Stonegate proved to be tiny with little more than a room containing the sceptre so I was starting Shame within minutes. This was a typical dungeon and it didn’t take long to make my way to the field around Doom.

I’ll confess that this had me stumped for a while when using the amulet on it didn’t make the field vanish. It turns out I had to fly through it on the magic carpet? Not sure if this was intentional or a bug.

It was nightmarish on the PC but this version of dungeon Doom isn’t difficult as such. There are some fields at the start which can only be cleared with the sceptre but it’s more of the same after that. The path goes up and down more frequently between levels than any other dungeon but this meant that there was often only one choice of direction so it’s just a case of perseverance.

Right at the bottom of the dungeon is a small empty house. After a bit of trial and error I figure out to use the sandalwood box on the mirror. Not sure if there was a clue for this somewhere along the way but I would certainly hope so as this wasn’t obvious without prior knowledge. I never did seek out Captain Johne on this playthrough and there was a demon in Stonegate who refused to help me out without the information I would have got from him.

There is a short ending sequence which is true to the original with regard to the banishment of Blackthorn although here it’s watched by the Avatar in person. In the original of course, the Avatar was sent home in the same spell that transported Lord British from his prison only to receive an ignominious homecoming and discover that his house had been burgled in his absence. On the NES he is rewarded with a banquet in his honour first. Indeed!

So that’s Ultima 5 on the NES done at last. Escape From Mount Drash aside, it’s easily the worst Ultima I’ve played on any platform. Definitely not as bad as I feared going into it but not one that should be tackled by any but the most (fool?)hardy of Ultima fans. The series moved to the SNES for Ultima 6 which should prove to be a big improvement.

On the subject of Mount Drash,  The Digital Antiquarian’s excellent post on the history of the game must have stirred up some interest as I was asked about an article from Sierra’s Interaction magazine. There isn’t much of it but it didn’t take long to dig up. It’s from the Fall ’94 edition which featured a Sierra 15 year anniversary article including this:-

The scan is courtesy of Sierra Gamers run by Ken and Roberta themselves who have a full archive of Interactions on their site. Curious to see an admission that Sierra didn’t treat Garriott all that well at the time. There must have been some regret at this stage about letting the series go but I’m sure there was more to it than Ken Williams not liking RPG’s with the main grievance being the royalties on ports of Ultima 2 as I understand it. If Richard and Ken had got on better, Origin would never have been formed of course so it turned out well enough for us gamers in the end.

I’ll finish off with a quick plug for Retro Revival which I’m off to tomorrow. It sounds like more retro gaming under one roof than I can fit into one day but I’ll be giving it my best shot.

When I last posted about this game I’d come to an abrupt halt when one of the dungeon ladders went missing. At the time I wasn’t too keen to try again as I’d been playing most nights for a week to get that far. However, I wouldn’t be doing this blog without a stubborn/obsessive streak which took over a week or so later and I decided I should give it another go.

That still didn’t mean I was all that keen and it’s taken long enough since for me to get back to it. I’m now playing on a NES emulator and at 2x speed the game has proved to be a lot more playable than it was on real hardware. At this speed, the controls aren’t always especially responsive but movement is much improved and it’s a lot more like the sort of speed an Ultima should play at.

Retracing my steps was still a largely mechanical process but at least I knew what needed to be done this time around. I headed down through Covetous to get the mystic arms at the first opportunity before getting back to relearning all the mantras.

Something I didn’t try first time around was taking on more than one shrine quest at a time. I’m sure this wasn’t an option on the PC but after finding it worked here I only made two trips to the Codex which saved ages. What I really wanted to do was head into Deceit and see if my missing ladder would show up this time around and I’m relieved to say that it did. After putting off the replay for so long, I had a maxed out party and the first of the shards after maybe 2 and a half hours. That’s a lot of retracing but better than I thought it was going to be and it could have been a lot worse. From what I remember of Knights Of Legend, it near took that long just to get between save points.

I found that I was still missing the Hythloth dungeon password. One of the few places I’d not explored was Blackthorn’s palace which seemed like a likely spot so I headed there next. I was curious to see how this version would handle the encounter with Blackthorn. In the original release, Blackthorn would permanently kill off one of your party if you weren’t a member of the Oppression. His actions are less drastic here and he sets 4 demons on us instead when I can’t provide the password. At this part of the game it didn’t slow my group down a whole lot and I had free rein to explore after this.

I take the opportunity to grab Lord British’s crown and find the last member of the council languishing in the prisons who provides the needed word of power.

After this it’s been nearly all dungeon crawling. The dungeons can get extremely convoluted with many routes requiring constant swapping between floors but having a full set of maps before you even start the game makes it all very easy. It didn’t take too long to retrieve all the gems, banish the Shadowlords and grab the amulet.

The lack of challenge is something that’s really hit home playing this second time around. Combined with the lacklustre dialog and slow movement speed all the life has been sucked out of the original classic. What’s left is a game that requires so little thought that it can be played on autopilot while watching a movie - not a good sign when I’ve got it running at double speed.

Having said that, the gameplay is inoffensive and not that bad a time killer once that extra distraction is thrown in to keep your brain otherwise occupied. It’s just as well as even with maps, the dungeons are large enough that it’s taken me about another 90 minutes to get this far but all I have to do now is raid Stonegate and then head down through the final pair of dungeons.

I’ve still not managed to start up again on Ultima 5 so instead I’ve dug out the negatives and proof for another Ultima advert:-

This is dated 20th April 1992 which would have been 4 days after the game was released and sells Ultima 7 on the basis of it being easier to play than confront the Romans with elephants which is hard to argue with. Ultima 7′s all mouse interface was way ahead of anything else I can think of at the time and still holds up well today, inventory shuffling aside.

It’s quirky but I reckon this advert did a decent job of conveying several aspects of Origin’s latest epic in a small number of words. It was ultimately used on the back cover of Computer Gaming World and presumably other magazines at the time with an alternative all black advert following on some time later.

The proof is marked bad on the front of the envelope which usually means some of the colour separation isn’t correct going on those I’ve seen before. The negatives for all these adverts come in four plates (3 colour + 1 black) which clearly gave scope for things to go wrong if something was left off of one layer. In this case the animal behind the T of Today is far darker than in the final version which can be found on the Ultima Codex.

It’s been a while since I posted so I thought I’d share some more of the swag I bought from Rhea Shelley a couple of years back. These are a pair of proofs for full-page Ultima 8 adverts with their negatives:-

As you can see, they have suffered a bit of damage with the prints being stored face to face at some point in the last 20 years resulting in them sticking together.

This first one on the left took the brunt of the damage. It’s dated the 4th November 1993 with the other being from the 30th of the same month. Aside from swapping out some screenshots the sales pitch was reworded and reorganised in that month with the latter being a clear improvement in my opinion. I thought it was particularly odd that the earlier advert lists compatibility with EMS and XMS memory in its short list of selling points as this wouldn’t have been high on my list of reasons to buy a game. Playing with DOS config files was par for the course for PC gamers back then the way I remember it. I’m sure this has to be a nod to the difficulties people had with the Voodoo memory manager Origin had used for Ultima 7 which was especially particular and continued to make the game tricky to run for years afterward.

All being well the next post on here should be the final stages of Ultima 5 on the NES. I got a new graphics card last week which is why it has been dead around here recently with any time I’ve spent gaming being on relatively modern titles but I’ve decided that I’m not going to be beaten by Ultima 5 and will start a new playthrough as soon as I’m done with Max Payne 3. I’ll be using an emulator this time with the plan being to speed back to where I was as quickly as possible.

The first dungeon I decided to tackle was Covetous due to it supposedly having the Avatar’s Arms at the bottom of it which sounded like they would be just the ticket for exploring the depths. The dungeons turned out to be quite large despite the move to 2D and I didn’t get the impression I was being short changed by the dropping of 1st person perspective and missing floors. They aren’t especially visually interesting of course but the maps sped me through them and I didn’t spend a lot of time exploring. The maps don’t show the exit to the underworld on the bottom floor so I had to stumble into that myself but it was reasonably easy to guess.

The underworld is lush,green and not all that dangerous making it quite the different experience to what I remember. From the few sections I’ve been to so far, each dungeon has is own little independent underworld with no blinking required (or even possible) to get around the map. Each dungeons underworld section just had one area of interest which I’d stumble across after a bit of aimless wandering. The picture above shows the Avatar’s Arms which were full sets of magic shields + armour for the party with a magic bow, axe and sword thrown in. These made my party more or less invulnerable and my Avatar could take down near enough anything in a single hit with a magic sword. I should definitely have come down here much, much sooner.

I thought I’d sell off some spares and ran into another strange quirk with this game in that merchants will only buy very specific items of armour or weapons so none of them were interested in any of the better items I’d found. Gold is strangely difficult to come across as monsters don’t drop any either meaning that the only source is the stock piles in dungeons as far as I can see. It would probably be quite easy to get into a position where you had spent all the gold in the world with this system.

A side effect of the above problem is the lack of inventory space which is a fair enough constraint except it’s only possible to discard and not drop items in a cache somewhere. I didn’t try it but I presume it would be all too easy to make the game unwinnable in this way.

Now I was well armed, I headed for another dungeon to start collecting shards. The first of these went without a hitch and I killed off the appropriate Shadowlord at Empath Abbey.This scene was more than a little anticlimactic on the NES but headed for Deceit to fetch shard #2.

This is where it all went strangely wrong. I followed my map taking a route which went down to floor 2 then back up to floor 1 in a separate area and then followed this to where there should be a ladder back down (the rightmost brown square on the screenshot above) and there was no ladder! I searched the whole level looking for an alternative unsuccessfully. I then watched the appropriate bit of the playthrough on Youtube to see what they had done and the ladder was there exactly where I’d been looking.

I’m entirely out of ideas at this point – no ladder means the game is uncompletable so this attempt to play the game has come to a grinding halt without any other suggestions. If anyone has run into this before and/or knows what I can do to fix it please let me know. I’m suspecting there must have been a bug in some versions of the cartridge at this point but maybe a certain conversation will make it appear?

It would have been nice to finish having got so far but I’m not going to miss playing the rest of the game too much in all honesty. I dare say I could speed through it considerably quicker if I were to ever try again on emulation now that I know the ropes. but I’m not too anxious to do that either right now. I don’t think this port is as awful as I’d heard but it doesn’t have much to recommend it. Every criticism I’ve got seems to be down to a lack of space and power on the NES. If this porting to U6 had been done on the SNES it could easily have ended up being the definitive version of the game so it’s a real missed opportunity in my eyes. We do have Lazarus however which I still have to play for myself and will surely get around to one of these days.