Ultima Underworld, Day 2

Today, the first thing I did with Ultima Underworld was install a mouse. Trying to play that game with a touchpad is a painful proposition (at least, immediately afterwards it is...ouch). I have continued my thorough exploration of each level in about a two hour period--and I think I'll be able to keep it up until level 6 or so, most likely.

The quests on level 2, the home of the mountainfolk, are not very comlplicated. First, an ironwitted fellow named Ironwit lost some blueprints, and sent me to retrieve them. A headless and a bunch of flesh worms later, he got them, and gave me a fly potion as payment. Yay! I also found a lantern, which is my favorite light source in the game, and elsewhere on the level, sliced and diced something like six grey goblins.

The second quest was to invade a mine and kill a mean old gazer which is staring at everybody, and probably eating them too. This wasn't too hard, though the gazer has some tough hide and took a bunch of hits. Also, I have found that my mouse freezes up once in awhile, leaving me unable to move or attack, and I can be easy prey in such situations! At any rate, my reward for killing the gazer was to get a medallion of some sort, which I swear looks like a pizza cutter. Offering the king of the dwar...ahem, the mountainmen some gold also got me a look at his treasure chamber. It strikes me that treasure is not of much value in the abyss...but I leapt in and attacked the golem guard anyway! Unfortunately, he pounded me flat into the ground.

I didn't realize the keyboard arrow keys don't work in Underworld I (or at least not in DOSBox), so getting around is a little frustrating. I'm so used to Half-Life-ish interfaces, where I can use the mouse to turn and keyboard to move forward that it's hard to use the older interface! I did eventually realize that w and x move forward and back, so I was able to use that knowledge to fight better. Speaking of fighting better, I improved my attack skill at the shrine, and I also discovered that using the multiple-skill mantras gives you far more cumulative points than the skill-specific ones. That seems to be by far the best way to improve my mana! For kicks, here is a rundown of all the skills and my opinion of them:

Attack: Highly useful if you decide to engage anything in combat
Defense: Useful if you enage anything in combat, and they are likely to fight back
Axe: Useless for me, since I don't use axes
Sword: This one is good for me, but it takes some time to find the mantra as I recall
Missile: I never found much use for missile weapons in the Underworld
Mace: There are some good magic maces, I think, but I don't look for them much.
Mana: Absolutely required for magic.
Casting: Required for magic that does not backfire and hurt you...
Lore: I like a high lore skill to identify magic items
Appraise: Since bartering is not very useful, neither is this skill.
Charm: See appraise
Swimming: Possibly the most useful in the game, at least before you can cast Water Walk. Thus far, 10 has been sufficient for all the swimming I've had to do so far.
Sneak: Not sure how exactly it works--It is useful in concept but I'm not sure if it is in practice.
Search: I have not seen a direct effect from increasing this skill.

I have a lot more skill points to use (1 + my level, it seems), but I don't want to spend them until I can increase swords or lore. In summary, I don't have the mantras I need, and I am a bit weaker than I ought to be at level 9 as a result :-(

WHEN DID IT HAPPEN?
On level 2, you can find Corby, Cabirus' scribe, but without knowing his ages when he wrote the Memoirs and when I met him now I can't get much info from our encounter...

Ultima Underworld, Day 1

No rest for the weary! Before I start talking about Underoworld I, I will mention a forgotten loose end from Martian Dreams and offer some final thoughts on that game.

5) Who is the lady with glasses who wears green, the first person you see in the line of people to go back to Earth?

Martian Dreams was a little less fun because I had already played two games with the same engine; there was less excitement in starting it because I had gotten used to that style of play. It also suffered a little bit from a problem that Savage Empire had, in that the difficulty level of certain monsters (especially the crawling cactuses...I despised those things!) discouraged me from exploring Mars as much as I explored Britannia in Ultima VI, which is why I missed those shoes (also, according to Paulon, they were hidden under a rock...) and the green lady. I did try to explore some places, though, it's just that I didn't find muh to see. I went over every nch of the terrain west of Hellas, for example, when I was waiting for that seed to grow, but just didn't see much. I think the plot of this game was vastly superior to that of Savage Empire, but the interactivity went a step backwards (at least in terms of building stuff from raw materials), as did the NPC scheduling to some extent (I saw Carnagie vanish and reappear elsewhere on a number of ocassions, and Yellin never moved, let alone slept).

I think Martian Dreams did highlight the desperate need for a conversation tree system like Ultima VII. There was a LOT of text, and sometimes it is hard to both read all the details, and also keep in mind all the keywords you need to ask about. I tried to keep a queue of keywords in my head, but I sometimes forgot them because one keyword would generate so much more information. Also, I remember asking Carnegie about "cannon" referring to the space cannon that would launch everyone back to Earth, but instead he talked about how it was too much work to make me any cannonballs. Eh? That being said, the choices of character icons was improved over Savage Empire, and I liked how all the characters in an area seem to have a distinct icon (a strategy also used in Serpent Isle to great effect).

Now, onto Underworld. I love Underworld--It didn't usd to be my favorite Ultima game, and it still isn't, but it's moved way up there, maybe to #2 or #3 (note to self: do a countdown at the end). The plot and the game engine and the quests and all seem perfectly in tune with one another, and it presents kind of a "micro story" of an event in Britannia, a fairly mior historical note, that we don't otherwise see in the games. Mygame time today...Well, there is very little to talk about. I thoroughly explored level one of the dungeon, chatted with goblins and wimpy loser human outcasts, and so on. It had the feel of an "introduction" level; even the treasure that I found didn't seem very impressive (it sucks to do an annoying jump only to find a "servicable leather cap" for the effort...)

A short plot recap: A mysterious blue bearded fellow contacts me as I sleep and yells in a hilarious voice, "treachery and dooooooom!" His brother is releasing a great evil. I am sucked into his wobbly blue head and appear in the bedroom of the local Baron, whose daughter has just been kidnapped. I am tossed in the Abyss, suspected of conspiring to kidnap her. That's basically all the information you start with.

I will take some time to talk about my choices in creating my character. A lot of my choices were based on my memory of the game, specifically, you eventually get a Sword of Justice that you have to carry around all the time, so it seems quite reasonable to start with a good swords skill. I also recall that swimming is *extremely* tedious if your skill is low, so I chose that too. My final option was the Lore skill, which helps me identify magic items, also a nice skill! My chracter class was Bard, because 1) it's what I always end up as after the virtue test and 2) it allowed me to choose both swimming and lore.

I am currently level 6, but I have not used any of my skill points yet--you raise skills by using the points at shrines, but you must know the mantra for each skill, and I have not found any mantras yet (not for specific skills anyway). All I have I a recipe for rotworm stew. I will probably be using a lot of those points on magic skills--currently, I think I have a whopping 2 mana points, which is not very useful for spellcasting...

Also, as a special feature, and for this game only, I am going to make a list of "When did it happen?" evidence that I get from in the game, because one of the most fun parts of Ultima Underworld is figuring out when it happened with respect to the 200 year gap between Ultima VI and Ultima VII.

WHEN DID IT HAPPEN?
-The king of green goblins knew Cabirus, who died not long before the greys stole off into the night.

Martian Dreams, Day 5

I finished Martian Dreams somewhat earlier than anticipated--the most interesting fact is that I had absolutely no recollection of a lot of the quests leading up to the end, even though I played them before. Specifically, I don't remember the quest Paulon correctly referred to as the most long and boring in the game--Bringing a cart full of iron ore to Carnegie from the mine I had visited at the beginning of the game to fint the Iolo, Shamino and Dupre clones.


Let me backtrack--when I visited the pumping station with my new robotic friend Cshesket, I was told by Diver, another robot, that robots needed a special coating to get past the steam blasts nearby, so I went to rubberize Cshesket. She complained that I didn't have the dye--which was true, if you recall from yesterday. So it turns out she can just walk through the steam without any coating at all! Hooray. Anyway, that go the canals working, and it was time to get iron for Carnegie. I began by sailing a nearby barge, filling a wheelbarrow with ore, and taking it in. Not good enough. I needed a whole cart full, and for that I needed to go get a totally different barge from the other side of the world and sail it to the mine. I was unable to sheel a cart out from inside the mine to outside the mine, because the idiot Yellin was standing on the track and wouldn't move. So instead, I had to drill the ore and shovel it to a nearby cart. Then I pushed that cart down somewhat close to the mine enterance. Next, I shoveled that into a wheelbarrow, one shovel-ful at a time, and rolled it out to the barge, and put it on the other cart. Once I had seven loads, I was free, and I took it to Carnegie. He told me he'd have his men mine the rest of the ore he needs, and gave me cannonballs to enter Aryre with.

1) What men!?
2) Why did I have to bring this big pile of ore? Couldn't I just tell you? Ahhh.

The rest of the game took about an hour. I made Cshesket look like a hot nude woman because those rouge berries and the rubberizer in the pumping station were just that good, and then challend Raxachk in the dream world (he abandoned Rasputin's body, killed his henchmen, and retreated). The challenge was against the three Shadowlords, and they were not ultimately all that challenging. The first, deling with determining a real from a fake Spector was easiest. The second involved giving a healing potion to a grouchy martian, and the third required me to run up against but not actually fight a big sand monster of some sort. My favorite quote was when I hit one of the Spectors in the first room of Falsehood, and Faulenei teleported me out and told me, "Resorting to violence, Astaroth would be so proud!" It was cool to see the Shadowlords again, at any rate.

The final part of the game had me grab use some glowing dream stuff to make a modern weapon with which to kill Raxachk, but I don't really know how I did it. There was a big blob of dreamstuff, and when I tried to use it or get it, I was told "you lack the mental capacity" or "cannot be used." Then I ate three berries of different colors, and it worked. Maybe that was the idea? Anyway, I dreamed up an M-60 and blew through Raxachk's crystal walls and shot the plant to bits. I enjoyed the endgame--all the characters are in a line as I head to the space cannon, and I got to say goodbye to all of them.

The total time came out to about 12 hours, I think, a few longer than Savage Empire, but still quite short! Here's my canonical list of loose ends:

1) Apparently the martians in human bodies survive a long time, long enough to give me a photograph of myself. Why does history not record these events? There is a parade at the end! Maybe the manual explained this and I missed it.

2) Only about three of the martians I met were given robo-human bodies by the end of the game. Where'd the rest go?

3) Paulon said to be careful with the cannonballs--I'm assuming he probably put them in a cannon facing thr wrong direction, because barges cannot be turned and the wall you have to blow up is to the left. Fortunately I had tried with regular cannons!

4) There are shoes somewhere that will take you home, as Paulon mentioned in a comment, but I didn't find them. Granted I didn't explore as thoroughly later in the game. I'm not exactly sure where they are, but I remember finding them last time.

Sadly, I was not invited to write to Lord British to report my feat this time, but I did get an email reminding me that I haven't tried to install Tabula Rasa yet, so perhaps I will give it a go. It's probable my laptop will not handle it, but I said I would try.

Martian Dreams, Day 4

The first hour or so today was spent killing time, waiting for my pod to grow. I went hunting for the lab at the north pole, never being able to find it. The dream-world martians told me to go up there and look for it, and finally asking one of them about "icecap" resulted in her telling me that the lab is sometimes frozen over. Aye carumba. I then repaired the three ruby lenses which use the sun to melt the icecaps, or rather, I repaired one of them--the other two needed help from the currently-posessed occupants of Elysium.

Eventually, I broke down and slept in my tent for the next five days. With the pod ready, I went to the dream machine and sucked in Prektesh, I think, the leader of the Hellas martians, currently living in the dream world. He was thrilled to have a new body until he suddenly whithered and died. He told me to take is corpse to Tekapesh, the leader of Elysium (whose occupatns are currently posessing a number of people I need to talk to) to earn his trust. I did so, but Tekapesh refused to free the bodies so I could melt the ice--i spent another half hour or so looking for the lab again. Eventually I gave up, and consulted a walkthrough, which told me to ask Tekapesh about "plans"--This didn't work because he interpreted it as "plants." A less incompetent walkthrough gave me the word better. Good grief! I hate wasting time when I was supposed to just say something to someone. I was told to show him the body and I did so, and I simply assumed that the fact that it didn't work was a bug. Ahhhh.


This led to a few more activities--first, freeing more dream world occupants. Wyatt Earp required me to buy him, in horse form, over a normal horse and the infamous Smith (too bad he did not show up in Savage Empire). Melies, the guy most famous for his silent movie where the moon gets a rocket in the eyeball, was rescued simply by dodging some panels that shrink walls, while Lowell's rescue involved finding Pluto. No wonder I remembered him as discovering the (former) planet! The hardest was Clemens, who required me to navigate through a void filled with invisible shoals and collect manuscript pages for him. Once they were all freed, I got a dull cutscene and a surprisingly long and angry seres of threats from Tekapesh.

From thee, it was easy to fix the pieces of the lenses to melt the glaciers (man, I bet this is getting confusing to those who have not played the game) because the relevant people, such as Tiffany and Carver, were free. Why were both of those stuck in the dream world associated with Hellas anyway, when they went into the dream machine through Elysium? Whatever. With the ice melted, I was able to find a sexy golden robot in a lab, and give it a heart.

This is where I began suffering from "one more quest" syndrome. To get the heart, I needed a gemstone; Hearst has it, but demands the safe return of a camera held by a nearby corpse. I fetch the camera from the very dubiously named and very dead Boringstoke, and gave it to hearst, who had feared for the life of his precious camera...But then I had to get the picture developed, which meant going BACK to Meleis! Finally! I was able to suck the feminine martian Cheshket's soul into the robot body, but to my dismay she is upset that she's a big golden robot and I have to make her pretty.

AHHHHHH! Stupidist quest ever!

Ahem.

That otherwise worthless actress in Olympus is willing to give her some make up...But fist I have to go retrieve some berries...And give Cheshket a shower in the pumping station (...). Fortunately, I had to do that anyway--meling the glaciers was not enough to get the canals filled, it appears. In fact, long before I ever made a big gold robot, Sherman told me to go visit that station, and I did, only to discover that you needed a robot to get through some steam. Incidentally, I am pretty sure you can really screw up some game flags by using the equipment in the pump room before you have Cheshket the Golden in your party...I seem to recall doing that the first time I played, towards the beginning of the game, and this big golden head popped out of nowhere telling me to put some rubber in the machine, or some such.

Anyway, that's about where I quit for today. I expect I will finish Saturday, making this game just a bit longer than Savage Empire.

Or maybe Andrew Carnegie will make me go rescue his poor kitty cat or something before building the rocket to take everyone home. Grumble. On a side note, I got a freeze ray gun, but it is not so cool as to turn people into ice cubes. I used it to murder Hearst and try to steal his gemstones, but apparently he had them hidden and not on his corpse.

Martian Dreams, Day 3

Martian Dreams is interesting because often I am not explicitly told to solve particular quests. Rather, someone mentions that something exists somewhere, and then I can go off and fix the problem or what not if I feel like it. The first part of today was spent repairing the power on Mars, and I am shocked by the ineptitude of the explorers who could not figure it out, especially because in the power generation area, there is a robot standing right there who explicitly tells you what to do! I repaired a broken conveyer belt and shoved some coal into a furnace, and now everything works.

Or so I thought. I went aboveground to find a bunch of wires had exploded, and was sort of confused when all of my companions refused to assist me. Sherman is afraid of heights, Nellie Bly doesn't want to do it in skirts, Dibbs has no science training, and Spector tells me he is "not stupid" and "not expendable." The real reason for their reticence was shortly explained because fixing the wires myself provided an in-game cinematic! Obviously I had made a big step towards finishing the game.

Next on the agenda was...Nothing, actually. I now had access to the teleporters, so I finally visited far-away Elysium, where martians had taken over the bodies of an array of humans. From them I learned some details about growing a new martian from one of the handful of live pods in Hellas, a city on the southeast of the map where I previously met a guy named Marcos. So it was off to Hellas again...where I also found a dream machine! I was loathe to go into it without being told to, for fear of corrupting the game, so for awhile I just hunted fruitlessly for the missing seeds, eventually concluding they must be in a room with a rusted door. For want of better to do, I finally went into the dream realm. There I rescued a few historical personages: Lenin (Red guy), Tiffany (glassware guy), George Washington Carver (panut guy), and...What's his name? He wrote the Invisible Man, the one that isn't by Ralph Ellison. I am no good with names.

Anyway, rescuing these guys is one of the most fun parts of Martian Dreams, because each has a unique little quest. Tiffany required me to lead a minotaur into a room to stop him from breaking all of his fine china. For Carver, I had to defend a pod plant from some worms by planting worm-repelling plants that, for the record, did not seem to do jack to repel the worms. My fists served that purpose. (Quick, ID this quote: "Killing worms can be boring.") Finally, Lenin made me distribute a pile of rubles for the common good. He wanted to take the leftover three for "the good of the people," but I burned them to prevent the Commie bastard from taking them. He also wanted a gemstone, but I wasn't sure how to destroy it, so I went ahead and gave it to him. I am tempted to replay that section and see if I can get rid of it without corrupting the guy whose corpse is incorruptible (granted, they cheated) in a glass case in Moscow. Finally, saving guy-who-isn't-Ellison involved navigating a weird maze where all my controls were screwed up-the left arrow took me up, etc. Eventually I had to kill some invisible footprints. Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure you could get drunk and have a similar loss of control in Ultima VI...

I also visited a grove full of martians inside the dream world, where I learned about a forzen lab I need to visit, and where I got more details on growing a Martian, and was told to use oil to open that lone inacessible door. Once out, i went ahead and planted the seed, and then I quit, because evidently it takes nine days to grow a martian, and I need to decide on a plan of action to get the canals working and to visit the mysterious polar lab. So, I think the game is nearing it's end--I remember from last time that getting into the Rasputin (you know, weird Russian mystic guy)-controlled city of Argyre led upto the last two quest or so, and it was shortly after that where my game was corrupted, so I'm unsure how much was left.

Now, to reader comments. First, no the surprise is not the SNES version of Ultima VII, though so few people have ever completed that game that I may make it an amusement when the whole process is completed. And no, it's not the Runes of Virtue games--but only because I already said I will be playing them at the appropriate chronological points in the real world, though they do not fit into the canonical Ultima timeline at all.

As for the add-ins for Ultima VII and Serpent Isle, my thinking is this--I will play the game about halfway through normally, and then do the expansion packs. That way I will have a taste of what it was like to, say, keep track of a billion keys in Serpent Isle, or get around without a free ship at the beginning in Ultima VII. They will be installed from the beginning, but I will ignore them until later.

Oh, I also found the book that gives the game it's title, as it contains a poem that wishes its subject good martian dreams.

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.

Martian Dreams, Day 1

Among all the Ultima games, Martian Dreams features one of the most creative plots around. The backstory is thus--Perveival Lowell, the guy who didn't discover Pluto but for some reason I thought he did, unvelied a space bullet which could be catapulted to Mars at the 1893 world's fair. Due to sabotage, the bullet was launched with a handful of well-known personalities from the era on board. Communication was lost, and it was up to Nicolai Tesla to build a new bullet to seek them out. The Avatar is contacted in his own time, and uses the orb of the moons to teleport back to that era, and subsequently launches to Mars, which you find to be inhabited (or formerly inhabited--the canals are bona fide canals, at any rate).

The graphics are...very red. The game also plays mysteriously slowly, unless I am in solo mode--I think it has to do with the huge numbers of monsters that will chase you tirelessly. I have not accomplished a lot so far--I just visited the old crash site, and rescued an old miner named Coot. On my way back I ran into a mean looking fellow guarding a gate who demands the signatures of the suspiciously named Sherman, Yellin and...I forget the third, but it's an obcious play on Dupre, so I can enter his town. In any case, they ar off exploring a mountain on the other side of the planet, and that seemed like a good place to call it quits for the first day!

So far, the hardest part of the game is not dying. monsters, including cacti and beans, attack you regularly, and much of my time is spent reloading my game to avoid tiring encounters. Unless you are buried in warm clothes, freezing is also likely late at night, and you require "oxium" in order to not essentially suffocate in the thin air. Freaking convenient, that oxygen-containing chewable mineral, eh? Coot is the guy who prospects for oxium all over the planet, and rescuing him got me a map to the "mother lode," which conveniently is not too far away from where my trio of signature-weilding explorers.

I played this back in the spring of 2003, and once before back in the fall of 1995 or so. I remember posting on Origin's CompuServe forum (I think they were in GAMAPUB, for Game Publisher's Forum A), with the title "Sextellegers kill Wild Bill and Jane." I wasn't kidding--some monsters, called Sextellegers, killed two main characters, and I had saved the game. Oops.

My second effort eight years later was more effective, and I got to the very end of the game, where you enter the land of your dreams and rescue some people. Sadly, I reloaded my game to do the rescuing again (it is quite fun!), and a character who assists me refuses to recognize a plot flag, and the game was basically insoluble at that point. Very frustrating.

So my history with this game is pretty negative. I will be doing more frequent backups (the joys of colossal hard drives--I just back up the entire MARTIAN folder) in order to prevent this from happening again.

Glad to see comments from a Savage Empire developer! As a side note, the duration of the day in Savage Empire probably has nothing to do with the frame limiting, because time passes in a turn-based manner and time does not pass unless I move. I think the day-night cycle is just faster. Thankfully, in Martian Dreams it seems much, much slower, and you are practically forced to sleep through the night.

-Zac