I’ve uploaded a new version of the Ultima patcher. This fixes the issue when applying the music only patch for the Second Ultima Trilogy version of Ultima 4 and can be downloaded from here.
Ultima Patcher 1.11
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Wing Commander 3DO Demo
This is another demo from WCNews and out of all of them probably the one I’m most interested in, since I’ve not played the 3DO version of the game and am thinking about buying it. The WC3 demo is part of the 3DO sampler CD which contains demos for a host of other games also.
Unfortunately, the 3DO is one of the less well supported consoles as far as emulators go. As soon as I select WC3, I have to watch the psychedelic version of the trailer. Skipping this hangs the emulator altogether so if there is an interactive section after the FMV I don’t get to see it. I tried 4 or 5 different versions of Freedo without any success here. I think the bottom line is, if I want to play WC3 3DO I will have to do it on the real hardware.
I wouldn’t mind owning a 3DO for more than just this one game actually, and they aren’t especially expensive or hard to get hold of so I may well go for that but it will have to wait for the moment.
I thought I’d try the U9 demo again to see if I could reach the end but my Win 98 machine appears to have finally kicked the bucket as well. I’ve tried PSU number 3 and it’s still completely unstable so I think I can add a new old PC to the shopping list. I’m not going to put any more effort into getting this one fixed, as it isn’t really the hardware I want in the first place. Something along the lines of a Pentium 2 would be far more appropriate and I ought be able to pick a PC that ancient up for next to nothing. As far as both these demos go, I’ll have another look when I have the right hardware.
Shadowcaster Demo
Happy new year! There could be several updates today as it is far far too wet and windy to step out the front door and I’ve nothing on until tonight. I could use some of the time to tidy my house up but I’m not sure it’s come to that yet.
I’ve still got a handful of demos left to try. I’ll start with the Shadowcaster demo which I’ve uploaded to here. This gets its own unique level definitely making it worth playing in it’s own right.
The quest for the demo is to restore the crown of the obelisk’s brother-in-flames. This is a little cryptic but basically means put the red pyramid on the obelisk in the lava region.
I’ve got the 3 most advanced creatures available to morph into, making the early stages a breeze as I crush the hordes of skeletons that come out to stop me. Instructions are built into the game and come up at the bottom of the screen as I play which is a nice touch for a game from this era.
I’m led down a path to these walking eyeballs and have to slot an hourglass I picked up earlier into the hole behind them.
This opens up access to a watery area. Things get tougher here as I have to morph into the frogman guise to swim through the underwater caverns. With no weapons to help me out, the fish in here manage to do me a good deal of damage and I’m forced to run and recuperate. This slow health regeneration was always one of the problems in Shadowcaster, where you have to park up somewhere safe and go and do something else for 10 minutes while your hit points come back. It’s particularly slow here without the Faun to morph into, but it does give me a chance to write the post up to here while I’m waiting.
I’m not able to save so I don’t take any chances, and only go back in the water when I’m back up to full health again. I’m less sparing with my various powers this time and use them to dispose of 4 or 5 fish. I soon find myself running out of mana and I’m still being chased by more fish. Running out of mana would mean transforming back into Kirt and presumably instant death by drowning so it’s another retreat and wait.
Fifteen minutes later and in a slightly tidier room, I go back in again to clear the place out. I’d like to say that I managed it but having taken out another 3 fish, there are still two waiting for me round a corner and I don’t have the mana to take them out. I do find a fire wand which initially looks like it should help but it won’t work underwater. It’s another lengthy wait and more tidying up….
The next attempt finally does the job and I find this chain to pull which opens up the wall behind it allowing me to swim up and into the next area.
The new area is full of more tribal eyeballs which I’m invulnerable to in my granite form.
I find a shruiken along the way which is needed to take out the moving target behind this wall of fire. This allows access to a teleport taking me to the final fiery realm.
My granite man guise is still invulnerable to the larger creatures here but my task is made a little harder by the streams of lava. I have to fly over these in another form while taking some damage, then quickly swap back to kill everything off.
There haven’t been any alternate paths in the whole demo so I soon get to the end and fix the obelisk. Other than the waiting I quite enjoyed playing through this. I dare say I could have dashed through the water section easily enough if I’d known where I was going but I didn’t want to risk having to start again. My house is looking somewhat more presentable again, so it got me started on a much needed job at least. If you don’t mind a little break in the middle, the demo is an excellent one showing plenty of what the game has to offer. Less fish might have been an idea though.
Ultima Underworld Strip Ad
I don’t know how much of it I’ll end up posting on here but I thought I would start systematically going through all the bits I acquired recently and randomly picked this Ultima Underworld advert from the pile. A large part of the collection is various proofs for magazine ad’s + their negatives such as this. All cool stuff to own for an Origin obsessive but I’m not entirely sure what to do with them now I’ve got them. This particular advert mainly consists of some extremely positive magazine quotes from around the world.
The negatives come as a set of four with the usual Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black used in printing. When building the proof you would use these to add a colour at a time in the specified order as I understand. As to what I can do with them myself, I suppose I could take them down to the printers and get nice clean prints which could be tempting with some of the full page ads. If they could be blown up to poster size, even better.
Since we’ve all gone digital these days, it occurred to me that if I ever did want to do that it would be a whole lot cheaper to scan and combine them all myself. Also, I think I’ve only got negatives and no proofs for some of these things so I can’t even see what they look like. This sounded like a good excuse to play around with Photoshop if there ever was one. My Photoshop skills were non existant but I managed to learn enough to create a CMYK image, paste inverted scans of the negatives into the appropriate colours and rotate them to roughly fit together. I ultimately came up with this:-
Admittedly it’s not perfect. The background is a very off white, and I definitely should have used a better rotational algorithm when I was lining everything up but as a proof of concept it’s a lot better than I’d hoped. The colours are brighter than the scanned proof but come out near enough exactly the same when printed. Higher resolution scans and a little more care and attention and I reckon I could get these looking near enough spot on. Whether I’ll ever actually do that is another matter, but I did enjoy messing around with Photoshop.
By the way, if you ever wondered why printing proofs have all the little lines on the page, trying to align all 4 layers will soon make it abundantly clear.
Ultima 9 Demo
I’m not convinced about the effort/reward ratio with all these demos I’ve been playing over the last few days. I’d quite like to get stuck into a game at this point instead of all this switching around. There aren’t that many left now though. This demo comes from the Xmas 99 PC Zone Cover CD. I’m sure it is widely available so I’ve not bothered uploading it.
I remember the demo well from the time actually. It was released world-wide although here in the UK, we were way behind the USA in terms of when we got to play the finished game. By the time it was released here it was the final patched version, making everyone in the USA beta testers in effect. It was a rare occasion where us Brits were better off with the extra wait. Of course, I’d paid a princely sum at this point to import the Dragon Edition which was never sold over here and ended up having to cheat my way to the end of the game thanks to one of the many bugs.
The demo starts with the impressive intro cinematic which was certainly up there with the best I’d seen at the time.
The playable part consists of the Earth training level + Stonegate and all the FMV that went with it. Any changes to the released game are minor except for the bugs which didn’t cause me a problem back in 99 having something approaching the ideal PC, but trying to run this now caused me quite a bit of grief. First off my “fixed” Win 98 machines new PSU decided that it would refuse to start up and would instead flick straight off immediately after I let go of the power button. I swapped the old PSU back in there which got it starting but it was completely unstable again and crashed within moments of the 3D sections starting. I think I’ve confirmed the problem anyway but I’m out of PSU’s at this point.
So I go back to running it on Windows 7. I tried the D3D mode and nearly all the textures were missing, so I swapped to using a Glide wrapper instead and it wouldn’t even start. It turns out that it refuses to run from anywhere except c:U9. Once I’ve discovered that much I think I’ve got it cracked and set into playing the demo. I have to say that the Glide wrapper isn’t a patch on what it looked like for the few seconds in was running on a Voodoo 3. There is a lot to be said for using the original hardware still where possible.
I did run into some problems with my avatar getting stuck in combat although jumping usually got him out of it. Other than that, it’s all going well until I run into the bit in Stonegate where I have to blow this vase onto the pressure plate and it simply isn’t having it. The vase always ends up floating in mid-air, presumably due to the same speed issue that causes the floating rune bug in the final game. No problem I think and try to switch the flying avatar cheat on but this refuses to work also and I never did make it to the end of the demo.
I can at least play the fmv that would have come up had I made it out of Stonekeep which shows a load of screenshots from the game. These screenshots must have been faked, they certainly aren’t from the game as any of us ever saw it. The clipping and fog would kick in way before the castle would show up, even if the game hadn’t already crashed at these viewing distances.
The hype surrounding Ultima 9 up to its release was quite something and it’s no wonder people were disappointed with it after so much buildup and screenshots like this. Looking back at it now, it’s genuinely enjoyable with some of the best dungeons of any game I’ve ever played and a fantastic looking world to explore. It isn’t an RPG by any stretch of the imagination though and was a dismal failure in terms of providing the climax the series deserved from a narrative standpoint. It’s a game I have mixed feelings about. If it wasn’t ending the series and/or didn’t have the Ultima name I might regard it as something of a classic. I just wish the voice acting had been shelved in favour of good old-fashioned text conversations with some actual depth.
I remember people spending quite some time exploring every aspect of this demo, with the most famous antics being using the breadmaker to build bread bridges to get to inaccessible areas. I’m sure there was a teleport behind the house which could be reached this way and I recall seeing extreme screenshots of someone miles in the sky on a winding trail of loaves.