The Ultima Saga – The Forge Of Virtue

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I’ve been away for a few days so I threw in the two Ultima saga novels and managed to read one of them in the meanwhile. I have read both of these before but it was a long time back and they can’t have made much of an impression as I remembered very little about them. This first in the series was written by Lynn Abbey, and published in 1991 by Popular Library.

It’s story is set shortly before the start of Ultima 5. The Avatar hasn’t yet been summoned to Brittannia but Lord British has gone missing and Blackthorn has taken over in his place. The story follows a few young adventurers (described on the back cover) who at least in this novel, are on the outskirts of the main events. Some of the Avatar’s companions make appearances but they are usually brief with only Shamino appearing for more than a page or two.

Althea, Drum and Jordan all set out in secret to attempt to locate Althea’s brother Balthan after Blackthorn makes outlaws of all the magician’s holding the words of power used to seal/open the 8 dungeons. Balthan is the assistant of Felespar and has been with him in Britain for some time putting him at serious risk. Before he left he gave Althea a magical “homunculus” to show his image which now shows a dark line which is acting as a compass pointing in his direction. This leads the 3 (picking up Jordan’s younger brother Darrel aka Squirt on the way), via Britain, to the Avatar’s temple in Cove where they learn Balthan stepped into the flame and never came out. They all follow Balthan into the flame, through the void and a moongate to a spot near Wrong and discover Balthan trapped inside a negate time spell, apparently awaiting the Avatar himself. Before Blackthorn succumbed to the Shadowlords, they appear to have been coming to him while he slept trying to persuade him to steal the word of power from Felespar, and the negate time spell was his way of avoiding sleep. Balthan is rescued but one of his protective spells leaves Jordan blind. He doesn’t actually regain his sight by the end of the book although we do learn that due to the nature of the spell that caused it, he can still see things in his memory after the fact by closing his eyes. Although, the main quest as such is completed, the book doesn’t have anything resembling an ending and it was clearly intended as part of a series right from the start.

There was potentially a lot more depth to the Ultima universe than the Wing Commander one to be basing a novel on, due to the different nature of the two series. Forge Of Virtue was for the most part quite faithful with all sorts of details from the games cropping up. The Britannia shown here  still has a strong class system despite Lord British’s attempts with only the “Peers” being able to attempt to follow the Avatar’s quest, as something of a rite of passage. The magical system is frequently mentioned with the same verbs and reagents as the games and of course some of the locations from Britannia are in here although there isn’t all that much ground covered during the course of the book. At the speed these guys move we would have needed another 10 books to cover every major location in Britannia. I’m sure there are elements that weren’t faithful to the games as well. The only thing that really struck me was one of the Peers having a slave which can’t be virtuous but this was only mentioned in one sentence.

The story is a fairly typical fantasy arrangement with some young characters running away from their home to go on a journey/quest. It is as much about Britannia and the effect that Blackthorn and the Shadowlords are having on it as anything else. I did enjoy the way the novel picked its way through some familiar events and places, expanding on them. I can’t imagine that anyone unfamiliar with Ultima would have made much of a lot of this though. The plot itself wasn’t especially strong either with surprisingly few significant events in the books 300 pages.

I think I’ve only ever seen harsh reviews of this series. If it didn’t have the Ultima connection, I’d probably have hated it. With the Ultima connection, I quite liked it but I would say it’s a slow start and I hope things pick up a little in the next one.

Wing Commander 3 – Official Guide

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This was published in 1995 by Origin via Brady Publishing. This is in the larger format that Origin moved onto around this time and it’s a sizeable book with just over 250 pages . It originally included a CD with some behind the scenes features, which unfortunately wasn’t included with my second-hand copy. I’m assuming that the “making of” video on the CD would be the same as the one on the limited edition Wing Commander 3 but from the back cover it looks to have other features that weren’t on that disc. With all the extra content compared to the last couple of clue books I’ve looked at, the original price reflects this and this guide originally sold for a hefty $24.95.

The book is split in 3 sections, each written by a different author. The first 50 pages are about strategy and tactics. This goes into the stats for all your wingmen, ship specs, general combat tactics and all the mechanics of the game. It even has a list of responses that your wingmen give you in combat. I never actually realised that if they have low morale, all their responses are different. Everything you could ever need to know about how the game works is in here. It’s quite dry stuff but there is a lot of information and it does give you a good feel for all the things going on behind the scenes that aren’t immediately apparent.

The second section is about 110 pages and details every mission in the game with tactics and the like. There isn’t much additional info here, other than a few boxes of text with news feeds and one with the transcript of the Hobbes explanation cutscene. I presume the news feeds are from the other scenes that got cut. This is the section of the book to get you through missions you might be struggling with, but there isn’t much here otherwise and I skimmed over it.

The final part is an 80 page making of section. This contains interviews with what must be most of the people involved in making the game. These interviews cover every aspect of the game and include programmers, artists, actors, scriptwriters, producers, packaging/documentation designers, etc.. With so many people included most only get to answer a few questions but you still get a very good idea for what was involved making WC3. Apparently this was one of the few Origin projects than ran more or less on schedule, which is a surprise given the scope of it. It does mention that Strike Commander was basically created just to develop the technology for WC3. Having this in place no doubt helped enormously as I remember all too well just how many delays Strike Commander suffered. Possibly the most interesting fact in the interviews is that Mark Hamill was originally cast as Maniac and was only swapped to Blair when Tom Wilson was signed up. It’s hard to imagine how that would have turned out.

The whole making-of section justifies the price of book on its own. It’s heavily pushing the “interactive movie” theme and what effect this had on people’s work compared to their usual work in the film industry. This is no surprise as there was a lot of excitement at the time about interactive movie’s being the next big thing. It didn’t exactly happen the way people expected but I think you can see some of the same mechanics in play in a modern game like Mass Effect, with the dialog choices and cinematic presentation. It may not be FMV any more but it amounts to the same sort of thing with modern graphics. There is plenty of praise for Chris Roberts directing skills from the people interviewed. I have noticed this sort of thing in every making-of that you ever see with a dvd but he obviously did a good job for a first time director. I did think about scanning in the making of section although I’m put off by the sheer size of it so I’ll hold off unless asked.

This book was everything an official guide should be with masses of detailed information on playing the game and lots of extra behind the scenes information. It’s definitely worth the few $ it costs to pick it up second-hand although you might want to be more careful that I was and make sure it has the CD.

Shadowcaster Cluebook

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This was published in 1993 by Origin. It’s author was Melissa Mead who co-authored the Noctropolis clue book and it was edited by David Ladyman who did the same for Noctropolis. With the same people involved, I’d expect this book to be along familiar lines and it’s certainly has a similar structure.

It starts off with descriptions of the 6 shapes you can take during the game and gives a backstory for each as told by Kurt’s grandfather. These stories tell how each race learned to shapeshift and are probably the best part of the book.

It then gets straight into the level maps which take up the majority of the pages. These are printed copies of the automap from the game, with significant areas marked.  They are accompanied by the story of Veste’s passage through them all conquering each land in turn, and also a central story of him building his temple to guard against future threats. This gives the background info to each level which you certainly didn’t get in the game but doesn’t include the levels that were added to the CD version. There is also a list and picture of every creature on each level, complete with the creatures stats.

Whereas I enjoyed all the background info for Noctropolis, I can’t say the same here. It’s certainly not cheerful stuff as Veste butchers his way through one world after another. Above all, I don’t like the writing style and it makes it quite difficult to read. There is certainly a lot more plot in the book than the game but I don’t feel like I learned anything I actually wanted to know and a lot of it comes across as nonsense, to be frank.

After the maps, there is a list of all items and their properties, a list of event triggers, a couple of pages of general game hints, and finally a full stage by stage walkthrough complete with mini maps so that you don’t have to flick backwards and forwards.

I’ve not gone through many of these clue books yet but I think (and hope) this is going to be one of the worst of them. It will get you through the game but otherwise is best avoided.

Noctropolis Clue Book

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It’s not clear how much involvement with the game Origin had but the Noctropolis clue book was definitely published by them in 1994. I picked this cluebook to look at tonight because I figured there wouldn’t be much content and I’d rattle it off quickly. There was considerably more than I was expecting though.

It’s a fairly lengthy 96 pages, which start out with the usual sections to help you through the game, such as questions and answers for each location, a list of items and where to get them and a full step by step walkthrough. The latter 60 pages however are an illustrated tour of Noctropolis with screenshots of every game location (with interactive hotspots shown), and some sort of clipping below relevant to it. These clippings are written as though they have been pulled from newspapers and other documents. To give a few examples, there is an advert for your bookstore at the start of the game, the police file on Stiletto and the transcript of an interview between Dr. Macabre and his psychologist.

All of the clippings are well written and exactly the sort of thing I’d like to have seen in the original documentation. None of them give anything in particular about the game away but they would have set the scene very nicely and take a tongue-in-cheek approach to the world of Noctropolis. I wonder if maybe these are from some extra documentation originally intended to ship with the game and it got pulled. It’s certainly the sort of content that I’d have expected to see in a mock newspaper or something similar that you saw in some games around that time.

The book ends with the transcript of Darksheer’s farewell speech to the city where he talks about his craving for the light. This might have made the ending even more obvious I suppose but I’m sure anyone who plays the game could see it coming a mile off. As for the screenshots, I used these a bit during the game as the interface gave no indication on which areas of the screen you could interact with so it saved plenty of pixel hunting. They certainly made it more fun for me, without actually giving away puzzles entirely.

In short there is nothing earth shattering in this book but it did add some value to the game. I wouldn’t have needed the screenshots with hot spots if the games interface had been better, and most of the rest of the content would have been more relevant if I could have read it before I played the game. Most of this arguably should have been included with the game in the first place but I would guess that costs needed to be kept down, and I did get the comic book included so I shouldn’t complain.

Wing Commander – Pilgrim Stars

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This is the final Wing Commander novel. It was published in 1999 by Harper Entertainment and written once again by Peter Telep. It follows on straight from the end of the previous book so is based on the movie universe rather than the game. However, in the acknowledgements at the start Telep includes the Wing Commander CIC so it looks like Wing Commander fans had some influence as well.  There was supposed to be a further book in the series after this but it was never published.

The story concerns a renegade Confed carrier called the Olympus which has been taken over by Pilgrims within Confed. This ship has the ability to create gravitational wells which suck any other ships in the vicinity into them. Since the ship is full of Pilgrims it can however use the well to jump to another system and escape. This potentially gives the ship the ability to destroy planets whilst also making it able to jump around without needing jump points. Both the Kilrathi and Confed want to stop and if possible capture the ship for their own uses. The Tiger Claw is the nearest to the scene and tracks the ship down only for it to use its well to escape. Blair and Taggart have in the meanwhile used their Pilgrim status to board the ship in an attempt to reason with its leader Amity. Maniac is taken along for the ride when he trashes his fighter.

Aside from the main plot, there are all sorts of relationships covered in this novel. Blair is still infatuated with Angel who is trying to avoid becoming close to anyone, although he is later distracted by his Pilgrim soul mate. Maniac finds another like-minded pilot to Forbes, but has to wait as she thinks he hasn’t gotten over Forbes. He eventually opts to become a one woman man. Paladin’s has the hardest time as his own Pilgrim soul mate is the one captaining the rogue ship.

The Pilgrim abilities go much further in this novel than the movie and some form of explanation is given for them. Apparently Blair’s abilities come from being able to read “scripts” left behind by previous Pilgrims who have already navigated all of space. Blair has other abilities similar to telekinesis which he discovers later on, from a woman who is apparently paired to him because of these abilities but is one of the enemy serving on the Olympus. This pairing means that each of them know the others thoughts to some extents.

To get back to the story, Blair, Maniac and Paladin end up on the Olympus, with Blair and Maniac spending weeks in the brig while Paladin attempts to talk round his ex to his side although it’s never quite clear whose side Paladin is on at this point.  Tolwyn in the meanwhile has taken the extreme action of getting all Pilgrims into camps and enforcing no fly zones in all their space. This results in Pilgrims starving to death and he sends an ultimatum that he will kill them all if Amity does not surrender by a certain date. Her response is to step up the attack on Earth but she is interrupted by an attack from the Kilrathi. Blair and other Pilgrims are forced to use their telekinesis to kill the Kilrathi from range but this leaves them all needing weeks of recovery. In the meanwhile, the Kilrathi regroup and attack again only for the Olympus to escape and jump straight into an ambush from the Tiger Claw. Paladin sabotages the jump drive and creates a gravity well too near to the ship allegedly to destroy it. Most of the Pilgrims flee including Maniac and Blair before they get sucked in. In the chaos Paladin is left behind but then helps the ship to jump the well and escape with Amity, leaving the threat still there for the next novel.

This book was quite a departure from the rest of series really, in both content and writing style. I much prefer Telep’s prose to anything from the earlier novels. The plot is far more complex with plenty of character development and enough originality to keep you guessing as to whats coming. I could summarise most of the other books in a few sentences and not leave out anything significant. Here I’ve done several paragraphs and missed out loads. On the other hand, I didn’t like the whole thing with Pilgrims in the movie and this takes it further still. By the end of the book Blair is able to step out of his body at will to fight marines with his mind. I like to see sci-fi and fantasy kept apart as a rule. This novel is faithful enough to the movie but it does seem to be a long way away from the Wing Commander I grew up with.

I think you could look at this book as the best of the series or the worst depending on how much resemblance you expect to Wing Commander.  As a fan of the WC games, I don’t especially like where the story was going and I’m not entirely sorry that the series ended here. Further novels would just have gone further and further from the games I expect. However, in its own right this was the best WC novel by some margin and I really enjoyed it. It’s a pity that Telep didn’t get a chance to do some of the earlier books as far as I’m concerned. I think he could have done a good job with them as he worked wonders from the starting point of the WC movie.

Peter Telep also wrote a trilogy of Descent novels which I’d be curious about as those games really didn’t have much plot to start from. I’ve far too many other books to be getting on with, to go looking for more anyway. I’ve only got 5 Origin novels left to read, but there is a huge stack of clue books left to be getting on with. I think I’ll pick off some of the smaller ones next and start getting the list down.