Ultima The Technocrat War Book 1 – Machinations

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This was published in 2001 by Pocket Books and written by Austen Andrews. It’s the first in a series of 3 novels based around what would have been the Ultima Online 2 universe. Ultima Online 2 was ultimately cancelled but many of the elements were carried over into later versions of Ultima Online 1 as seen in some of the Prima guides I looked at a few weeks back.

In the world of the novel, Blackthorn has been forced to flee New Britannia but is rebuilding his forces in a distant land. He has harnessed the power of machines left by a previous race and is building an army to retake New Britannia and also conquer the Juka race closer to home.

At the start of the book, the Juka are sailing to Britannia in order to try to forge an alliance with the humans and defeat Blackthorn. They are however attacked by forces commanded by a knight called Montenegro against the orders of his superiors. During the battle, he is challenged to a black duel by the Juka Way Master Thullan, defeated and as per the deal he then orders his superior forces to let the Juka’s escape.

This battle doesn’t put the Juka’s off trying to forge an alliance and a second party is sent. Blackthorn sends an agent to try to sabotage this alliance however. Without giving the whole plot away, much of the book deals with the relationship between Montenegro and Thullan and they ultimately have to forgo their differences to try to track down the saboteur. The book ends with a desperate defence of the Juka’s lands and Blackthorn’s forces being repelled at great cost to the Juka. The alliance is forged but the war is far from won.

I enjoyed Machinations vastly more than I expected to. Unlike the earlier Ultima novels, this stands in its own right without relying on nostalgia or knowledge of the games to sustain the reader’s interest. The characters are rounded, complex and believable, and the story always had enough intrigue to keep me turning the pages. The end of the novel, possibly felt a little rushed as if the battle had been crammed into a few pages to add a climax but it’s only a minor complaint.

I can’t say that it felt very much like an Ultima however, being based as it was on the Ultima Online universe with new races not featured in the main Ultima series. The Meer race were already established in New Britannia at the start of the story although there is only one of them in the novel. The Juka’s were more or less the typical fantasy alien race of warriors with a strong honor system. They may as well have been the Kilrathi, or the Klingon’s for that matter. The Technocrat’s of the title are Lord Blackthorn’s forces who now have mathematics as a religion and steampunk technology to work with. It’s the standard battle between the forces of order and chaos, with the twist being that the good guys are on the side of chaos.

All of this is a long way from Ultima as far as I’m concerned but it’s still a decent fantasy universe to set the novel in and would have been a solid basis for a game also. The story mingles familiar themes with the virtue system of Britannia and it actually creates a cohesive whole. Thanks to the depth of the characters this is ultimately one of the better modern fantasy books I’ve read in its own right. I’m very much looking forward to reading the next two novels and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this to any fan of fantasy fiction, even if they know nothing about Ultima.

I’ve scanned this in as usual but I can’t achieve great quality with these small paperbacks. It’s perfectly legible but if you want anything better, I’d recommend buying the real thing which can be picked up for next to nothing second-hand.

F-15 – Official Guide

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This was published in 1998 by Prima. When I was playing it for the blog, F-15 was a game that I rushed through just to get it out of the way. It’s not that it was a bad game by any means, quite the opposite, but it was in a genre that doesn’t interest me as a rule. Something I learned from all Origin’s sim games is that the further a sim game is set from the date it was published (in either direction), the more I enjoy it. That makes the Wing Commander series my favourite of the lot (by some margin) but I did enjoy Pacific Strike and Wings Of Glory as well.

The F-15 guide isn’t bad at all having said that. It was put together by the same team that had worked on many of the other guides I’ve already looked at before now and they clearly knew what they were doing.

The book starts with around 100 pages of walkthroughs and procedures for all the situations you might encounter and full details of how to approach all the tutorial missions. There is an awful lot of information here, all of which is exactly the sort of thing you need to set you up with the game. The tutorial mission walkthroughs struck me as especially helpful for anyone starting out. There is a lot to remember and it emphasises how F-15 isn’t the sort of game you just quickly play through without investing some time and effort into learning the real skills needed to fly.

There are no details for the campaign missions as they vary depending on what happens throughout the campaign, but there are walkthroughs for standard mission types which should tell you everything you need to know. There is also some of the story surrounding each campaign to set the scene, and the 3 possible outcomes at the end of the Iran campaign.

After this the guide starts to go into the Jane’s level of detail which doesn’t appeal to me especially with lengthy extracts from military training manuals. I’m sure there is a wealth of useful information in there if you want to take the game seriously but I skimmed over it. There is an even more technical section afterwards on the mechanics of F-15 flight with all sorts of graphs detailing how the plane performs under certain conditions, how much damage certain targets can take, how much damage the weapons do, etc…

There aren’t any developer interviews but there are about 50 pages about the development of the F-15, its history of service and the specifications of it and the weapons it carries. As someone with an interest in the development of technology of any kind, I quite enjoyed reading through some of this. It’s not strictly relevant to playing the game but goes down as a welcome extra.

This book was positively crammed full of information and probably one of the better guides I’ve looked at. It’s not the most entertaining of reading and is deadly serious 99% of the time, but we are dealing with a serious flight simulator here so it seems appropriate. It gives an extremely thorough grounding in what you will need to learn to play the game and I’d recommend anyone who fancies playing F-15 has a look at it.

Another batch of manuals

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I’ve added a large batch of manuals to the downloads. Apart from a couple of requests after the last post, I’ve also gone through replacmentdocs adding in anything I’ve played on here that I noticed was missing or poor quality. This includes Cybermage, Noctopolis, Netstorm, Ultima Trilogy, Runes Of Virtue 2 (SNES), Super Wing Commander (3DO), Origin FX, Privateer Speech Pack, Privateer Righteous Fire, Longbow Flashpoint Korea, Ultima 1 Remake & finally the Ultima 9 spellbook. Some of these have more going for them than others, with the highlights probably being the two comics from Cybermage and Noctropolis. I think that fills the gaps for every game which is on the blog but if there is anything else the offer to scan it in still stands.

Manuals

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You may have noticed a few manuals appearing on the downloads page in the last couple of days. I got a request last week for the Strike Commander, Pacific Strike and Wings Of Glory manuals, all of which are now done. I wasn’t originally going to host any manuals on here but I’d rather not have to wait for the replacementdocs approval process, so I’ll host them at least for now. I’m glad to say that I’ve also finished scanning in the last of Origin’s books which I’ll be reading for the blog, but you will have to wait for that one until I’ve read it myself.

I thought I’d already scanned in the missing Origin manuals 5 years back for replacementdocs but I clearly skipped a few. If anyone has a request for anything else that is missing/needs redoing, let me know and I’ll get that done as well (provided that I have the original, of course). I can’t say that I’m anxious to do any more scanning but after 500 page epics like the RPG Companion, the manuals are positively lightweight. If nothing else, I’ve caught up on a few films I wanted to see while I was making all these pdf’s.

The RPG Companion

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This was published in 1995 by BradyGames and was written by Ronald Wartow. The author has the curious distinction of being referred to in all 3 of the major original CRPG series. He was a farmer in New Magincia in Ultima 5, appeared in Might and Magic 3 and a fountain was named after him in Wizardry 4. The book doesn’t have any official links to Origin but it was requested by someone and since I happen to have it, I thought I might as well add it onto the list.

The RPG Companion weighs in at just over 500 pages and appears to be designed to introduce novice players to the concepts of RPG’s. This sounds like a strange notion these days, but old RPG’s were definitely intimidating to anyone who hadn’t played them before and it was something that put me off playing many of them for years myself. I’m not sure a 500 page tome is less intimidating but once opened it’s easy to read and I got through it surprisingly quickly. There isn’t a whole lot of text on each page in all honesty. If it had used a normal font and didn’t have the massive spacing, this could have been 150 pages.

It starts with numerous sections on the RPG basics. It doesn’t apply them to specific games but instead goes through the areas they have in common. This covers things like party creation and how virtual dice rolls work. It usually sticks to AD&D rules and classes in order to keep everything generic which is fair enough since most RPG’s are variants on this theme. If you are new to the genre, it’s all solid advice and includes tips like the age-old but extremely useful exploit of forming sacrificial party members at the start of the game in order to steal all their gold and equipment.

There is a brief section of interviews with developers and expert gamers, including Richard Garriot. This is unusual since it isn’t the expected career retrospective but is asking them for their tips on playing RPG’s. As you might expect there is a lot of contradiction. One of the expert gamers basically just tells you to find exploits in the games to shortcut your way to the end which didn’t strike me as especially helpful advice. The whole thing is something of a throwaway section, that does little more than allow a few familiar names to be put on the back cover. One of the main appeals about RPG’s is that you should be able to play them however you like if they have been designed well.

The last 350 pages of the book are taken up with game walkthroughs for the 26 major RPG games at the time. It sticks to the same huge text size so when I say that when a game as huge as Elder Scrolls Arena is covered in 12 pages total, only 7 of which are actually the walkthrough it should give you an idea how brief these are. They have a page of power tips which give some good general advice, and the walkthrough quickly covers the steps required to win the game. It also mentions if games have bugs that you need to watch out for, which anyone who played Arena for many hours only to find out it wasn’t completable (i.e. me) would have appreciated at the time. The games covered include several Ultima games as well as System Shock.

I didn’t read through all these walkthroughs and I’ve only ever played half of the games. From the games I do know well like World Of Xeen, the advice wasn’t too much better than a task list even for some of the key events. For instance at the end of Might and Magic 4, Lord Xeen can only be damaged by the Xeen Slayer sword and unless you cheat there is only one of them. Only getting one hit in a round doesn’t make things easy when he can annihilate half your party in his first attack. The way around this was to toss the sword between characters by trading in the inventory at the start of each turn so all 6 of them can get a strike in, but this isn’t mentioned. The walkthroughs could clearly help people out but they leave most of it up to you to sort out for yourself. There are no maps or tables of creatures/equipment and all the usual things you might expect. The Quest for Clues series was largely contributed to by amateurs but did a better job with a similar number of pages per game. I did quite like the power tips for some of the games though.

There is a CD included which is a free edition of Interactive Entertainment magazine. I’ve not looked at this as of yet. I gather it’s a multi-media game magazine which given the space limitations of CD’s and the state of video compression at the time doesn’t sound like the best of ideas. It doesn’t matter these days with fast Internet but at the time I liked my magazine discs full of demo’s and possibly game patches, and was happy to keep the reviews on paper. I’m slightly curious but the CD is still sealed in the back cover of the book so I’ll probably leave it there.

All in all, I wasn’t too impressed with the RPG companion. For it’s size, it is lacking in substance and the walkthroughs are fairly poor unless you just want to be told what tasks to perform. If you expect a thorough guide to any of these games, this isn’t the place to look. It has made me curious about some of the other games that are mentioned though and I may try a few of them out in the future.