on a weird glowing circle and it says "Chaos Serpent Eye." Oh...of course! In any case, this quest was kind of tiring, due to the sheer amount of craling and jumping and monster ignoring you have to do. On the plus side, I found a sweet axe called Deceiver nearby. My only complaint is that it isn't very fun--Slayer claps thunder when you kill a monster; Flame Sting burst flame, but this one just sorta kills things, with no special effects :-(

When I returned to the necromancer (what's the guys name? Vividos or something? I keep thinking of "Vardion" but I know that's not him) he told me I was now able to seek the Birthplace of Moriens. He describes the amazing experience he had there, though not in any detail. He also made me totally confused by giving me "the key of the scion," which looks exactly like the magic wand with a skull that is used to cast necromancy spells, except this one actually oens doors...somehow. Anyway, it opens a lot of the locked doors I found in mapping the catacombs, and one of them is labeled "The Birthplace of Moriens." In the pre-patch version of the game, it was labeled as "Towards Fate Do You Travel," and the Birthplace did not exist. That's the kind of totally bizarre problem that I just do not understand--how can that have gotten through any kind of playtesting, or even a brief survey of how the quest was supposed to be accomplished?

In any case, the end result is not as inspiring as implied by Mr. Vividos. You can almost see the little speech bubble over the Avatar's head saying, "What, this is it!?" Fortunately, just around the corner there's a bunch of Zelda traps that you can easily escape, including...well, I won't say dumbest, but man it's silly...the rolling spiked ball. I think it's in the top 5 absurdities of Ultima VIII. Let's make a list:

1. Morgaelin's complete lack of continental shelf
2. Rocks floating conspicuously in midair
3. Physics-defying spiked rolling balls
4. Vanishing midair red platforms
5. The skull of quakes

The Skull of Quakes you ask? Why, it's found pretty nearby to the spikey balls I just described. What possible use could a skull of quakes be? Isn't it obvious that you would go somehow place it inside a mysterious red half-circle, thereby causing an earthquake to open a teleport pad? When I first played Ultima VIII, the only reason I thought to do this was way into the game, when I was literally double-clicking the Skull of Quakes and trying its little cross hairs on everything. So bizarre! Ahhhh.

If you have other notable absurdities, please add them in comments! I might start having to approve them due to excess spam, but I hope not to...

Ultima VIII, Day 2

2007-12-16T18:24:00.001-08:00

Well, my second day was focused on the necromancers, although for some reason or another, I don't seem to have any screenshots of the necromancers. Maybe they are actually in Day 3? Anyway, this involved two quests. One involved collecting some reagents--Executioner's Hood, which was under a tree near the cemetery (and which is aptly named), and some sticks, which, humorously, only come from one tree off in west tenembrae, and which are called "dead man's elbows" (not so aptly named). The second one was one of the more amusing quests in the game due to its absurdities--Mordea, the Tempest and leader of the city of Tenebrae, stole the ceremonial dagger that is needed to kill of the dying Necromancer. I am unsure why she did this--the net result would ultimately be Lithos, the local titan of the earth, getting annoyed and causing earthquakes and so on. Anyway, she has it hidden in her bedroom. The key to her bedroom is hidden under a pillow, and her servant gave me the key to the chest in her room where the dagger is hidden. Well, I wandered in to fetch the thing while Mordea was asleep, and made the mistake of assuming the chest in question was behind her bed--needless to say, she got upset and killed me. This happened repeatedly, until i broke down and slept so that she'd leave.

And slept.

And slept more.

But she never got out of bed! Then I remembered a notable detail of this game--time doesn't pass until you trade screens. Did I talk about this in the last blog? Anyway I went out and came back in, and indeed, Mordea was awake in her throne room, yapping about the need for more executions. So I just walked past her, into her bedroom, opened her closet, retrieved the dagger, and went and returned it to the Necromancer, and he was kind enough to make me his acolyte. Technically, he was not yet the Necromancer; instead, it was a woman on an altar, who he promptly stabs to death. From there I was sent to the catacombs to meet the previous Necromancers.

And boy did this waste a huge amount of time--nowhere in the game are you told "this is the necromancer's den." Instead, you just have to randomly walk into a room whose floor collapses under you. Of course, it's surprisingly hard to go down holes in this game (this is why I did not get Slayer), and I ultimately had to aim a jump just right to end up falling in the hole. But that is tomorrow! There are also some levers that turn the world upside down. I don't understand what this means, exactly, in terms of the actuall experience of the Avatar, though.

In the meantime, Bentic was executed. Eek. Poor library guy. Devon, the fisherman who rescued me, was also imprisoned. I had a chat with him, and saw Bentic's book hidden in an evidence room in the jail. I need to do something about this, but I was unable to find a way to get into the evidence chamber...

Finally, some comment replies. I agree that the characters are well animated, but they are ugly in the first place, and a smoothly-moving blurry blob is still a blurry blob. I also find the animations pretty annoying, in terms of interaction with the world--it's infuriating when I can't attack a monster because I am busy going through some random animation sequence (or worse, when I am going through the various directions of rotation before I can turn around and run away). Agh. Finally, I would note that it's a bad idea to get too creative about getting places. I have a screenshot here of me hidden underneath the waterfall, because I accidentally fell behind the wall there. I have similar shots in the catacombs and elsewhere, so we'll see more of this.

The day associated with this part was pretty good. Except for the catacombs, which are interesting but which need better directions. Making the map was particularly fun; I haven't ade many maps since Ultima VI or so.

Ultima VIII, Day 1

2007-12-10T19:12:00.000-08:00

Well, it's the moment everyone hs been waiting for. Well, only a few oddballs who love this game. I for one, do not love this game, and I was going in with such low expectations that if it had electrocuted me, I would have been impressed. Actually, that's Ultima IX--Ultima VIII would impress me by merely kicking me in the shins.

In all seriousness, as I play the game (this blog is also retrospective, but on the advice from the Serpent Isle posts I will not specify how retrospective) I can get a pretty good idea what a really cool game with the same premise and world would have been like. The first thing you notice, from a modern perspective, is how absolutely desperately his game wants to be 3D, from the jumping and climbing, to the excessive frames in the character art, to the fact that the walls are so huge that it's easy to randomly lose objects behind them. But the fact that it's decidedly not 3D leads to some of its biggest drawbacks...

1) The isometric perspective where you and monsters are constantly hidden behind walls and other objects
2) The hideous character art. Faces are like smudges. Beren looks like Gumby with his weird parabolic arms. They're all like really low-res 3D models
3) The fake 3D models require huge numbers of animation frames, wasting space that could have been used for more monsters, weapons, more everything

As far as plot goes, this day was spent wandering around Tenebrae. The place is mostly empty except for generic peasants and guards, sometimes in pairs, spouting the same lines about paying taxes over and over again. Let me see if I can remember everyone inside the city walls...There's the tempest, her manservent, her bored girlservent, Orlock the bartender,his waitress, the goth buffoon with the giant axe and no clothing, the trainer, and...oh yeah, the blacksmith. That's eight. I guess it's better than the typical town in Savage Empire, but yeesh. Beyond that we've got three guys living around tenebrae, four tempests, five(?) sorcerers, and a necromancer. And an old hermit. So the whole word is pretty tiny.

I forgot Bentic, the dude who is unable to rise from his chair! He is at least colorful-looking.

Like I said, my first day was all wandering around--I found a pit that as I recall leads to a magic mace, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to climb into the hole; the Avatar merely walks around it. I also talked to Mythran, the old hermit, who gave me an item that recalls me to various locations (with the inventive name "Recall Item"). He also makes potions and has a bunch of physics-defying, endlessly rolling spiked balls in his foyer. I'll save my floating platform/sinking stone/etc. bashing for later, when it becomes extremely absurd. But suffice to say you end up feeling like you're stuck in Castlevania in this game.

None of this is to say that the game is necessarily bad, but the first impression when you play is, "Holy crap, what did they do!?" Most of the cool features that have been hallmarks of the game since Ultima V have vanished, some of the best features of the latest game (the paperdoll inventory, the awesome character portraits) have been eliminated, or in the case of the paperdoll inventory, made so non-functional that it might as well not exist.

Now I feel compelled to list some high points of the gameplay.

1) Being able to climb and jump allows for some quick navigation. In Serpent Isle, there was this ridiculous walled-in area east of Monitor with teleporters inside, and it was simply insane that you couldn't just jump over the section of wall that looked about 1 foot high. Here, you eel less absurd because you can.

2) I'm having trouble thinking of anything that isn't plot or concept related instead of an aspect of the gameplay or construction of the world itself. I know a lot of people love the music, but I find almost all of it forgettable. I enjoy breaking out tunes from Ultima VI and Ultima VII outside of the context of the games now and then, but in Ultima VIII they seem like mood music that is uninteresting outside the game context.

So this blog is a downer. I will be nicer when I actually get involved in the plot. I thought it was ironic, though, that Ultima VIII included a parody of a competitor, the description of which might apply to this game ("a pale imitation").

Man I don't look forward to playing Ultima IX. Oh, I should add that I looked up ways of improving DOSBox performance, and found that you can set the CPU core and cycles to "Auto" and the improvement is shocking. The game went from barely playable with slow movement and skipping music to almost too fast. Why, why, was this not the default!?

Serpent Isle, Day 18

2007-12-01T15:58:00.000-08:00

Well, it's time to end the Serpent Isle blog! But I must first acknowledge an error--In the last blog, I described killing off the Trapper, when in fact that happened on this day, as you will note from the screenshot! (Did I mention he oddly killed the remainder of the Gwani but left their bodies just laying around instead of skinning them?) It was the last thing I did before Dupre was sent to sacrifice himself.

Actually, that is a mistaken phrase. In reality, after I finished off the Trapper, Xenka informed me that one of myself or my Companions had to sacrifice him/herself for the greater good. I drew the shortest straw, and so we were all sent to Monitor, where I removed Renfry's ashes from the crematorium machine (Renfry rand the cremation service in Monitor--this was one of the more amusing details of the city's destruction) and pulled the lever, intendeding to hop in. But alas! Dupre felt guilty for all the crimes he had recently committed, and leapt in in place of me. A sad tune plays and you see a nice brass urn roll out from the machine.

So what did Dupre do, anyway? Iolo slaughtered people in Fawn; Shamino blasted them in Moonshade, but it's not clear that Dupre did anything at all, besides sit around the White Dragon Castle and plan for my doom. Anyway, this sacrifice by Dupre fulfilled the crystal ball prophesy in the ice caves of Ultima Underworld II, which I am sad to report I did not get to see due to that game's bugginess :-(

The rest of the game was a whirlwind tour. Xenka immediately sends me off to the Skullcrusher mountains (AGAIN!) to open the Chaos Wall of Lights, and send Dupre's soul into the void so that he can control the Chaos serpent while I go and release the great earth serpent. The more I think about this, the more confusing it is. Why doesn't the Order serpent need anyone to bind to it to control it, or the Earth Serpent for that matter? In any case, this qualifies as the most boring quest in the Ultima series. It entails nothing more than exploring three levels of a gigantic maze in the back of that dungeon (after blowing up some big golden doors). The maze is mostly devoid of anything interesting at all. There are a some rooms, and a few monsters (particularly a dense forest of gremlins that are extremely annoying; I didn't even try to fight them) but no treasure, no books, nothing else. Eventually you reach the Chaos temple area, and if you are lucky, notice a secret door in the back through which you enter and see the Wall of Lights. With the Chaos banes (oh yeah--maybe that's why you need Dupre to undergo this binding; I forgot about that) you send Dupre into the void, and he prevents the Chaos serpent from attacking you.

Side question--where can I download all the ultima voice files? I have a tool that extracts them from Ultima VII, but it doesn't quite work for Serpent Isle, and I am additionally way too lazy to convert the .voc files.

From there I head back through the maze, chat with Xenka, who finally sends me on to Sunrise Isle, a huge dreamland-like "island" which on the map takes the place of where the Eastern Signpost was in Ultima I (creative reference, almost as good as Bulldozer -> Sleeping Bull!) but which gives no evidence of being on the planet at all. Actually, Gwenno did freeze to death there, so maybe that indicates it is in the frozen north somewhere (I gave up trading boots between the Companions and just let her die). Sunrise Isle is largely a series of puzzles--Collect the items that symbolize each virture. Then gather cubes of ice and fire(!!!). The hardest part is the very first one--you have to remove blue and red serpent statues from some pedastals and place them on the scale. The only problem is that the "scale" looks absolutely nothing like a scale I've seen. The only clue that it's supposed to be a scale is a) a chain nearby and b) the complete lack of anything else to do.

In any case, I finally made it to the last chamber, right after I presented the Great Earth Serpent with the serpent crown, staff, and armor, the emblems of the Great Heirophant, which somehow got scattered all over Serpent Isle. As a reward, I was given the Order Serpent Eye, a blue glowing thing. This was good, because I had the Chaos Serpent Eye, and I was certain that the Order one must be around somewhere, but I never saw any mention of it! And the Chaos serpent eye just showed up in the random secret room behind the Great Heirophant's mummy. This was one of the more confusing aspects of the game, I'm afraid. Anyway, from there I took out some servents of the Order serpent (ice elementals), and heard the famous alliterative line, "Slay me! Slay me with the Serpent Sword, and send my soul back into the void!" That sword was the rusty-looking Ophidian sword Xenka gives you, and it's lucky I remembered to keep the damn thing with me.

As a side note, the last time I played this game, I totally forgot to pick up the Chaos blackrock serpent from the slot I dropped it in when I used it to send Dupre in the void, and I was so mad that I broke down and cheated to create a new one. This time, however, I remembered it and finished the game entirely legitimately!

In the void, I see the Serpents all combine with each other in a manner reminding me of the serpents-around-a-staff medical emblem, and then the Guardian snatches me out of the void and drags me to "another world altogether!" Then the game crashed, and I immediately reloaded, played through the last scene again, and finally saw the credits in a relatively anticlimactic manner. I am sad that I didn't get a "You beat Serpent Isle in XXX days!" message, so I'll end this game with a screenshot of a gigantic hand!

Serpent Isle, Day 17

2007-11-29T17:09:00.000-08:00

Boy do I need to finish this Serpent Isle blog up! No fear, this is the second to last day. With luck I shall begin Ultima VIII this weekend! bets are now open on how long that one will take--my recollection is that the game is not terribly long, but there is a fair amount of tedious stuff you need to do to win. But I only played it once, way back when it was released.

Speaking of first times--The worst game-stopping bug in Serpent Isle, to my mind, is the dream world, where if you die, the stuff you had there vanishes. As a consequence of this, I lost a key that is required to open a door near where Rabinrath lives, and thus could not finish the Dream World quest. That is "old news," but I was vaguely reminded of it on the Isle of Crypts, where I could have spent days wandering around trying to get anywhere had I not broken down and checked a walkthrough, learning that you need the balance blackrock serpent to continue onwards. And, quite frankly, day 17 consisted of "finding a bunch of missing quest items." In order of my acquisitions...

1) Balance serpent
Turns out that this goody is among Silverpate's treasure, Silverpate being a pirate who left a map hidden in the basement of the Sleeping Bull inn. That place has since been destroyed, the only survivor being Wilfred, who will join your party, and then cowardly run away if he gets too hurt. Inexplicably, the Sleeping Bull is loaded with dead guys who look like Brendann from Monitor. More inexplicably, there are "trails" of blood that lead to bodies, but in at least one case, the "trail" leads directly through a wall! Anyway, the basement is as empty as ever, and I eventually found the map, teleported back to Skullcrusher (I must have been there a dozen times now), and went and found the pirate's treasure after getting hit by lightning bolts and picking up lots of those annoying caltrops.

2) Order serpent
Technically, I probably fetched this one on the previous day, when i went to Moonshade, but it's worth mentioning here--I get the key to fetch this Serpent from...erm, that guy...from the dungeon,,,thief who people want dead? This is the blackrock serpent which I picked up in Ultima Underworld II, making Ultima Underworld I the only canonical Ultima game that does NOT get a reference in Serpent Isle. Hmm, actually the Worlds games don't either, do they? Ah well. Serpent Isle is more self-referential than most. Martian Dreams is only mentioned in Underworld II, and Savage Empire in Ultima VII and, obviously, Martian Dreams. This reminds me that I need to post all the UWII screenshots someday...

3) Eye of Chaos
I found this on a gold platform behind the place where the Great Heirophant is laid. Not sure how the hell i was supposed to look there. However, it's clear that when you see a big glowy read thing, you should pick it up.

4) Eye of the Serpent
Not to be confused with the eye of Chaos (or the one of Order!) this bauble is held by an old man in the basement of the Temple of Tolerance; he drops dead on the way out, and it can be used to chat up the Heirophant of Chaos, whose dead body is nearby. This may be the second least useful quest object in the game, the bottom position being a tie between all the random quest-item like junk you can pick up that do nothing!

5) Serpent Crown
6) Serpent Armor
7) Serpent Staff
This was a trio of adventure. The staff required for me to kill the Troll King near the gargoyle city underground. I remember when i first played Serpent isle, I found this staff and had no clue why it was there. I kinda wish the troll would talk to you the way the goblin king did, by the way. From there, I headed north to Fawn, where I discovered nearly everyone is dead except the gatekeeper, who seems unconcerned about eveyone's demise. Ruggs tells me that Mad Iolo (The not-mad-anymore Iolo presumably felt a bit embarrassed about now) came to town and tore the skin off of Yelinda, cut the tongue from fellowship-jabberer Leon, and basically slaghtered everyone else. So I fetched Yelinda at the swamp--still not having figured out how to get to Fawn's Serpent Gate, this proves to be annoying--and once I gave her yet another marginally-useful quest item (a magic brush that the game calls a comb), she sends me to her treasure chamber, which is actually mighty impressive--a firedoom staff, magic sword, magic armor, an infinity bow, and other junk (including the Serpent Armor). Sweet! From there it was south to the forest, where I stopped by a tree and fetched Hawk's treasure, the Serpent Crown, near where I hit up the house of wares with its exploding "glowing box" and the evil pirate. Why did the Avatar not recognize a computer, anyway? Finally I ended things by taking a brief trip to Monitor, noted everyone except Harnna was dead (she had suffered some traumatic brain injuryand did not note the corpses littering the street), and then hit the serpent gate.

Monitor looks good ruined, by the way; I like the smashed walls at the town hall. Why wasn't there more of this? It seems like ruining a town in Serpent Isle basically means trading the chairs for broken chairs, tossing garbage randomly, and making all the fences vanish. Not to say it looks bad, but when I see Monitor, I think the others could have been cooler.

8) Final Serpent Tooth
This is posessed by the trapper, who hacked up (but oddly, did not skin) most of the reamining Gwani. Man, saving the chumps on this island has been such a total waste of time! In any case, I went and found him, he proved to be pretty damned weak, and now he's dead and I have a tooth that will get me to Sunrise Isle, where the game will end. Hooray!

My birthday was last week, just after the Thanksgiving holiday, but I forgot to ask for a copy of Ultima IX, my original CD being lost. I'll pick it up on eBay, I suppose.

Serpent Isle, Day 16

2007-11-22T11:21:00.000-08:00

This will be a shorter entry than I typically produce, due to the fact that this part of the game was somewhat buggy...The bulk of this day was spent in he Castle of the White Dragon, which was full of clever traps and mocking insults from my companions as they tried to destroy me. Interestingly, the first encounter I had was with the king of the White Dragon himself, who I was nonetheless able to destroy with ease. Most of the castle involved finding keys in assorted locations; I should add that I didn't explore anything close to the entire castle! I'm not sure why, but I never made it in the dining room or kitchen or one of the studies; I never found the keys, but I remember from my first effort playing the game that those rooms were at least interesting...In any case, I went downstairs as soon as I could, and made the remarkable discovery that if I were killed by monsters in the game, I would be spontaneously resurrected with Iolo, Shamino, and Dupre, even though their evil counterparts were wandering around the basement of the castle! This fact incouraged me to destroy them as quickly as possible and get out, lest something else go wrong.

Killing them proved to be fairly easy. Trying to fight them outright simply got me killed, so instead I cast mass sleep and killed them. When resurrected, they were all contaminated by Chaos and refuse to talk to me except to say random insane phrases. Guess what I had to do? That's right; off to solve three more shrine quests! At least these are not as boring as the tedious Ultima V shrine quests. Anyway, I had already done the quest at the temple of Discipline, so I merely fetched more water. At the temple of Ethicality, I had to give up some gold and also fight Batlin to the death, and save a man from some flames. I failed the gold-giving-up test once because I failed to notice I had some gems in my backpack. The guy at the test refused to let me take it again that same day, so I simply reloaded an old game and re-took it. The temple of Logic required that I navigate a maze (kind of an annoying maze, too) and then solve a "murder" mystery, of who killed one of the automotons and stole his key.

I forgot to mention another bug--after their crazy counterparts were healed, my companions immediately joined me instead of hanging out at Monkey Isle. So I basically had to carry around a bunch of insane buffoons to these temples. Dupre was cured quickly, but at the temple of Logic, Iolo died in one of the maze chambers, and I had to fetch the water and resurrect him to cure him. Right after I did that, a random monk appeared to me and announced Xenka had returned, and I was whisked off to Monk Isle to chat with a very grouchy ex-farmwoman. She complained about the people in Moonshade, and asserted the justness of Lord British and his virtues.

I wish I could add a section on Day 17 here and do a combined day, but unfortunately too many interesting things happened on that day so I am stuck with this rather lame entry. I am happy, however, to report that I've broken my monthly-entry record since I began working! Oh, I just remembered something I can talk about...a decent part of the second half of this day of Adventure was spent trying to find anything in the Isle of Crypts. Apparently, it turns out you need the blackrock serpent of balance (yet another random quest item) before you can get anywhere, but nothing in the game tells you this fact. I had to check a walkthrough after a great deal of frustration (there is a plaque that reads, "Stand here to continue in balance" and I stand there but nothing happens, argh!).

As a final way to add some space to this entry (so I can jam this last screenshot in, mostly), I'll note that I had to kill a whole lot of jesters, each of whom had one lonely piece of garbage in their inventories.

Serpent Isle, Day 15

2007-11-21T14:23:00.000-08:00

Continuing from where I departed the present time and went back to the Silver Seed...

I arrived back in the Spinebreaker mountains, and headed on to Batlon's hideout, where I promptly killed Brunt, Deadeye, Palos, and Selina. Actually, it wasn't prompt. Selina has to die last and will not die until the others are dead, yet my idiot companions invariably focused their attacks on her. So I would wait around forever and she wouldn't die; eventually, I realized the problem and had the Avatar wipe out the other three, at which point Selina finally collapsed and i could take her useless blink ring and her ridiculously convenient Dispel Field scroll that I will need soon--The second most contrived element of the game (The first was the door that won't open even if you do the right thing, mentioned a few days ago). The next scene has Batlin opebning the wall of lights, something going wrong, the Banes escaping his body an invading my Companions, and the Guardian killing him--"See how I reward those who fail me!"

Incidentally, that comment by the Guardian was my "recycle bin emptying" noise for the longest time in Windows.

I had to repeat that whole scene about six times--first, Boydon exploded, so he had to leave; later, a Juggernaut Hammer vanished after the companions turn all evil. This was followed by a myriad of other absurd problems, mostly due to my failure to save my game at convenient times. Eventually, I escaped and in short order accomplished two goals: Freeing the Gwani horn from an energy field (so convenient Selina had a Dispel Field scroll!) and freeing Gwenno from ther icy tomb with that horn (whee, I'm led along on a leash!). From there I had to cure Gwenno's sickness by acquiring the water of Discipline, which in turn required a visit to Moonshade.

Moonshade is in sad shape. Most everone is dead, save people who I need to do things for me (I think Shamino the Anarch considered this when he decided who would die). For some reason, Ale the Parrot is still wandering around, but Edrin is dead, as is his brother. Rocco is dead too, but Petra yet lives. This is good, because I need to drag her off the the temple of Discipline to change bodies with me. That same temple involved finding some Y-shaped doodads to put in slots on a machine at the front of the shrine, but humorously you can click-drag the slots around the screen! I never found one of the two, but they don't seem to be necessary.

Curing Gwenno got me some information--namely, I need soul prisms. Three of the not-dead people in Moonshade pulled that off for me, but they need items that, conveniently, I had pilfered from Vasculio the vampire back in Skullcrusher aka Skullsmasher. With the soul prisms created, it was off to White Dragon Castle!

But not really. Actually I had to visit three more shrines to get water related to three Chaos virtues: Tolerance, Enthusiasm, and Emotion. Tolerance was the most interesting, since in the process I rescued poor stranded Mortego (though he vanishes shortly thereafter) and talked to a guy who's been alive for hundreds of years because a mouse stole a key and hid in a very blocky maze. Man, narrating this takes forever! The short version of the other two shrines--Enthusiasm: Wander around a convoluted maze that has no apparent association with the concept of Enthusiasm. Emotion: Talk to a green little girl in a wall who explains how to collect some emotion-themed stones that look just like the Silver Seed (bu not silver). I dump this water on the soul prisms (hey, Gwenno references soul cages, as in the Black Gate!) and all is prepared for my journey tothe White Dragon castle.

All this leads to one of the more confusing aspects of the game--What am I doing, exactly? As my recollection goes, Batlin vanished from Britannia and went to the Serpent Isle, where he freed the Banes of Chaos, and then the universe started falling apart with the teleport storms, earthquakes, and so on. Then he opens the Wall of Lights for...the purpose of getting into the void, thinking for some reason that he will beceome all powerful? And then he announces that he's been tricked, the Banes escape his body (why was this triggered by opening the Wall of Lights?) and go into my companions. So did this kill him, or did the Guardian? Or was the "see how I reward those who fail me" just posturing? If the imbalance is causing the storms and all, why is it only happening now? The Great Earth Serpent was yoinked away all the way back in Exodus' day! I assume it's because of the Banes being freed, but the storms keep on happening even after they are trapped...But that's tomorrow!

In any case, I am afraid Serpent Isle leaves me confused if I think about it too much.

Silver Seed, Day 2

2007-11-18T21:05:00.000-08:00

So the Aaram Dol portion of the Silver Seed quest proved to be the most difficult. The other two quests in the Fiend's Domain and the Abandoned Outpost proved tricky, but not exactly difficult. Technically, I only got the belt of strength from the latter quest in a "day" beyond this one, but shhh, I won't tell anyone if you don't...

The Fiend's Domain was hard to navigate due to lots of fire traps--I ditched my companions at the gate because Boydon constantly exploded, and blasted through the puzzles as a result of my quick gloves! Two goals existed--getting the orb (which allows access to the silver seed), and getting the ring of reagents. The latter was created for the Fiend, an unfriendly fellow from whom all sense of Order was expunged. He lost it due to an automoton's mistake, and in fact the ring is visible just outside the gate to his home, though it takes quite a bit of navigation through invisible walls to actually reach the thing. Nonetheless, the quest was direct since all it required was making a map and avoiding a fair number of traps.

The abandoned outpost, like the Fiend's domain, proved easy in terms of the orb and difficult in terms of the magic item (this time the belt of strength). The most clever trap in this section was a series of gates, two of which are not actually there; they are illusions and you can walk right through. Figuring that out took forever! A much more annoying trap related to a golden platform with an obscure sign; somehow, I was supposed to figure out that I had to put a lightning whip on the platform. I confess, I had to check the walkthrough for that. And I'm glad I did; I probably would have never figured it out otherwise! Jumping ahead a bit, the outpost also has a well that may be descended using rope (apprently rope is useless for any other purpose), and some magic force fields that must be destroyed by reading a scroll (that puzzle also took forever, but at I got it eventually).

All this orb collection leads to the main point of the Silver Seed add-on...The silver seed! (Who would have guessed?) Finding it required pressing a seriously obscure button deep under Serpent's Fang, the citadel you are in during the game, which causes a giant cask to move nearby, uncovering a stairwell. I found the cask movement entertaining, because previously I had passed by it and thought to myself, "Huh, I seem to recall there being something odd about that cask..." but because I only ever played Silver Seed once back in 1995 or so, I had no memory of what was special about it. In any case, when i go down there, I am accosted by a group of female monks who want to kill me because they, gasp, serve the Guardian! I had met them earlier before some of my quests, but they offered dubious advice and then vanished, and I failed to mention them. They died, and for some reason they carried keys to a glade where I can plant the now-recovered silver seed. Karnax the monk appears from nowhere, and cheers me on, also telling me that the silver seed cryptically mentioned by the Forest Master is ruined and worthless, thus ruining the mystique of that character. Thanks a lot, Karnax.

Anyway, the silver seed is planted and grows into a big silver tree. Karnax assures me the job of restoring balance will be much easier, which is true, but that's because of my big pile of magic gear, not because of some tree! This is basically where Silver Seed fails--it has a bunch of fun, useful stuff, but it tries to be relevant to the main plot. yet, because the main plot by necessity must be able to be completed without Silver Seed, it cannot be relevant. I think it would have been better to do like Forge of Virtue, and make a neq quest largely unrelated to the main one, but nonetheless interesting. On the plus side, I like some of the new character portraits, and some of the additional backstory you get concerning the Order/Chaos war. Silver Seed raises more questions then it answers, though, the most pertinent being...Where the hell *IS* Serpent's Fang, anyway? It is not present in the main game, which takes place hundreds of years later. Is it destroyed or what? And what about the tree itself, where's that? And how did Karnax get there!? Were the monks chasing me servants of the Guardian back then? But Ultima IX asserts the Guardian came into being when I became the Avatar. How does that work? Ahhhhh. I hate time travel!

But at least the game revealed the Forest Master is just a brainless chump who doesn't even notice that his Silver Seed is rotten. He was pretty rude to me, you know!

Silver Seed, Day 1

2007-11-17T22:26:00.000-08:00

Overall, finishing the Silver Seed took about 5 hours, most of which was spent wandering around mazes, so I am tempted to combine it all into one entry--but nah. I'll do two! But they will probably be shorter than usual. The Silver Seed...It is surprising that it was even made, given the fact that Serpent Isle, after the point you kill Batlin, has a decidedly rushed feel to it, so it is interesting that anyone went to the effort to make an add-on, even if there is a sense of hurried-ness to the whole Silver Seed adventure.

The premise is this--The Monks found an old amulet and give it to you; you go back in time through its use and must solve quests to prove you are the Champion of Balance. There are four quests, and a variety of treasures as well. The first treasure you get is the magic keyring, which from the screenshot you can see that I rather desperately need! Serpent Isle is absolutely buried in keys, man...and they have a lot of types of keys and lots of colors, yet still multiple versions of all of them! It's almost like the wider variety of key types ironically drove the proliferation of keys even though I suspect that was what it was intended to solve...

The first quest I went after was the maze. It was built by some famous architect, and there's also a helmet of light laying around inside, and a cat person. The walls open and close as you step into a room, and sometimes you get trapped, needing to escape by death! Fortunately, you can shortcut through the maze by virtue of the fact that you can often run into a room and then dash backwards just as the wall closes, which would have normally locked you off from the old room, bu which opens doors in the old room--so if you don't like your current selection of doors, you can step into another room and then instantly backwards, and new ones will open. As a result, I finished the maze in like 8 minutes.

The second quest was vastly harder--Aram Dol is a liche that lives nearby. In Ultima I, liches were floating heads, as they were in later games like Ultima IV. I don't think there were any in Ultima VI, but in Ultima VII and Serpent Isle they have become red-robed mummies with crowns on their heads. Aram Dol lives in a big cave area chock full of miscellaneous undead, along with some spider people who are weirdly pixelated--almost as if the artists simply blew up the spider body and stuck a person on the head. In any case, I faced skeletons, mummies, and zombies; there were many secret passages and a few puzzles, leading ultimately to the Showdown with Aram Dol, which was nearly impossible to win. My ultimate strategy came down to this:

1. Have all my companions leave to avoid their deaths
2. Cast Vibrate on Aram-Dol, forcing him to drop all his magic spells (yes, they look like little fireballs and death bolts on the ground)
3. Grab the key to the treasure
4. Get the axe and gloves that he has
5. Use the newfound strength and dexterity to kill the Liche

Even with that strategy it took three or four tries! But ultimately, I killed the liche and got another orb. Ultimately the orbs are used to get the silver seed, a seed needed to restore balance in some unspecified way (more on this weirdness later). While in this lair, I also met a dragon. He had a series of riddles, and I solved all but the last one--and it seems to me my answer on the last one must have been correct, but he insists I am wrong. Let me see if I remember the riddle...

A tailor needs thre strips of the same color cloth to make a shirt. He has a large stack of disorganized cloth, each strip being of one color, and there are four colors. His assistant is lazy, and just randomly grabs cloth from the table. What is the minimum number of strips the assistant must grab to ensure the tailor can make a shirt?

Bonus points to anyone who knows the game's answer and can explain why it is the correct one.

Serpent Isle, Days 13 and 14

2007-11-13T16:24:00.000-08:00

Onward and northward! This blog comprises two extremely eventful days, but which deserve to be combined since, once again, much of the time was spent wandering around and exploring, rather than doing stuff tat deserves extended commentary. I guess I can break it into basically four parts...

Going North
One thing I invariably forget about this game is that after you pass through the Gorlab swamp, you don't really have an opportunity to go back to the towns again. You can do it, but it means you have to trudge all the way back north--you don't get teeth for the northern Serpent gates for quite awhile. So this time I was glad to remember to bring enough cloaks and boots and fur hats for my whole party! Last time I played Serpent Isle, I forgot, and I ended up trading fur boots between Iolo and Dupre; whoever wasn't quite dead yet got the boots until the other was near dead, then they taded...In any case, armed with my cloaks I headed north through a remarkably large dungeon. Among other things, I found a Moongate, a key to the "House of Wares" in the woods near Monitor owned by a disgusting, cigar-smoking pirate named, appropriately after one of the Serpent Isle developers. Also, I went to a lot of trouble to build stairs up to a cool mountaintop tower, only to discover that there was nothing there but some skeletons and a liche statue seated on a throne.

Ice Dragon
Once I *finally* escaped the dungeon, I found myself in a frozen wasteland. I managed to chat to some furry Gwani, who asked that I fetch some ice dragon blood for them. No doubt this would be easier if I had the dragonslayer sword from yesterday, eh? Anyway, this part's pretty linear. Getting the blood entailed "sailing" on an ice raft that we somehow managed to steer, swinging in circles around lots of sea serpents! The ice dragon lair was a teleport maze, essentially, eventually leading to the front of the maze where I killed, you guessed it, an ice dragon--and actually without much difficulty. Delivering the blood got me the instructions for entering the Skullcrusher mountains. This is where linearity sucks--The puzzle you solve to get into Skullcrusher requires placing some runes on pedestals in a certain order. Just a little trial and error uncovers the order you ned to use, and voila, the gate opens! Except it doesn't...Instead, the Great Earth Serpent pops up ad tells you that you are forgetting something. Bah!

Vasculio
Skullcrusher is the Chaos lair, with a convenient Serpent Gate guarded by a bunch of crazed mallet-weilding automotons. Oh yeah, and a hideos vampire who teleports out of his coffin and threatens to kill you unless you give him the Magebane (acquired earlier from some jealous penguins). Actually, he offers a trade...but kills you anyway (though he DOES give you the spell he offered as a trade, which is honest, if pointless). If you drop the sword on the ground, he instead offers to spare you if you feed him one of your companions. Naturally, I said OK, but for some reason Iolo and pals were not very keen on the idea. In the end, we just killed the guy. We also picked up some stolen items which, by sheer coincidence, happen to be the items needed in Moonshade later in the game. Except Filbercio's magic topee; I left that there. The Chaos city seems perhaps too literal in its embodiment of Chaos--the streets are wacky, there are random pools of water, and stairs are stacked in a disorganized fashion. There's also some big, as I recall un-openable, metal doors behind which the last surviving Chaos warriors locked themselves when the Order army attacked. The ultimate fates of the Order and Chaos people are thus not made exactly clear--Order went through the Wall of Lights into oblivion, and Chaos was mostly destroyed except for a few behind a big door...

Batlmost
From there it was a rapid trek across the ice to the Spinebreaker Mountains, where I almost reached Batlin. Spinebreaker is basically one big city-like area with a temple (and two juggernaut hammers, woo hoo!) and a lot of Batlin-set traps. Isn't it sorta odd that the only four dark-skinned guys I can think of in this game try to kill you? There's Shmed, there's the fellow who accosts you in Spinebreaker, Brunt (actually, he didn't--the game failed to trigger his movement for some reason, so I just kinda walked by that trap...) and there's one each in the party that attacks you outside the Mint and in the group inside Shamino's Castle. But I digress. Palos also threatens you, calling you...well, you can read the screenshot. It's a nice Ultima 6-and-previous reference! It's also humorous to hear about something that you personally did in "ancient times" because you live so freaking long...

Now I abruptly end. There were earthquakes and it was clear batlin was about to open the Wall of Lights and, somehow, destroy us all and I needed a break--So I went to the gate in the middle of town and used the Serpent Amulet I was given on Monk Isle and began the Silver Seed quest!

Speaking of a screenshot (like I was two paragraphs ago), I forgot to mention one thing in the icy waters--I found a boat with some skeletons, whose bodies are full of stuff that vanishes if you get too close and they come to life. One of the things they are carrying is a yellow stone that says "stones" when you click on it. I think it's the only one in the game, and it doesn't do anything. Weird.

Serpent Isle, Day 12

2007-11-12T15:01:00.000-08:00

After navigating the very poison-y and maze-like swamp of Gorlab, I arrived in the great northern forest. The name is apt--it's very big, and the trees are somewhat different, with the hollow stumps being brown instead of gray. Among other things, there's the trapper's hideout, a Serpent Gate, and a curiously locked Castle of the White Dragon. The gate is on the site of one of the old Ultima 1 towns, as I recall. There's a dearth of characters up here, save for a trio of explorers, one of whom stole a magic device from one of the few other characters around, the Forest Master, who is from Pagan. The thief, Draygan, is quite friendly, but the burned ship that some of his former companions are rotting on suggests the friendliness is a ruse. The short story is tht you go fetch some herb, and you put Draygan to sleep and kill him, stealing away his orb--it made him invulnerable, but apparently it's easy to steal stuff from him (and not everyone else in the game!) when they are asleep. Interestingly, in a bit of extreme convenience, as soon as you kill him, the Forest Master, who wants his magic thingy back, appears out of nowhere and takes it from you! Why didn't he just teleport into Draygan's hut at night?

In any case, as a reward he gives yu a whistle--are you still keeping track of the unique quest items?--which you use in conjunction with one of the more cumbersome quest items, Cantra's wooden practice sword, to track the little girl down. The whistle summons an attractive and amusing dog, who will also do tricks for you. He sends you off to Shamino's Castle, which, as you might suppose from the name, is the castle once controlled by Shamino. He expresses shock at seeing it again; I express shock that it looks nothing like it did in the old game! We enter through a secret passage and explore a bunch of locked rooms, my favorite being one that has crazy gushing ovens that blast you with steam when you approach. In several rooms, Shamino's former lover Beatrix, daughter of the King of the White Dragon, attacks you, as retribution for Shamino's departure during the days of Mondain even though he was there when *I* dropped by. Don't blame me, Beatrix! Oh, and Shamino...about that princess you had locked in your dungeon back in the day? Or maybe that was how you convinced Beatrix to marry you?

Anyway, I shall cease digging up old bones (pun intended). Eventually you encounter Batlin and his buddies; the latter mostly die, the former escapes, and then you summon Monks to take Cantra's rather gruesome corpse back to Monkey Isle, where she will run around saying disturbing things about desiring your flesh until the end of the game...Eventually, the next time Shamino dies, beatrix heals him and gives him a book of questionable love poetry. In the corner of one of the castle chambers, i know there to be a Dragonslayer sword, which I like to give to Shamino due to its uniqueness, but I'm afraid I was unable to figure out how to open the chest containing it this time through. I am a little overloaded with keys at this point, and I may have missed one...And bashing it didn't work, though I vaguely remember needing to bash it repeatedly? Lockpicks were also not effective...

Tomorrow...The great north!

I should add some more text here to buffer the last image...I guess this part of the game is a little disappointing, because the forest is really pretty big, but you barely spend any time there at all. It's fun to just explore, though.

Serpent Isle, Days 10 and 11

2007-11-11T18:10:00.001-08:00

Well, after vanishing for a week (no good excuse, just lazy), I've returned! I'll continue the Serpent Isle blogging process with the goal of finishing up this week. I'm not sure why there was a request to focus on my blog-related progress rather than my real-time game progress; usually I allot only a sentence or so to the latter, mostly for the benefit of the oddly large number of people who are eager to know when I will get around to Ultima VIII :-P I haven't started that game yet. Once I get very close to finishing this blog I'll begin, for fear that playing it will damage my memory of Serpent isle...

This blog concerns two days, which include a series of time-consuming but not very...evocative(?) adventures. Basically, they were fun to play, but not so fun to try and describe. The first involved retrieving the helm of Monitor from the goblins in the great northern forest, which for some reason isn't frozen like everything else up there. Most of the time alloted to this quest was spent exploring the dungeon there, including finding a nice but oh-so-dangerous firedoom staff (I learned from Ultima VII never to actually use it as a weapon). Incidentally, am I the only one who thinks the paperdoll graphic for the firedoom staff, a wooden staff with a blue glow around it, was pretty bad? In the game world it looks like it's positively flaming! The same goes for the Juggernaut Hammer, which doesn't have the cool flashing effect in the paperdoll that it ought to have. On the other hand, magic swords and flame swords look pretty awesome, and the Black Sword looks especially menacing.

Anyway, killing the goblin king was not so hard. He was disappointed in my failure to eat his Monitor spy. It's interesting that this fellow, Pomidigrum, seems exceptionally brutal and conniving, when the implication is that one of his predecessors, Guodinir (?), was the embodiment of courage (he originally had the helm, and his ashes are used at the end of the knight's test). Anyway, with him dead, the rest of the goblins fell pretty rapidly. I tried to rescue a pikeman, who followed behind me torwards Monitor but eventually ied of a heart attack or something. I also gathered proof that Lord Marsten and Spektor were traitors! I don't really understand their motives--by letting the goblins destroy Fawn and the Sleeping Bull, aren't they essentially giving up control of the entire continent to the goblins? And with the other two Commands dead, how can they possibly expect to hold Monitor? Their scheme is very bizarre indeed. Marsten even lost his "bedmate" (his phrasing)!

But I'll quit ranting. Onward to the Gorlab Swamp, where my party all falls asleep. Interestingly, even automotons will fall asleep if you have any in your party, though they do not strictly announce that they are getting sleepy. Once asleep, you enter the gigantic dream realm, where you see, among other things...
-Dancing naked girls
-Mages torturing one another
-A tiny little moongate that a monk tells you that you need to seek out
-Yourself being killed by Batlin
-Lord British

The latter item is rather sad, as the king is wandering around a totally demolished castle. I was impressed tht the guard-corpse in that scene looks just like the Ultima VII guards rather than the red-and-purple Serpent Isle guards. He's upset by the teleport storms and earthquakes. I suppose I would be too. I run into Smith the Horse as well, though for reasons unknown he does not have a character portrait. He, as usual, gives me a worthless hint. From there I went and defeated a guy named Rabinrath who had put the town of Gorlab (from Ultima 1) to sleep; Siranush in return gives me a serpent...Which was it, the necklace?...which she says was a thing of power from those that settled the Serpent isle after Gorlab collapsed. Interesting--why does she have it? I enjoyed he minor plot detail that she has a dream crystal on her neck that matches the one Edrin has in Moonshade.

Tomorrow...Shamino's castle and the dragon slaying sword I never figured out how to get!

Serpent Isle, Day 9

2007-11-03T17:25:00.001-07:00

The game's done! Only a day or two later than I'd intended, thanks to the Silver Seed.

The day dealt with here was spent wandering the subterranean realm of Furnace, which was formerly known as the Hole to Hades back in Mondain's time. It has since been populated by gargoyles, who moved into some old Ophidian ruins there. Theyhave all succumbed to a sleeping sickness, the same one that is affecting the gargoyles and emps in Britannia, and to some extent the other Gwani in Serpent Isle. It's odd, however, that it is not affecting other "wild"races like the goblins or the trolls. Killing the goblins would be a lot easier if they were all zonked out.

The city is pretty large, and in good condition--its like its people just got up and walked out one day. As I recall, this place was the city of balance, so once the Great Heirophant of Balance died, it's probable that everyone there just walked away. It's possible king Zheklas and his gargoyles also cleaned the place up some, but based on the random corpses laying around, that is doubtful. In any case, Zheklas kicks me over to a test of my knowledge of the Ophidian virtues! Actually, he seems to just test my devotion to the principles of order. By far the most memorable of these tests is the infamous red-worm killing test, wherein I fight off a series of unbelievably wimpy red worms that pop out of the ground, something like whack-a-mole, but with worms, and only one at a time. Dupre is off looking for treasure and becomes progressively more insane as I insist on whacking the mo...worms instead of going and gawking at the magic items, etc. with him.

Wandering around the duneon took in the realm of an hour or more, due to the sheer size of the place, and the variety of rooms to explore. Found here is also one of the most useful items in the game--the Everlasting Goblet, which allows you to feed your companions forever! Now whenever Iolo or Shamino whines about how he "could use a little food," I grab him by his collar and jam the goblet in his mouth until he can't breathe, and say, "WILL YOU SOON BE PLUMP YET OR DO YOU WANT SOME MORE????"

Ahem.

An annoying aspect of Furnace is the fire elementals, these flaming fellows who are an excellent way to kill Boydon. I had to reload several times when he died, since he breaks into his component limbs. He is still amusing, though, because you can put his head in your backpack and he sometimes makes pithy comments. My favorite is when you are falling asleep near Gorlab swamp; his severed head pops up and says "We're getting sleepy" or something like that, instead of the usual "I'm getting sleepy." I like that attention to detail.

After exiting Furnace, I went to the western forest, where I found a bottle of ale and which I used to accuse the Monitor innkeeper of being a spy; he then turned into a goblin and urged me to kill his leader. It's surprising he could stick around so long. I also wonder about his story--he claims he and his wife were ambushed by goblins at one point in the past--is this a true story and he simply replaced the expired inkeeper, or was he, as a goblin, married to a human woman (without her realizing it) and then had her killed? That's some impressive acting ability!

Anyway, that was three inhabitants of Monitor I had to kill thus far, but no fear, all the rest die later except Harnna the healer, who merely becomes insane and oblivious to her surroundings. Much of the first half of Serpent Isle is, in retrospect, totally futile!

On my next day I'll be heading north to the golbin camp and killing their leader and stealing his Helm of Courage, which he stole from Monitor, which they stole from some previous goblin (Guodinir, I think is the name), and where they got it, who knows...One of the more curious aspects of the backstory of Serpent Isle is the goblins, who are quite mean, but who evidently represent courage.

In response to comments--I won't be using that high quality filter in DOSBox, since I don't want my games to appear significantly different from the way they once did; otherwise, I might as well play Exult. Sometimes I think playing these old games in emulators is sort of like publishing old books that might be written in different languages and whatnot. When you publish Shakespeare, which of the versions do you use? Do you correct obvious errors in spelling? If someone would make a new version of Ultima III, should they include the elements that exist only in the old Nintendo version? I have contemplated creating a new version of Ultima (Ultima 1)for Windows, one that emulates all the characteristics of the original, but should I also emulate the fact that the game is shockingly slow? Or that the resurrection feature when you die is hopelessly broken and you often get resurrected in the middle of water?

A harder question concerns the graphics--the Apple II's graphics were weird and used only one bit to represent multiple colors; as a result, solid white text has strange colored shadings to it. Should a new version of the game try to emulate the Apple's goofiness, or would it be OK to make the text solid white? What about the fact that it's in ALL CAPS?

I do intend to work on that project when I am done with the blog. The original code is in BASIC and should be easy to analyze and recreate in a C program given some open-source graphics and sound libraries. Not sure which ones I should use though; I've never done multimedia programming before. It should be fun!

Serpent Isle, Days 7 and 8

2007-11-01T18:33:00.001-07:00

In the real-world timing, I am just about finished with Serpent Isle. I should wrap up the game sometime tomorrow, though I might need to play slightly more than two hours (the Chaos shrine in Skullcrusher is a seriously annoying dungeon--a big empty maze, basically--and the Sunrise Isle quest is not exactly brief...).

First of all, on the day I document here, actually two days, I should mention that I obviously misnumbered things so that these are days7 and 8; somehow, I skipped day 3. I should go back and renumber the old entries. In the end, my whole Serpent isle experience will have taken 17 days, plus two for the Silver Seed. I think theat blows away all previous games in terms of length! in any case, these two days were not very interesting. The first was spent endlessly haggling with mages in Moonshade in an effort to buy up all the available spells. I also performed a few dubious experiments for Gustacio, who has been investigating the teleport storms--his logic was not especially clear, though. I don't understand how I was supposed to tell the "change one thing into another" lightning bolts from the "exchange item" lightning bolts--they effect would appear th same, unless the teleported item happened to be nearby...

Ale the Parrot was transformed back into Edrin, an exchange I think pretty much everyone realized would happen within five minutes of meeting the bird :-P I also did some breif exploration. I enjoyed the fact that a gazer that is in an underground area near the town seems to shoot his paralyze bolts up through a hole in the ground. Similarly, the burned out house of Vasculio was a nice touch. I guess I can simpl narrate my screenshots since I'm unsure what to talk about...

The first shows one of the more amusing though not strictly fun parts of Serpent Isle--organizing all the random crap you pick up so that you can carry it all. I end up with a lot of wands and firedoom staffs (which I never use due to their tendency to kill my companions...especially Boydon), lots of food and spare armor, and approximately 100 million random quest items. Cantra's sword, the necklace Ylinda gave Iolo, etc. There are even useless quest items that do nothing...but we'll get to those in the 2nd half of the game!

The second screenshot shows amusing commentary during Gustacio's experiment, but I already mentioned that. The third is in the cave of the ratmen from day 8, whom I was able to put to sleep using a magic harp provided by Mosh the rat woman, appropriately enough, after i gave her fish. I thought cats liked fish, not rats. This particular area seems to be a throne room, but the king and queen of ratment seem to be dead. I wonder what happened.

The final screenshot is a bit of a prophecy from king Zheklas of the gargoyles whom I met at the end of the 8th day. The adventure in his underground domain will bring on us all one of the most important sentences in all of Ultima. 100 bonus points if you can guess just which sentence that is!

Finally, comment on comments...No, I do not use the HQX or whatever filter on DOSBox, largely because I have no clue what it is. As for performance--I have a 1.2 ghz laptop at present, and DOSBox performs very poorly on Serpent Isle; if I have i use too many cycles, the sound gets unbearably choppy and the game too annoying to play. That's my main concern with Ultima VIII. I am opposed to the idea of a boot disk since I don't want to reboot just to play a game, and I would have to make some kind of boot CD for lack of a floppy drive on the laptop. But we'll cross that bridge when I come to it! I do notice that Serpent Isle generates huge numbers of "illegal read" errors in the DOSBox status window...odd.

Serpent Isle, Day 6

2007-10-25T21:11:00.000-07:00

Another day, another gigantic dungeon. Today's quest was to escape from the Mountains of Freedom, which i believe I did in record time, for me anyway. To begin with, I hooked up with Frigidazzi, who falls for me because...I dunno, maybe I just smell good. She dances around, and gives me a kiss which oddly looks like a punch in the face, and we go to bed. Filbercio, her lover and the lord of the city, then drops in, sees me, and immediately banishes me by way of yet another absurd trial to the Mountains of Freedom, the most dreaded dungeon in all the land. Her goblin servent is supposed to leave, but she stays in the corner watching us. Please stop reading if you're under 18, because you can almost make out exactly two pixels that are probably supposed to be nipples. I'd should have gotten a screenshot of the Avatar nude, because him climbing in bed with that gigantic two-handed sword is pretty amusing, and potentially disturbing...

Honestly, I'm not sure why. I guess other people who are sent there cannot save their games, nor do they have a demon sword to call upon, but still! It's a long series of puzzles and mazes, although only the first part has much of a maze; the rest is fairly linear. There are a few highlights worth noting, however. First is this guy named lorthondo who isn't really explained, but who seems to be king of the mountains, and who threatens to kill you repeatedly, but who never actually engages you in conversation. He turns one guy into a giant bone dragon, which was kinda cool. In the end, you have to blow him up via Arcadion, whom you picked up in gem form back on the Isle of Fire. I always thought that was kinda sad, but the way in which the Black Sword is nonetheless used for the plot later in the game is cool. I'm still using it as a weapon, though I seem to recall that as such it's no good until you get it fixed later.

Other entertaining aspects of the dungeon are Stefano, the thief who for inexplicable reasons was tolerated in Moonshade for a long time before being sent here, the depressing dead baby inside a female fighter that you have to kill, and, of course, the Big Room o'Levers. I have a screenshot of that--basically, it's a series of brief and weird, dream-like quests, such as leading some generic woman to her pet nightmare, who promptly kills here; putting carrots on the plate of a bunny, and then giving flowers to a ranger whose gal is dead. He then goes and fixes a stuck lever for you...and then turns into a skeleton and explodes! Wha!?! Finally, there's a tricky teleport hallway that the designers did pretty well, which appears to go on infinitely, until you drop an item and realize you are simply teleporting backwards over and over. Usually, teleporting seems to have a lag time, but in this case it's nearly seamless, and pretty confusing the first time through. Unfortunately, it's one of those things that doesn't replay well once you know the trick!

After escaping the Mountains of Freedom, I made a brief visit to Torrissio to buy Create Automaton, for kicks. he tells me how old his family line is, and says that many of his forefathers were killed in the war with the demons that "brought an end to the age of the two kings." I assume he refers to Britiannia, but it makes me wonder if he realizes that he's on one of the old continents from that time period.

Oh yeah, and I have been skipping out on one of my goals for Serpent Isle, which was to discuss its relationship to previous games--And here I should point out that the town of Brother was situated, long ago, where Monk Isle is now, and Magic was the city somewhat south of Moonshade's present location. The island you teleport to in order to get the phoenix egg was once home to the dungeon called Morbid Adventure, though i think that name would be more appropriate at this point for the Mad Mage's isle! There's also Dead Cat's Life, which is on the isle of Claw, but which you never see in-game, though I believe there was once intended to be a plot item associated with it.

With that cleared up, tomorrow I will tackle two days, mostly because the next two days of gaming were primarily spent wandering around buying spells :-P If you're curious, today in "real time" I killed an ice dragon and am seeking a horn. I still anticipate finishing the game before Halloween, but the blog will extend beyond that most likely--though I forgot about Silver Seed, and if that add-on is too long it ill push the blog into November. But all the better! It would amuse me for the blog to take exactly a year to complete. I am worried about Ultima VIII's performance in DOSBox, by the way. Anyone got tips?

Serpent Isle, Day 5

2007-10-22T21:20:00.000-07:00

Continuing!

The 6th day of my adventure was spent bouncing between islands--the quick version is this:
-Hop on a turtle
-Pull a lever, revive a bird and fetch an egg
-Collect some body parts and make a man
-Talk to a guy who wants to be a cornstalk
-Visit a swamp and get a spellbook

It was actually pretty busy! One cofusing aspect of the game was Erstam, who seems to think the orange glow-ey yellow apparatus in my backpack was his and that it was replaced with the stupid dagger that Lord British gave me (he coulda at least given me a great dagger...), when in fact I am pretty sure it is the hand that got replaced, and the wacky apparatus was the vampire Vasculio's, who got the un-useful Rudyom's Wand as a consequence. But I don't remember. In any case, that seems like a minor plot oddity no one had time to correct.

Thanks for the clarification on the mantra for summoning the giant sea turtle. I had entirely forgotten that those words were Gargish, even though when I looked it up, there was a long discussion on the subject on the Ultima Dragons newsgroup back when I was a more active member of that commnity and I actually remember reading the posts about it now. In any case, the turtle was a bit of a letdown--The back of the box has this cool image of you and your party attacking some dark monks on the back of a turtle, but that never happens in the game, which is a source of much woe. And the turtle didn't really do much, either. The phoenix quest proved more entertaining, since the island was full of those weird green men who attack you, somehow, by stretching out their necks. I was amused that the phoenix seemed pretty nonchalant about its constant rebirth, and more amused that someone had actually gone to the trouble of constructing a lever that served no other purpose but to revive the thing, yet did not bother to revive it. I was reminded of the rather dubious story Tacitus (Roman historian) tells in the Annals about a phoenix, and I was only reminded of that because a friend and I had been reading Tacitus lately and he just sort of randomly interjects that story into the midst of an unrelated topic. But that is itself an unrelated topic to my blog!

Monk Isle also proved fun, but I did not spend as much time there because I know I will be spending a lot of time at that place later--I did read a few of Xenka's prophecies, some of which seem surprisingly specific, certainly more specific than the random prophecies you encounter from supposed psychics in the real world. But I digress...I remember reading that Xenka would return when all the bells rang, and so the first time I played the game I went over to the bell tower and actually tried to ring them all at once. It didn't work.

My favorite character in Serpent Isle is probably the dude that tells me about the tides needed to collect mandrake root from the swamp on Monk Ise (even though a book in the library claims they are random) because he professes to be a Child of the Corn and looks quite disheveled. Along with "Indeed. Put it on the table," the phrase "Canst thou hear the cry of the corn?" is one that instantly reminds me of Serpent Isle. In any case, from there I teleported back to Moonshade via the Serpent Gate (now that Erstam gave me a jawbone and some teeth, I am able to bounce between islands easily, although conveniently he only happened to have ones that keep me off the mainland...)

Back in Moonshade I chatted briefly with Frigidazzi, who would like me to stop by her abode late at night to discuss cold spells. I hope this is not just a ruse to magically undress herself with a rainbow, perform a dance of passion, make the blankets on her bed teleport away, and then have sex, because if that happened, the Magelord would get mad and throw me in the Mountains of Freedom. Wouldn't that be sad?

Serpent Isle, Day 4

2007-10-21T17:31:00.000-07:00

The 5th day of my adventure in Serpent isle began by telling Hawk we needed to hit the water and sail to Moonshade. he agreed, in spite of the danger; soon, myself, a local merchant, a peasant and his parrot, and Hawk were on board ship and avoiding lightning storms. I was fortunate to avoid the "waiting in the ship forever" bug that others have encountered, although I was made nervoud that the parrot walked towards the boat, then suddenly turned the opposite direction and went off screen. He came back a few seconds later, though.

Moonshade is a big island, and of the cities I think it has the most distinctive layout. Monitor is cool because all the streets have names (how many of you bothered to read them?), and Fawn has awesome architecture and a certain empty feeling (Fawn seems full of empty houses), but every home in Moonshade is distinctive and it's very easy to remember who lives where.

Like Fawn, the Moonshade quest is spent, to some extent, waiting around. First, a witch sends me a scroll; then, Flindo arranges a banquet for me. The banquet, much like the one in Monitor, was interrupted by bad news about blood moss, but on the plus side the automaton nearby did not complain when I bagged the whole feast in Shamino's backpack, including the "demon roast."

The next two quests are a little questionable in my mind--First, you have to go retrieve blood moss from a swamp. Why? because Pothis, the local apothecary, is too weak to avoid a few slimes to get it himself. Then, Rotoluncia (the witch mentioned above) steals one of your companions under the brainless premise that because Batling had a pet daemon (actually a gargoyle...), we must know how to control daemons. I guess she "summon daemon" spell from Ultima 6 and earlier has been forgotten? In any case, you have to go kill her, and she proves to also be a total wimp. She is hiding out on an island that previously she'd shared with the ruler of the city; in their shared bedroom we discover a banana, a whip, and a diaper, among other things, and thus learn too much information about their activities.

Back in town, Pothos gives information required to go meet his fater, the mad mage. This time playing through the game, I finally remembered that I do NOT need to write down the mantra and all that are required to summon a turtle to go meet him.

General comments...
Iolo makes an odd statement about how I was able to use power without understanding it in the days of the False Prophet. Huh? Maybe he is referring to the fact that I retrieved the Codex without knowing the gargoyles revered it?

The game got slightly confuse with respect to Mortego. He is standing in his house, asking "How did I get here?" and the like over and over again. However, that's what he says after he is teleported off to one of the serpent shrines off in the frozen north, and it is curious that he's saying it now. He was willing to summon the ghost of Christopher of Trinsic for me, though, who gave me little useful information.

Finally, I retrieved a dubious magical compass from the Seminarium (sp?), and I have packed it away along with a magic orb that gives quotes like "Ask again later" and "You can count on it" a la a magic 8 ball (it also, disturbingly, tells me to trust the Guardian...). I have designated Iolo as my Junk Carrier, while Shamino is my Food and Supplies man and Dupre is my Gold man. I hang on to important quest items.

Serpent Isle, Day 3

2007-10-18T17:29:00.001-07:00

Victory! Sort of! I finally got to the other side of Gorlab a day ago, that being my 12th (!) say of gaming. This is like maybe 3/5ths of the way through the game, and it's already about aslong as all of Ultima VII took. I forgot how colossal this game is, and of course that's part of its appeal.

Now let's go way back in time...

When I left off, I was standing outside of the temple in Faw, being woeful at Dupre's fate, and in the real world I was saying how the Fawn story is not so compelling because it is resolved in a positive manner no matter what you do. I decided to play it "naturally," and I was sent to manipulate some levers and kill one of the leaders of Fawn, who attempted to slash me with...a decorative sword! Couldn't he afford a real weapon? Yeesh. In any case, the second half of the trial is pretty amusing. Dupre is accused of trying to steal a kiss from the town healer, and Delin the provisioner thinks Dupre's a good match for his daughter. I am especially fond of Zulith whom Ii give a screenshot of, and what I imagine is a completely deadpan, "I don't think that would be advisable" when the local drunk sings a nice lewd tune.

From Fawn I went off to the Sleeping Bull, which is my favorite name in the game, derived as it is from the town of Bulldozer, which formerly occupied the spot in Ultima I. There's not much of a quest there, but I did spend some time wandering the basement. It's always surprising to me that I am the first to discover, say, a hidden door...Is no one else suspicious of the random levers scattered about? One of the nice touches at the inn is the "magical music player" that will provide lots of songs from the game, and elicit comments from your companions ("Not Stones again!" and the like). The primary quest is picking up a woman named Selena who convinces you to go rob the Britannian royal mint, which has been teleported to Serpent Isle and, for some reason, is haunted by weird shape changing, teleport-causing beasties. Selina, of course, is n league with Batlin and a small band of wimps attacks you and tries to kill you as soon as you escape the mint. When she vanishes, she drops a mysterious blink ring, a ring which does nothing, since apparently implementing the blink spell proved too difficult.

Somewhere in Serpent Isel, there is a blink ring hidden in a tree. I can't remember where it is, though...

I alsmot forgot one of the major parts of the game--tracking down all your hidden possesions which are snatched away by the teleport storm in the beginning. There are basically two items that prove impossible to figure out--one is the pile of Filari, which Delin claims is his but which as far as I can tell didn't really replace anything, and the bottle of Moonshade wine, which replaced a map that you didn't start with. Many years ago, I did some experiments by creating items and putting them in my inventory and seeing what vanished, and also by putting certain items on certain characters and trying to make a list og exactly what gets replaced with what. Sadly, that was so long ago I don't remember the results, except that if you give yourself a map of Serpent Isle, it vanishes from your backpack after the storm. The hint book claims that the wine replaced a map of Britannia (!), and so I presume this was just an oversight.

This day also brought to mind one of the weirder parts of the game, one which I deliberately avoided--There is an exploded building in the weeds north of the inn where a major game character is wandering around, for no apparent reason. I was concerned I could break the game by talking to him and abstained. Since Serpent Isle was rushed to release, there are a fair number of oversights like this in the game. We'll talk more of that as things move onward...

Serpent Isle is long!

2007-10-12T18:25:00.000-07:00

Just in case you're wondering where I went...I've been doing something akin to a (slower-paced) Serpent Isle marathon, but after day 8 I'm still in my first visit to Moonshade! I had forgotten how long this game can take. My plan was to get past the Gorlab swamp, then stop playing and do a "blog marathon"...So I'll still do that, but getting there is taking longer than I remembered :-P

So I'm not "stalled" as one person commented. I still aim to finish the game & blogging by the end of October; then I'll do U8 in November, and U9 in December and January, squeezing the second ROV game in somewhere.

Incidentally, I promised something "special" a while back after I finished Ultima VII...and it never happened. That was going to be an amusing and brief play-through of "Ultimuh," a ridiculous parody(?) of the series. However, the game refuses to play in or out of DOSBox, so I'm afraid that won't be happening :-(

Back to gaming...For the record, I am trying to buy all the spells and I am waiting for my mana to recharge so I can cast False Coin a dozen more times or so...

Serpent Isle, Day 2

2007-09-26T19:11:00.000-07:00

This blog covers my second day of adventuring on Saturday. Of course, the phrase "adventuring" is somewhat dubious. The short story is I walked to fawn, wandered around awhile, and Dupre got thrown in jail. This part of the game is pretty amusing, but it's also a bit dull because you don't really DO much; instead, other characters sort of lead you by the nose.

I did experience some humor, though, because I decided to wander into Fawn late at night, but all of the normal plot events still took place--there was a teleport storm, the locals get scared, a drunkard asks Iolo to play a tune, etc. Eventually the local captain of the guard chases me down and I meet Lady Yelinda, the most beautiful person in all of Fawn, although to my eyes she looks a bit too much like Dolly Parton. Anyway, in this brief exchange, a series of toasts, Dupre says just about the most foolish thing anyone says in any of the games, save for everything said by the Avatar in Ultima IX. The screenshot speaks for itself.

So Dupre is tossed in prison for blasphemy--incidentally, Iolo or Shamino say it if Dupre is dead--and I have to attend a sham trial, a concept that will repeat itself in Moonshade soon enough. Much of the testimony is funny, and I posted some highlights. It is true, I did spend much time in Fawn wandering around and looking in houses, eating other people's food since stealing is a-OK in this game. I also tried to construct a stairway up to a crate on the top shelf in the docks, but to no avail. :-(

Serpent Isle is somewhat more linear than Ultima VII, but the Fawn quest is unusual in the degree to which you don't really do much of anything. A pirate tries to kill you, but he shows up wherever you are. As long as you talk to people, you don't need to find anything or flip any switches or kill any monsters. Giving away part of the the next blog--if you choose to just sleep from one part of the trial to the next, the quest you are supposed to finish in between gets solved even though you quite literally did nothing!

So I ended Saturday's gaming just before the beginning of the second half of the trial. This new style of blogging is convenient, since I now have several days of material to write about, but it does not inspire me to post often. Hmm.

As a side note, "teleport" is not in Google's spell checking dictionary.

Serpent Isle, Day 1

2007-09-22T19:56:00.000-07:00

Friday began my Serpent Isle experience. I have to admit--I have played he beginning of this game probably a dozen times at this point, and I have the sequence of quests more or less memorized. Even some of the conversations stick in my head!

The first thing I noted when I originally played the game was how shockingly badly your party is equipped for their quest--Shamino doesn't have any armor, and the weapon selection of the companions is poor at best. I was buried in magic junk at the end of Ultima VII! Where'd it go? I won't even get into the fact that I became weaker, yetagain, right after finishing Underworld II...

In any case, my gaming time was spent wandering around Monitor, chatting up the locals, becoming a knight, and attending a really cruddy banquet in which a fight breaks out. The knight's test dungeon is located where Dead Man's Walk once was many years previously, whereas the town of Monitor was founded near what once was the town of Turtle. There are serpent ruins scattered loosely around these areas, and it seems as if most of the Serpent Gates which connect various places throughout the game are on spots of old towns.

Someone claimed that Serpent Isle was tedious--and I guess I see why; there is a HUGE amount of in-game text to read through, and sometimes the game won't let you read it all. For example, if you talk to Harnna, a healer in Monitor, you can ask her about everyone in town plus all kinds of other information, but after a few questions she says she needs to get back to work! Ahhh. There is also the fact that the game is fond of making you wai around for events to happen--A woman wants to make me a wolf cloak, but I have to kill 24 hours before it will be ready. That's OK since there is a fair amount to see in the town and nearby, but this early in the game it can be boring due to the fact that monsters kill me extremely quickly (in the Knight's test, a gremlin finished me off in three hits...)

I've also heard complaints about the game's linearity before, but I don't agree with them. It's true, there are certain segments of the game that are partitioned from previous segments, but within each basic section, the game is fairly nonlinear--you can solve the three town quests in any order you wish, for example, but all three must be solved before you can head north.

My favorite part of the game is that it's a pretty detailed world, and the order in which you do things tends to affect other characters' perceptions of you, so that people in Fawn remark on the fact that you have become a knight, for example. Also, each town has a fairly distinctive architecture, and even the names of the townsfolk seem to all go together.

So one day is down. I'm surprised that it took a whole two hours, actually! I've not yet decded when I will take on the Silver Seed add-on to Serpent Isle. I think maybe I will do it just before I find Batlin, but I'm not sure yet.

Loose Ends, Serpent Isle

2007-09-19T19:42:00.000-07:00

So it's been two weeks since I finished Underworld II, and about four days since I first planned to start Serpent Isle. I've had a ridiculous problem, however, in that I come home from work around 6:00, eat dinner, and then invariably fall asleep on the couch or a chair until 9:45 or so! Thus I wake up and barely have enough time to do my handful of chores before I go to bed :-P

Anyway...

I feel I was somewhat less thorough in my playing of Underworld II than I usually have been with the other games, or at least I was less thorough in my blogging. I think this is because of the marathon schedule, where I was posting a blog about several days' worth of adventuring. Also, the lack of posted screenshots was a bit of a problem. I'll also grant that UW1 and UW2 have been hard to blog about because their world is less detailed than those of the other games, at least in terms of things to do like the ability to bake bread or build stacks of crates to climb onto walls, etc.

I'm going to seek to rectify the situation with Serpent Isle. I WILL keep to a marathon schedule when I finally start playing, but I will only blog about one day at a time--so even if I finish the game in two weeks of marathon sessions, I'll have material for perhaps four weeks worth of blogs, one every few days. I think writing about two days at a time made the Underworld II blogs less fun to read. The slower pace of posting for Serpent Isle will also mean it will be easier to format and include screenshots, which are highly essential this time!

I will also use the following theme in my discussion of Serpent Isle--In what ways does the game enhance, reference, and/or ignore the history of the series, specifically in reference to the continent as it was portrayed in Ultima I? Serpent Isle is a great game in no small part due to its awareness of its own history, and there will be a whole lot to say about the topic!

The quest shall begin shortly!

Ultima Underworld II, Day 10 and 11

2007-09-04T17:13:00.000-07:00

Another 5.5 hours, another game...

Finishing Underworld II took a lot longer than I had initially anticipated. Much of it isn't worth recounting--I wandered around trying to find the right place to use Altara's scepter in the various other worlds, and then I sought out some mud and basalisk oil (turned out I already had three bottles of the stuff on me--great scott!) in order to, of all things, suck some kind of air daemon inside my body. This took much longer than I thought, especially because a) I kept making wrong turns in the void and falling off ledges and b) No one bothered to tell me that you have to cast Iron Skin in order for the daemon to not slaughter you when you break its container! I puzzled about that for awhile before remembering my previous gaming experience.

Far more interesting are two things. First, I got the serpent statue! The requirements to get it are nutty, but I hit upon them when I got an unusual conversation option--one of the goblins offered to teach me tracking. Odd. So I let him, then talked to him again, and he handed the serpent over! I feel good that now the beginning of the next game will make some sense :-P It's not really a blackrock serpent, it is more silvery than that and it might be facing the wrong direction (though honestly, how can these serpents face any particular direction? Can't you just turn it over?). This quest is way too convoluted though, because it requires you do something wacky--go back and randomly talk to these goblins late in the game--and that you do something totally unrelated by asking him to train you in tracking.

The second interesting thing is, of course, the sequence of battles leading to a meeting with Praecor Loth, one of the more depressing parts of the game, as depressing as the entirety of Killorn Keep. Actually, everything in the game is depressing, all those conquered worlds...Anyway, what makes Praceor so depressing is that the three liche-companions who had served him for his life are so totally self absorbed that they force the king to live as a ghost because they refuse to let go of their earthly existence. I think you can convince one of them to let you by, but not the others; in either case, I killed them all. The "Smite Undead" spell was extremely useful in that regard! When you finally meet Praecor Loth, he is totally oblivious to the fact that he's been dead 700 years, and informing him that the Guardian conquered his planet and that he is buried in his tomb is not very fun; moreover, you can pretty easily see something similar happening in Britannia.

The rest of the game zips on by. The Killorn anti-Avatar, Mors Gotha, stupidly drops her spellbook, and you grab it up; then, she invades Castle Britannia. I killed her by turning her to stone and then whacking her over and over again. Then the game ended, and somehow Lord British suddenly has a throne!

I'll probably post more thoughts about the game later, but I will do something else first...In Ultima Underworld II, you visit eight different worlds. Whenever I bump into the number eight in an Ultima, I feel compelled to associate them with the eight virtues! So perhaps each of the world could plausibly be associated with one of them...

Killorn Keep: I don't think I can associate this dismal, forgotten keep with anything but compassion, as I invariably feel sorry for the dusty old Lord Thribis, the drunken Lobar, and that senile Ogri.

Pits of Carnage: I associate this place with valor, which is sort of a no brainer since you are slaughtering everything in sight, and gaining respect through your merciless killing, and in Ultima terms, valor is all about blood.

Ethereal Void: This is something of a dreamscape in which you encounter bizarre situations, and moreover it tends to be somewhat postmodern and self referential. Thus I can't help but associate this place with spirituality.

Goblin Tower: Here you are forced into a humble position, at least at the beginning of your visit, and you have to hide who you really are, so I would obviously think of this place as representing humility.

Talorous: This one's pretty tenuous, but I think that the death of the Bliy Skup Ductosnore suggests sacrifice, except usually "sacrifice" is you sacrificing yourself, not sacrificing someone else, lol, especially not against his will! But I think some of the other Talorians engaged in risky behavior in order to change their world, too.

The rest are tough. I'd tend to put the Ice Caves in the justice category, but not for a compelling reason except that you are restoring a balance of sorts by preventing the Guardian from drawing power from the world. The Tombs I tend to associate with honor, since the three companions of the king are obviously not behaving honorably, but also I associate it with honesty, as you must force the dead king to confront reality. That leaves the Acadamy, which I can't really see as representing anything.

On a final note--In each world you collect a blackrock gem, but they seem to be rather randomly located. Sometimes, they are in the location where you use Altara's staff to break the connection with the world; but sometimes (like in the Ice Caves), they are somewhere totally random. Hmm...

Also, on a final note, there is a VERY strange area in Praecor Loth's tomb, where you can go down one hallway if you go one direction, but that hallway does not exist if you go the other direction. It's on level three, near the maze with all the portuculli. I found it very confusing and I don't know how the game engine could support such a thing...

Ultima Underworld II, Day 8 and 9

2007-09-01T18:28:00.000-07:00

Well, this actually covers my gaming from the last three days--but one of those days was shorter, so I am not calling it a "day." As one might expect, playing the game is easier than writing about it, especially for the Underworlds because there are not as many random world details to talk about. However...we can speak of the lack of random world details. Where'd LB's throne go!?

Anyway, on Paulon's reminder, I was able to complete the "secure vault" and get a Vas and a Tym rune, plus a few others I lacked. Now I am only missing Ex. And that rune is very useful, because with it you can cast open, a spell I am in desperate need of due to a seriously tiresome portcullis maze in the tomb of Praecor Loth.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

Before I hit that tomb, I went to the Ethereal void and wandered around awhile. The void has, essentially, five distinct sections. The section you enter is this highly random (as a dreaming Blog says, "stochastic") arrangement of platforms and darkness, chock full of gazers, imps and other beasties that do a boatload of damage in one hit (I've had fireballs that did 50+ hit points!!) The other areas are distinguished by color. Here's some thoughts on each:

Yellow: A big annoying maze. Really, really annoying, since there's no automap here (or anywhere else in the void). But fortunately there ar eonly a few floating brains to contend with, and it's easy to finish.

Blue: Here you meet a man who wants some eyeballs, a wisp, and a HUGE number of monsters that fly out of range of your attacks and blast you with distance spells. Agh. There's some treasure, but I died too quickly to get to it. Fortunately, once this is done, there's nothing else.

Purple: This one's a hoot. The first part involves some purple slides, with the final one leading into a frankly rather shocking image of the Guardian's wide-open mouth! From there you hit one of the highlights of the game--A black and white maze full of stick men that brings back memories from 1980 (or last February, for me) and the old Akalabeth. I seem to recall that a powerful weapon of some kind is hidden here, but I don't remember where and I couldn't find it.
Red: This is called the "red hell" and for good reason. It's full of fire elementals and difficult daemons, of a wide array of different varieties. I didn't get too far with my "RUN, RUN, RUN!" method--I leaped over some lava chasms, was teleported to a poisonous swamp, and then to another dark room, where I died of intense poisoning. Lesson: Have magic and the ability to cast cure before coming here again.

At the end of each level, you leap Q-bert like on a pyramid and change it to various colors.

Since I couldn't finish red, I decided to go to the only reamining world instead: The tomb of the kind Praecor Loth. I think the sequence at the end of this part of the game--where you face the three companions of Praceor Loth, the king, and then speak to him and convince him that he is dead and his kingdom is gone--is among the more gripping sequences in the whole Ultima series. I invariably have mixed emotions when I play through that part of the game. SOmetime when the blog is over I'll make a list of all such similar moments that help make the games worth playing.

In any case, I'm not quite to that point yet--I'm just wandering through mazes. On the plus side, I have found a black sword and the sword of stone strike Paulon mentioned in comments to the last post. on the minus side, I don't know where I'm going :-P I think I need to head up to an area marked "EXIT" on the third level of the tomb, but sadly that area is surrounded by flying fireballs. I may go back to Britannia before continuing.

Speaking of which--I just noticed that I have a total of 36 training points. 36! Where did all those come from? I thought you got like one per level. In any case, that emphasizes my need to head back to Britannia--I need to train my attack, defense, and spellcasting. I think it's been dumb of me to ignore spells until now, because some of the monsters really need distance magic; moreover, "open" will do wonders for certain annoying doors...And I have so many random magic items I cannot identify, too!

Allright, enough for one day. I know I am a lazy bum concerning the screenshots. I think when I finish this game (Tomorrow? Monday?) I will start adding a few. I'll probably take a break for awhile before beginning Serpent Isle, by the way. After that, only two games remain in my immense quest!

Ultima Underworld II, Day 6 and 7

2007-08-29T15:33:00.001-07:00

I didn't realize I was so far in my "days" of playing Underworld II! In any case, I have devoted this week to being something of an Ultimarathon, because I have made a point of reverting to my traditional 2-hours-a-day schedule from earlier this year before I had legitimate obligations!

So this blog will document my gaming from Monday and Tuesday, whih essentiall involved solving most of the Pits of Carnage and the Scintillus Academy.

The former was pretty rough--The pits are essentially three arenas, all of which are hard to fight in except the Earth arena (just a simple brown floor) and a lot of people who want to kill you. If you go downstairs, you meept a large group of other monsters which also desire your death! Whoopie! I explored all of the second level and only enough of the third to meet the pre-blogging troll named Blog. Appropriate! He assisted in fetching the gym for the world.

The pits are pretty boring, overall, and a bunch of the generic characters have the exact same portrait as other non-generic characters, leading to confusion. The last time I played Underworld II, I distinctly remember using the pits as a place to win huge amounts of gold: There is a fellow who will pay you to fight up to five enemies, and I would slaughter them all. However, this time around I seem too weak for even one of the male warriors, but I can slice up the women pretty easily (disturbing, perhaps, but there it is). I was unable to find much in the way of good weapons, and no one is even willing to train me in swords there, which was surprising.

The Academy is one of my favorite parts of the game, and far easier than I remembered. It consists of eight levels. The most famous are probably the gigantic 3-D maze for which your automap is useless, and maybe the level in which you have to leap onto platforms that cause other platforms to disappear--the aptly titled "non-reversible processes" test. You don't regain mana during the exam, but oddly I didn't really need to use any magic. A good thing, since I never bother learning magic in the Underworlds and can barely cast Lesser Heal!

I ended my game at the exit to the facility--They have this "secure vault" in which are stored a few sweet runes, but unfortunately I can't seem to get through the door in the ethereal void that leads me there. It occurs to me that I never bothered to try the key that got me in the vault in the first place, and I will feel like an idiot if that works. In any case, I'll mess with that awhile longer before I give up and go back to Britannia.

At present, my biggest problem in the game is lack of training. My skill in swords is very high, but not in attack or defense, and no one seems to do a good job of training either of those skills. Geoffery does them, as I recall, but only gives me like one point per training session, whereas the Dupre-like-guy Lothar in Killorn Keep gives me 3 or so points per session of swords! As it stands, I can fend off most monsters, but some things--male warriors and reapers--give me an extremely hard time.

I may post tomorrow again or wait till Friday, but I expect I will finish up my quest in the Ethereal Void by then. I seem to recall that the hardest of all is the Tomb of Praecor Loth, due to the trio of very difficult enemies you have to face at the end, but I also remember the place being truly stuffed with cool magic stuff. In my next few sessions I also intend to identify some of my magical items and discard the less useful ones in order to make room!

Ultima Underworld II, Day 4 and 5

2007-08-16T17:22:00.001-07:00

Well, I have played a fair amount of Underworld this week. Perhaps not quite four hours. It does seem like "finishing" each world takes roughly two hours, although given my recollection of the sizes of the upcoming mazes, this may not hold true!

The world I beat in this round of playing was Talorous, where some glowing blobs talked with me and assisted me in developing a plan to fight the Guardian. Well, one of them did, the future-predicting one. How did he not predict that the Guardian would ruin things? Anyway, in the process I faced a moral dilemma in having to murder the Bliy Skup Ductosnore, the guy responsible for creating new members of his species. He also has a sense of humor--he left the i on the floor after it fell off from the sign to his room. On Talorous, I made the mistake I always make--I don't realize that the picture on the wall in the lower level is actually a device I need to pick up and use elsewhere!

That quest took up a few hours. The rest of my time was spent in Killorn Keep and elsewhere, just exploring. As requested, I tried to get the serpent statue from the Goblins in the basement of the castle, but I did not succeed this time. I managed to do it the last time I played--I remember that you have to kill a whole lot of worms, then talk to the goblin leader, and then come back sometime in the future and he randomly gives you the gift. I guess no one really gets that thing simply because there's no point in going back there!

Actually, maybe there is. A reaper who has the key to the armoury is nearby, as I recall. In spite of the fact that I just hit the 11th level, I am still too weak to take him out :-(

My general thoughts on the game are quite positive. The game manages to fuse the good points of Underworld I--mainly a strong atmosphere (the ice caves seem very lonely, for example)--with the strong plot of...Well, Serpent Isle, I suppose; in that game, the plot moved forward and there are consequences to your actions. Just a few minutes ago, Dupre told me he's going to go to the ice caves and fetch water for the castle. Granted, he never actually does it, but it's conceptually neat that people are going out and doing things.

My favorite quote from the game so far is a character who found a mysterious key, and who asserts that it "looks as if it might date from the time of Minax!" If this is hyperbole, why not go all the way back to Mondain? It was only a few decades before. And if it wasn't, what dates it specifically to Minax? Does it say "DIE FOOL" on the handle? :-P

Anyway, my recollection is that it opens a door with a mean ghost and some treasure. Thus far I've acquired a magic sword, a magic vest, and some other magic thing (a shield?) but my Lore is too low to identify them. Perhaps I would be better served just raising my mana and casting to be able to cas Identify? I'll have to ponder that one.

-Zac

Ultima Underworld II, Day 2 and 3

2007-08-07T17:52:00.000-07:00

Well, another four hours of Underworld II have passed me by! I can very quickly summarize what I did--in Killorn Keep, I explored and found very little worth having. Well,besides a gem, which I found by accident, and which was accompanied by a key that didn't seem to unlock anything. It is rather see the decrepit old Lord British clone named Lord Thribis. In the realm of the ice world, I was able to dig out the lost city of Anodolous and talk to an unhappy ghost. That city always struck me as weird, due to the mass of locked massive doors, and I can't remember if I ever found a key for them in previous playings of those games.

That city, however, features one of the best parts of the game--You find a crystal ball, and looking into it you see your past and future. Sadly, the game sometimes breaks, and the crystal ball doesn't work. I like it particularly because it's the only in-game reference I am aware of to Martian Dreams! In fact, the fact that the crystal ball did not work was sufficient to make me angry enough to quit playing for the evening.

The variety of environments in Underworld has been pretty exciting, but I have some quibbles. The main one is navigation--I am CONSTANTLY getting stuck on pointy walls. In some cases, like with sliding ice, I have had to re-load a saved game because i just couldn't move. I've also had some trouble keeping myself going in the intended direction. I should probably use the keyboard for combat, too, because nothing is more frustrating than accidentally clicking your compass instead of swinging your weapon!

I appreciate the small details though--the talbes and chairs, and the blood spatters on walls (though British really ought to have a throne). I also like the slow collapse of the ecosystem in the courtyard of the castle. Well...Slow is the wrong word, it's insanely fast. They shut off the fountain and an hour later plants start dying! Ah well.

The game's fun, though. I've picked up an array of magic items that I need to identify. I even found a mani runestone so that I can finally cast heal. Still, there is one unresolved question that is surely on everyone's mind:

Where's Shamino!?

Now, unresolved concerns from other blogs:

Screenshots: They will appear eventually. I feel less pressure to get them for the Underworlds, because they are almost always terrible--you see too little to have any clue what's going on. But they are there and I'll post them sometime.

Akalabeth phone number: For some reason, it doesn't work exactly as it is shown in the display. Try this: Search for (415) 569-9126, no quotes.

Ultima Underworld II, Day 1

2007-08-03T20:08:00.000-07:00

Well, my sojourn into the gem-encrusted castle of Lord British over the past few days went well. What surprises me about Underworld II is how short it is--or rather, how the various worlds in the game vary so substantially in size. The best example is Lord British's castle where the sewers are full of details that you for the most part will never need to explore! In any case, I zipped down very quickly to the gem on the lowest level--This was mainly because it's easy to get there, and because even the relatively wimpy monsters kill you swiftly when you are a weakling level one chump! I found the lair of a gazer and of a reaper, both of which I will kill at some point.

I also believe I have completed the quests associated with the goblin tower, because I got a blackrock object of some form from a leader there. It's curious how cordial the goblins are in that tower, at least to me. Well, there's a trio that call me monkey boy (hey, morons, you're bipedal monkey-like things too, just green!).

Underworld II is very much like Underworld I. The only aspects that have changed are the size of the view window (a little bigger) and the graphics, which are also slightly improved. Oh yeah, there is also "digitized sound," which means that you hear some rather out of place splats and dings and so on when you fight monsters.

Back to the plot--My recollection is that there are eight worlds to explore, and the first, the goblin tower, is by far the easiest. There is a troll in a jail cell on an upper level, too, but I have forgotten how you get it open. There's a guy named Janar or some such who has the keys, but he's fairly friendly and I don't much want to slice him up. Moreover, being wimpy, I can't! I think the next order of business is to go to Syria and others in the castle and get them to train me so I can hold my own in a fight a bit better.

As a final note, I have heard that the castle caretaker Nanna has been grumbling about worker's rights, and soon I'll need to tell Lord British about it, an infamous source of bugginess in the game. I will actually need to consult a walkthrough to remind myself how to solve this quest exactly correctly and not cause a game-stopping bug. Finally, I will need to cheat--Stupidly, I misspelled my name and I will need to break out some save game editor to fix it. Actually, I might be able to simply open one of the files in a hex editor. We shall see.

I only did four entries in all of July! How sad. But then, that's what employment does for you I guess. Underworld II may go faster than I speculated, but I am taking it at such a snail's pace that it may be awhile before I am done!

Runes of Virtue, Day 4

2007-07-21T13:12:00.000-07:00

Well, strictly speaking my 4th day of Runes of Virtue was sometime at the beginning of this past week, but somehow I have not gotten around to blogging about it until today. A large part of the reason is, of course, that there's so little to say. The Isle of the Avatar's Stygian Abyss is, as one would expect, chock full of crazy traps and creative puzzles. Some of them, for example, require you to push rocks around and create passages in walls with them using a lever that makes walls vanish and reappear (it's difficult to explain...), and on more than one occasion you must take advantage of your enemies' capacity to kill each other and/or destroy spider webs. My least favorite puzzles, however, are the big rooms full of blinking teleport arrows. You must use them to move to the exit, but the fact that a screen full of dozens of blinking arrows gives me a headache added to the challenge significantly! There's some magic armor in the abyss and it was, to my surprise, not very difficult to get to. The endgame, as one might expect from the Game Boy, is relatively anti-climactic. You disappear from the dungeon where you got the rune of humility, and appear kneeling before Lord British. The end.

OTHER UNINSPIRING ULTIMA ENDINGS
-Ultima II, which gives you an ad for another game in the Sierra version (anyone recall which game? I can't get my Sierra copy to work)
-Escape from Mt. Drash where you are told in block text on a mold-green background you achieved the title of "Questor." Woo hoo.
-Ultima IX, where that idiot Raven and Lord British look up to see that for some reason you have exploded and have turned into an ankh made out of stars in the sky.

I was tempted not to include Ultima II because of my fondness of the "ALL HER WORKS SHALL DIE!" message that you receive upon Minax's death.

Back to the issue at hand--Runes of Virtue. Overall, and amusing diversion. THe only serious flaws of the game are the irrelevance of the premise (retrieving runes related to virtues) to the dungeons (which have nothing to do with the virtues) and the odd game mechanics (pushing levers and eating mushrooms seem to have about the same effect, and how does a rope build a bridge?). Beyond that, the game is not overly challenging, and the ability to restart over and over makes up for its lack of a save feature (though in a world of emulators, who cares about poor save features anymore?) I would not suggest the game, however, for an actual Game Boy due to its length and the repetitive nature of gameplay when you cannot save. As a final note--I still think those wizards look like vampires! Look at the big black cape with high collar and the pointy teeth!

One could argue that the game is canonical--After all, it appears to take place sometime following Ultima VI, and the goal is to rescue the Runes and become knighted, and a certain drunken paladin has just recently been knighted as of Ultima VII. Never mind that he was apparently a "Sir" long before that. And even if he wasn't, Lord British has some pretty stringent requirements for becoming a knight if it takes, what, 300 years of continuous service?

Expect a slower rate of updates for the next two games--Underworld II and Serpent Isle. The reason is simply that playing them is less fun because it's only been a little over a year since last played the games, and Ultima is more fun when you've forgotten a large portion of the game. On the other hand, it's been about 7 and 12 years since I played Ultima VIII and Ultima IX, so those will be a lot more fun for me. Plus, those two games are not particularly good, and it's a lot easier to write criticism than praise :-) I remember when I started the blog I speculated that it might take a year to do--but I kept up a pretty intense pace back when I was unemployed, and it seems like I'll probably be done before Christmas as I result, despite my much slower-goings lately.

I also need to take some time at some point and reply to comments and other feedback again. Maybe during my Underworld II blogging!

Runes of Virtue, Day 3

2007-07-14T16:01:00.001-07:00

My third day of adventure in Britannia, or in some domain that has a certain amount of resemblance to Britannia, I retrieved the rune of honor and the rune of humility. After the last rune, I took an underground passageway to an island that presumably represents the Isle of the Avatar, and where Beh Lem allows me to borrow his boat. And look, he has wings now!

The game is somewhat devoid of plot, so there's not much to comment on. I guess I can talk some about the various items and creatures you encounter. A lot of the Ultima denizens we know and love are there, including reapers (which are stationary and shoot laser bolts), trolls, various forms of rats, skeletons, and the now-violent-again wisps, which teleport around and zap you. Less tied to the computer games are the vampire, the rolling-boulder-thing-with-a-face, tigers, and unfriendly giant heads a la the Olmec. The hardest monster is the black shadow guy, which I don't recognize. Most of them are easy to avoid, though sometimes they hit you just by going past you.

As far as player characters go, you choose between Iolo, Shamino, Dupre and Jaana. Iolo is fast and has a bow, Shamino starts with a magic axe, Dupre starts with armor, and Jaana...I don't know what she does. The game claims she can wield powerful magic weapons, but i already am using a magic sword as Shamino. The world itself resembles Britannia, but islands are much farther away from one another, and the main continent seems to have been chopped into a couple of pieces. The towns and castles just have one or two characters, who also oddly are wandering in the dungeons as well, offering advice and/or sarcastic comments. Among others, we get to see Ultima 6 characters including Dr. Cat, Sherry the mouse, Chuckles, Ariana, that horse seller who wants to sleep with you in Trinsic, Beh Lem, Finn, Kilp/Klop the two headed horse, and Budo, the pudgy armorer from Yew. Wait, that's not Budo...Budo was the fat theive's guild man. What was the fat armorer's name? Anyway...

In the game, you can use soup to raise your health and panpipes to freeze your enemies. I am not very inspired by the controls, because they make it difficult to attack in a direction without also walking in that direction--there is no "turn around" button, just a "walk in this direction" button. Sometimes I can get it to work, and I can move left and right while firing downward at something, but often I walk forward right into someone's fireball!

The game is nearly finished after a good five to six hours. One more hour will probably wrap it up, once I complete the abyss. It might be amusing to go back and play as Jaana, to figure out what exactly she can do that Shamino cannot.

Runes of Virtue, Days 1 and 2

2007-07-10T18:58:00.001-07:00

Ah, it's nice to have a PC again, although it is sad to see the skeletal remains of the old one, after I yanked out all the cards and drives. It was surprisingly hard to find a motherboard with floppy support for my 5 1/4 drive! Oh well

Runes of Virtue was an Nintendo Game Boy adventure game released sometime around 1992, either before or after Ultima VII, and I suspect after. It features Birtannia, approximately, and various characters you might recall from Ultima VI, including Dr. Cat, Sherry, Finn, Lord British, and some woman I don't remember. The basic premise is that someone has pilfered all of the Rune of Virtue, and you have to go on a quest to retrieve them, with British telling you where to go, although strictly speaking in some cases you can ignore the guy. They are hidden in caves, with the caves full of traps, mazes, and assorted monsters, including wisps, slimes, trolls, blob things, gremlins, vampires, and even the seahorse, not seen since Ultima V! There are also some shops scattered about

Each dungeon tends to have one or two items, sometimes a weapon and often some sort of useful device. For example, one has a fire wand to burn dark spider webs, one has a lightning wand to zap knights, and one has a rope to cross water (No, this doesn't make sense). The game's something like a combination of Zelda and Lolo, with the puzzle-solving and such of the latter with the wandering enemies of the former. The graphics are pretty good, but I miss the blurriness of the LCD display, which an emulator just doesn't give you!

You choose Iolo, Shamino, Dupre or Jaana; I chose Shamino, who has a magic axe and a transparent face(!). When you find a rune, incidentally, you look JUST like Link in the original Zelda, when he lifts up a piece of the triforce. Thus far, I've gotten through 6 of the dungeons, many of which have been renamed for the ignorant among us--Hatred, Cowardice, Selfishness, Pride, etc. No more Covetous. The game's non-canonical, but nonetheless an amusing diversion from the much longer, hardcore games I will be playing soon! Four hours has gotten me this far, and I have to say...thank goodness for save states, or the game would probably become outrageously repetitive.

Hiatus

2007-07-03T04:36:00.000-07:00

For those who are curious where I went...My computer, at long last, has totally kicked the bucket. It powers on, and the fans work, but there's no video output, no beeps, no POST, nothing; after a minute or so it just turns off again. I will either be buying a new one today or orderig a new one, not sure which route to go. But it will probably be awhile longer before I am back to blogging...of course, since you are all subscribed to my RSS feed, there's no need to keep checking here, right? :-P

Ultima VII, Day 13

2007-06-27T18:38:00.000-07:00

To my surprise, finishing this game took almost two hours, although the eventual ending is a pretty sudden one. There's a lot about the final dungeon at the Isle of the Avatar that makes it appealing though, the most notable aspect being the Thrones of Changes and of Virtue, the former of which teleports you without providing any immediately obvious indication in your surroundings--it would have been much harder if I were not able to see the rooms around the throne room!

Another memorable aspect of the game is the large blank maze, which is just black space between rooms with a candle. As it turns off, i never had any reason to use it, because I ventured across a liche and some explosions without noticing the dark path, and only later realizing it existed when I happened to bump into its other side. The Isle is also quite notable for the presence of the Armageddon spell, which I have not used but which kills everything in the game in a manner that prevents you, sadly, from inspecting their inventories.

I'm not sure what final thoughts to add about Ultima VII, except that when I first played it years ago, perhaps a year or so after it came out, it was a revelation to someone raised mostly on console RPG's. I played Ultima VI before Ultima VII (my brother brought his computer home and I played it during Christmas break; we had no PC at the time), but Ultima VII was the first time I had a game "all to myself," so to speak. The game has a huge degree of open-endedness, with only a few areas inacessible at the beginning of the game, and there's just such an immense amount of stuff to do without even really paying attention to the plot.

Its only significant downside, in my opinion, is the somewhat weak plot. There's an element of veiled menace inherent in the Fellowship throughout the game, but it doesn't really build to a climax, it simply seems as if everything is simultaneously revealed. You don't build a significant chain of evidence implicating the Fellowship in dastardly deeds; rather, you pretty much get told about it by a gypsy. That undercuts the suspense a little bit, but the existence of the Guardian was a surprise and very weird.

Incidentally, this game has my favorite introductory sequence, with you actually somehow playing Ultima VII, and the recognizable map from Ultima VI in the background.

With that in mind, I will next embark on a total side project--Ultima: Runes of Virtue, an action/puzzle spin-off that was produced for the Game Boy around the same time that Ultima VII came out. It was more related in plot and presentation to Ultima VI than Ultima VII, but I have chosen to follow a more or less chronological sequence in playing the games.

I'm not sure of my total time playing Ultima VII. I would like to estimate it at approximately 26 hours, perhaps, maybe a little less? I am expecting Runes of Virtue to go rather quickly by comparison!

Ultima VII, Day 12

2007-06-24T09:19:00.001-07:00

It would seem one more day will be required to completely finish Ultima VII, at least in terms of plot! My most recent adventure was entirely centered around Buccaneer's Den, where I encountered the great-great-grandson of the fat Budo of Ultima VI, as well as a pair of sentimental pirate buddies whom the Fellowship had driven apart. The cube proved useful in getting me access to Hook's chambers, where I found a sweet Juggernaut hammer, the first one I have found so far (save for the one in the weapons chamber of Serpent's Hold). I also found a dead Alligator, for some reason, in an otherwise inaccessible room. It occurs to me that I might have been able to get into Hook's lair with the use of a simple Telekenesis spell in the Fellowship hall, opening a secret passage in the back room! In this respect, Ultima VII suffers from the fact that it has no way of obfuscating the areas behind doors the way earlier games did.

In those secret passages I met a relatively unfriendly torturing troll, a dragon trap, and some magic weapons which I didn't pick up because I am so completely overloaded with magic stuff at present. I also spent a bit of time relaxing at the baths in the city, although without female (or for that matter, male) companionship because I don't find the portraits very attractive. I was able to get into the building, again, through the secret doors. I contemplated some gambling, but I am so close to the end of the game, it doesn't matter. I just remember my strategy in the past was to play Virtue Roulette, and simply open my inventory and place my bet while the wheel is paused, just before the final click that decides the winning color. In that manner I experienced the collapse of the universe described elsewhere, when wall start spontaneously vanishing.

After that I headed to the Shrine of the Codex, which for some reason Shamino insists is the Shrine of Humility, and also beat up on a group of pirates nearby, finding a whole suit of magic armor in the process. Those magic gorgets are hard to come by! I seem to remember the game has something like 8 complete suits of magic armor scattered around Britannia, except lacking one helmet, or maybe it was lacking one gorget. I'm not sure. I quit playing after about two hours, standing around beside the throne of the Guardian on the Isle of the Avatar.

In other news, I had a very brief conversation with a reader who reminded me that the Ultima IV on the Sega Master System is very good, and that it takes the unusual step of featuring 2D dungeons.

Finally, have I already mentioned the strange partially obfuscated backpack in Vesper, which is totally inacessible without cheating? It's positioned such that its straps are visible in a window in the Provisioner's shop, I think, but it cannot be manipulated. I wonder if I should include a list of the things you can do in Ultima VII that I neglected to do...Well, here's a few:

-Visit the lost cave where a note from a despairing fellow can be found
-Find a field of sleep-inducing flowers with the only love arrows in the game
-Find all the randoms tuff in the great forest, including a pirate hangout and a soldier encampment.