Day 4

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I managed all of about 20 mins last night on Ultima 3. There’s not much new to say, I’ve got half my party up to level 2 now and quite a bit more gold. I’ve nothing on tonight so I’ll get a decent session in then. Instead I’ll talk a bit more about the new stuff in Ultima 3 that I didn’t mention yesterday. First off you now have a party of four instead of a single adventurer – this certainly adds more variety to the gameplay, there’s a huge number of spells, weapons and armor and all in all it feels closer to a modern role-playing game because of it. 

The monsters travel in parties too, which has led to the addition of the combat screen, which was with us till Ultima 6. This means that every battle you swap to a screen where you can move all your characters around individually, attack or cast spells in turns. This makes the combat a bit more interesting, the downside is the battles take longer which is going to slow me down quite a bit. Only the character that makes the kill, gains experience. My wizard should be ok with his mittar spell getting quite a few kills, but I’m going to struggle to level up my cleric at the moment.

All the modern technology has finally disappeared, so we also have a proper fantasy environment for the first time since Akalabeth – I’m not far into it yet but the game already feels a cut above all the others. It seems like this game has actually been planned and designed rather than throwing together a load of elements ad hoc as in the first couple of games. Even though I’m just trying to level up, I’m enjoying it more than the first 2 games so far.

I’m only a few days in but I’ve decided I’m changing my Ultima mission into an all encompassing Origin mission where I blog my way through every game Origin has ever published. I think I own every one of them except for Caverns of Callisto, which I guess I’ll just have to download unless I find a copy. I’m as much a fan of Origin as I am of Ultima so it seems like the perfect thing for me to blog. I am wondering just how long is this going to take? If it took a year to play through all the Ultimas, how long would it take to play through every Origin game? Only one way to find out…

Even if its going to take me ages, I’m still looking forward to playing all those games. Overall I think it will just be more fun than sticking to Ultima, as I won’t be stuck with the same genre of game the whole way through. There are loads of them I’ve never played, which will be all new to me. More to the point, its never been done. With the non-ultima’s, I’ll try to be more thorough and include screenshots. I’ve not bothered so far, since there are loads of screenshots already on the other two blogs + I tend never to look at them when reading the blogs myself. Hopefully, when I’ve got a few games in, my writing style might even be coherent instead of the ramblings I’ve managed so far, but I wouldn’t count on it.

Day 3 – Ultima 3

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I’ve just barely made a start on Ultima 3 today. Its a long, long time since I played this but from starting out it looks like its going to take longer than the first four games put together. This was the first game published by Origin. The box is a lot smaller this time, but the quality of the packaging is excellent again. The cover illustration of the demon would have been enough to make me buy the game, but the manuals are superbly produced, especially the spell books. Each spell is on its own page with illustrations around the border relating to the spell. I love the effort that went into these things, and they really help to set the scene when the game itself is so basic. 

I’m playing the Ultima collection version with the upgrade patch to add ega graphics and midi music. I’d quite liked the idea of playing the nes version originally on my psp but the music put me off before I got started so I’ll stick with the pc.

I’ve played maybe 30mins to an hour so far. The game appears much more structured than its predecessors. The dungeons are no longer random and they now contain fountains, which heal you, cure poison or poison you. Line of sight has been added to the overhead maps, so you now cant see round corners, or any distance at all in forests. I’ve gone for a very traditional fighter, thief, cleric, and wizard party. So far, I’ve just spent some time gathering gold. All my characters are still level 1, starting out in this game is quite difficult but I’ve got a few thousand in gold together, and a load of food mainly by raiding the 1st floor of the same dungeon over and over, finding my way there in the dark and raiding the same chests. I keep having to swap dungeons to get to a healing fountain though due to chest traps. If I can level up my guys a bit and get some more hit points it will be much easier and faster. I’m planning on limiting my trips to Ambrosia so I really want to get all my guys to 9999 gold before I go there but this will mean a lot of grinding to start out. I’m not even going to attempt to explore the world until they are stronger.

Day 2 – Ultima 2 & Escape From Mount Drash

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Another day, another 2 Ultimas finished. If I keep this up, I’ll be done by the end of the week.

Ultima 2

First off, I have to say the box for this game is a thing of beauty. I’ve got the Sierra big box version and it was worth every penny. Even the back cover looks great – the cloth map is much thicker and better quality than in later games and the package overall just looks awesome. The unnecessarily large manual, is an entertaining read – it gives the impression that it was written by a Sierra employee based on some notes from LB, as its often sarcastic and jokey about the game. 

I’m using the upgrade patch from http://exodus.voyd.net and playing the game in dosbox. You can get decent colour graphics in Ultima 2 by using the tandy option in dosbox but the restore command and frame limiter in the upgrade swayed me towards that instead.

The game is fairly similar to Ultima 1 in technology terms but since the Ultima 1 I played was a remake, it kind of feels like a step backwards even with the upgrade patch. There are now towers as well as dungeons (no difference except you go up instead of down) but the major change is that towns are now on scrolling maps so are much, much larger. This was the first Ultima to use moongates – I gather the idea was pinched from the movie Time Bandits, along with the cloth map and the time of legends – Terry Gilliam should sue. The game takes place on earth this time – this was so that the time travel had a context but origin struggled to explain it later in the series.

The game is extremely open ended with little story to it – much like real life I seemed to spend most of my time trying to make some money and very little time spending it. I started off just trying to improve my characters stats. Once again, this is using an extremely odd system to do this, there is a guy at the desk in the Hotel California (The Eagles should sue as well) and if you offer him gold he raises your stats. Which stat he changes depends upon how many moves you have made, so you can control this by saving and restoring and passing turns. Getting enough money to raise your stats is a problem though – you go through food very quickly and I only seem to be able to steal so much before I fail in my stealing attempt every time. The key to the whole game is  getting a blue tassel. Every time you kill a thief you get an item at random. These have all sorts of effects like saving you from sleep spells, but the blue tassel means that if a ship is attacking you, you can board it and sail off. If that doesn’t sound too useful bear in mind, that you don’t use any food while sailing (endless supply of fish I guess) and you have cannons to blast anyone and everything with. Ships are rare enough however, never mind blue tassels. Also thieves steal items while you are attacking them – so if you do get a blue tassel make sure you don’t lose it.

My strategy here was to go to Pangaea and fight until a got a blue tassel – (this took some time). A boat had turned up by then so I sailed round Pangaea blasting everything to raise a bit of cash. I then gave LB all my money to raise my hit points and tried to fight through the hoard of extra hard baddies at the time of legends. Since all of them are casting sleep and paralysis this was pretty hard going. The best strategy seemed to be to coax a couple into the starting area with the moongates, then back off so I only had to cope with two at a time. This still used up loads of hit points. By the time I’d killed about half of them, a boat sailed in to the west. I made a run for this, managed to board it and then blasted the lot of them with my cannons. 

Now the boring bit, I sailed round and round the time of legends island blasting anything that appeared until I had 9999 gold. This is pretty tedious but seems like the best way of getting lots of gold quickly. I also stocked up on all the items in the game by killing dozens of thieves. I had 10 blue tassels by the end having struggled for ages to get the first one. I raised all my stats and bought some decent armor at New San Antonio. I also got the quicksword from the guy in the jail, and nicked a plane while I was at it, which I used to get to the town in the holocaust time period and pinch a shuttle. 

The space section in this game is simpler than the last one – there’s no combat, you just travel around. There’s a whole solar system of planets, but I just skipped them all, hypered to 9,9,9 and planet x. You actually have to land the shuttle yourself, which is just a case of watching the world scroll by and pressing a key when you are over clear land. Thanks to the frame limiter this is easy, you don’t want to try it without it. I’m here to get father antos blessing which means I have to butcher my way through some guards again. So far in this game I’m guilty of nicking food, mass-murdering guards, breaking people out of prisons, mutineering, stealing an airplane and stealing a space shuttle. He gives me his blessing anyway though so its off back to earth. I get the ring from the guy under atree in New San Antonio, spend a bit of time maxing out my hit points then its off to the time of legends to do in Minax.

Minax’s castle is fairly huge and full of interesting rooms you can’t get to like torture chambers and time zones. There’s a few bad guys around but nothing too major apart from one that is invulnerable – a negate time spell and I managed to lure him into one of the rooms though so hes out of the way. Minax herself is up in the top right corner of the castle. I get within a few squares and she starts blasting me and shouting ‘DIE FOOL!’. A quick whack with my sword and she vanishes off to the bottom left of the map, so I trek down there, whack her again, and she’s off back to the top right again. Another 3 hits later and she’s had it. All her works now die with her and the castle turns into black squares one at a time. There’s no finishing text this time, I get a screen of the shuttle scrolling over earth and a message at the bottom saying to now try Ultima 3 – Exodus. I assume this means that this was a later version of the game created after Ultima 3, or was this there in the original version and the sequel already planned?

All in all, this game has been less fun than Ultima 1. I like the scale and idea of it, the fact that it has the entire world as its map and all the time zones work well. There’s no real plot again, which is usually one of my main reasons for playing a game. My main gripe though is I spent far too long just sailing round and round the time of legends collecting money. If I was playing this at the time, properly, rather than just trying to complete it as quickly as possible this perhaps wouldn’t have been as big an issue. These days, you have to be on an Ultima mission to bother playing this.

Escape From Mount Drash

This is a game I’d never played before. I don’t have the VIC-20 version (unfortunately) or a rom so I’m playing the dos port. Does this game justify being one of the most expensive in the world? Absolutely not – if there was ever proof that adding a brand name onto something crap gives it value this is it. This game is rare for a good reason – no one sane would have wanted to buy it. Akalabeth was leaps and bounds above this.

The game consists of 15 levels, which are very small mazes where you have to get from the bottom right corner to the top left. On later levels you also have to collect gems from the other 2 corners. You get a 3d view of the maze in a little window but this isn’t all that useful since monsters on it are invisible as are the gems and the exit. You can’t even tell when you have picked up a gem. There is another map window, which shows locations of exits, monsters and the bits you’ve explored in early levels, gradually dropping off to showing nothing in later levels. 

Combat takes place in the final window and pretty much consists of pressing z and c as quickly as possible in the manner of sprinting in all those sports games from the 80’s. I gather the original version only lets you move every time the monster does so you could press your z and c at a more leisurely pace. Monsters are fairly Ultima like with gremlins, phantoms, and a sort of gazer thing, theres also a slime monster that puts me in mind of might and magic more than Ultima.

You get 3 lives I think to get to the end of the game, I only ever died once so I don’t know for sure. There’s a time limit also but its really not an issue as long as you are quick on the z and c buttons. I never went anywhere near to running out of time.

So to cut to the chase, the game is crap. On the bright side, its extremely easy so I didn’t waste too much time on it. On my first attempt I got to about level 13 but I just had dead ends everywhere and needed to use a spell to blast through a wall. I couldn’t remember what key to use and ended up quitting the game while trying keys so I had to start again. My second attempt, after reading the manual, I finished it. This gives you a screen saying you achieved the rank of Questor and that’s it.

The idea that people have paid around $2000 for this makes me feel much better about what I have spent on my game collection. My more extravagant purchases include $50 for a copy of forge of viture, $100 for Ultima 1 CPC, $150 for big box Ultima 2, and maybe the same again for the limited edition Ultima 6. That said, I’d still like to own a copy and would probably pay a few quid myself given opportunity so I guess I’m as gullible as anyone else.

Day 1 – Akalabeth & Ultima 1

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I’ve raced through the first couple of games today. They really didn’t take long at all to play through, maybe 30 mins for akalabeth and a couple of hours for Ultima 1. This is going to be easy!

Akalabeth

There’s a couple of remakes knocking around but I chose to just play the one that came with the Ultima collection in dosbox.  I chose a fighter and rerolled my stats a few times until most of them were in the 20’s, in the shop I bought a weapon and a load of food, then set off to find Lord British’s castle. The overhead map for the game world is only 20×20 so this didn’t take long to find. He then raises all my stats by 1 (thanks a lot LB) and sends me off to kill one of the critters in the dungeon. I go to the nearest one (they are all identical) about two steps away from his castle. 

Every dungeon floor is the same every time, including the position of the monsters so its always predictable once you’ve been playing the game for a bit. The best strategy here seems to be to stick around on the first level, killing the easy baddies and opening the chests to get some gold. Then go back to the nearest shop, get the best equipment, and as many amulets as you can afford. Then I saved my game just before entering the dungeon, use the amulets (the effect is random for fighters) until I turn into a lizard man. This seems to roughly multiply all my stats by 2. Oddly enough, if you keep using amulets and turn into a lizard man again it doubles your stats over. By saving and restoring, when the random effect doesn’t work out I had a character with all stats in the 200’s inside about 5 mins. This made me completely invulnerable to all the monsters, except gremlins who could still steal food.

There isn’t too much to say about the rest of the game, each time you complete your quest LB gives you another creature to kill which is 2 levels lower down in the dungeons. The final one was a balron, I think. I dispatched that, got made a knight, and that’s the end of the game. The end message is basically the same as the original version but you aren’t given a phone number to ring.

For a 30 year old game, written in his spare time by a student it holds up pretty well. Its extremely simple but its pretty good fun for half an hour. 

Ultima 1

I’ve not seen any upgrades around for this so just played the Ultima collection version in dosbox. I chose a fighter once again. This game is basically Akalabeth with a decent overhead map system added in and a space combat subgame – I read somewhere that tile graphics were invented for this game and they are now used instead of lines to draw all the maps. The dungeons are nearly identical to Akalabeth with a few additions like trap doors (can climb down them but not back up), and traps that drop you a level. My strategy for this game was to buy some basic weapons at the start and then use the nearest dungeon to gain enough experience to get me up to level 3. This is pretty easy as you regenerate hit points when you exit a dungeon (depending on how many things you’ve killed). So I just walked back and forward down the first corridor of the dungeon, killed everything, exited, and repeated. This raised my hit points loads and got me some much needed cash. The experience however does not raise your stats. Next I found a town that would sell me an air car – apart from getting me everywhere on the map this has a nice set of lasers to blast enemies with. I then set out to find all the castles to get quests and visit all the signposts on the way. There are 4 lands each with 2 castles, containing kings, princesses and jesters. One of the kings gives you a quest to slay a dungeon monster ala Akalabeth, the other to find some place or other. Once you complete the task, you then go back and get either a gem and a clue, or a bonus to your strength stat (this is the only way to raise your strength). You can be on quests for all eight kings at once and do the quest several times if you wish. 

Back to the signposts, these are dotted around the map and you enter one to raise your stats. You then have to visit a different signpost before you can raise your stats again however. This is one of the oddest ways to raise stats, I can think of in an RPG. My strategy was just to pick nearby pairs and fly between the two until my stats were maxed. There’s also one signpost that gives you weapons (a better one each visit) which I used to get the blaster. I maxed out all the stats this way at any rate, completed the 8 quests so my strength was in the 60’s, and then went to buy a space shuttle. This does seem kind of out of place in a fantasy game – I gather that the idea was that the technology progresses throughout the game. Hence the lightsabers, blasters, aircars etc. The space combat bit was added as there was room on the disk to fill up. 

The space section is basically a sub-game that has little to do with the rest of the game. First off you have to dock your shuttle using the arrow keys with a little space station. You then choose one of the other two ships docked with it to actually explore space, and shoot tie fighters with. One of them has loads of fuel and not much shields and the other vice versa. The combat itself is dead easy. You move your crosshair around on screen, the little alien ship moves accordingly. i.e. if the crosshair is above it moves down, to the left it moves right, etc… When it gets near enough so that you can see the hole in the middle, you can shoot it. For some reason you seem to have to aim slightly above it. Something I never noticed before, is you can use the spacebar to get your crosshair back to the middle of the screen, which makes things much easier. You get 100 experience for every alien shot and I think you have to kill about 18 to become a space ace. Once I’ve done that I hypered back to the middle of the map, docked, got back in my shuttle and went back to Britannia.

The next task was to go to a castle, kill the jester to get his key then fight past the guards to free the pricesss and get her out again. She then tells me where the time machine is – its kind of odd I hadn’t noticed it before since its the same size as LB’s castle. I then go back into the same castle where new guards have been recruited and all is now forgiven, offer up all my money to the king to get my health up to about 6000.

Next its off to the time machine, I insert the four gems from the kings quests and this is it the battle with Mondain. I head straight for the gem and try to get it – it shatters dealing me about 3000 damage. I then blast Mondain over and over until he turns into a bat and tries to run off. I then have to chase around after him all over the map trying to get within one square and blast him, at which point he runs off again and I start chasing. This is kind of anti-climatic and more like some sort of game of tag than an epic battle but eventually I get him. There’s a nicely written screen of text at the end of the game where LB congratulates me. 

All in all, the game was fun enough. Theres no real story to it, but all the different elements come together well. It was easy enough not to be frustrating and not a bad way to spend a couple of hours.

Another Ultima Blog

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Its been done before but in this blog, I’m intending to play through all the Ultima games in order from start to finish (without cheating), and post my thoughts and progress here. Does the world need another Ultima blog when its already been done so well? Probably not, but I’m going to do it anyway. I’ve always wanted to play through the whole series and that blog has inspired me to give it a go. I’m not going to attempt to be as thorough in my blog, and I may do things a bit differently as I’m not so adverse to using upgrades where they are available, e.g. I’m intending to play Lazarus instead of the original Ultima 5. I’ll also break off to look at some of the Ultima ‘literature’ along the way (hint books, avatar adventures, the two Ultima novels, the Shay Addams Ultima book etc..) I note that it took about the other guy, a year to play through all the games. I’m sure it can’t possibly take me that long…. 

To give a bit of background, I’ve been an Ultima fan for many years and am old enough to just about remember the early games coming out. I’ve played some of them several times, but others not at all (including the likes of serpent isle).  I’m a bit late starting the blog so I’m already a few games in, I’ll cover them all briefly then go through the later games in more detail.

Enough with the intro. On to Akalabeth…..

EDIT: I decided partway through Ultima 3 to expand my run through the Ultima games to include every game Origin ever made in vaguely chronological order (although I may change my mind about the order). I’ve collected all these games and probably never played half of them so its about time I did. I’ll cover the other Origin games in more detail than the Ultimas, and include screenshots since they haven’t been blogged before.