Ophidian Dragon blogs his way through the entire Ultima series, from beginning to end.

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Martian Dreams, Day 2

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

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

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

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

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

2 comments:

Skip said...

So, when you do Ultima VII are you going to first do the base game and then add the expansion on each part, or just start out with the expansions installed, and get to them as you will?

weas said...

This "amusing surprise" - would it be the Runes of Virtue games, or The Black Gate for SNES?