Ultima Underworld Demo

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Ultima Underworld is arguably my favourite game of all time and was the game that really introduced me to RPG’s. On this basis, I had to give the demo a try out although it barely varies from the final game from what I saw.

I’m fortunate enough to own a packaged copy of the demo. It’s declared not to be for resale, so I’m assuming this was sent out to stores to put on demo PC’s. The cardboard part of the packaging has ready-made creases in it so that it can be folded up, stapled together and then stood up next the PC the game is being displayed on. The only problem with this is that all the instructions for playing the game are on the inside of the card so any potential customer would either need the controls explained to them, or have to bend the tent display open to look inside.

Had it been properly sealed I’d have been reluctant to open this, but it looked like a rodent had been nibbling away at one corner so I only had to increase the size of the hole slightly to get at the contents. As expected the demo is exactly the same as the one already available at http://www.uo.com/archive/uw1/demoftp.html.


There is no intro, just the title screen, after which it goes straight into a rolling demo with a couple of short tours of the first level of the game. This can be interrupted at any time allowing any potential customer to try it themselves.


The demo gives full access to Level 1, although you are stuck with a pre-created character. I had a run around the level to see if I could spot any changes. The HUD has been changed to display the game’s name at the bottom right which makes sense when you are trying to sell it to people. As for the game itself, saving is disabled and the silver sapling has been removed giving the player no second chances if they are killed off.


Other than that, it appeared to be the first level almost exactly as I remember it. I’m sure there were fewer lurkers and for a while I thought they were missing entirely until I eventually ran into one. About the only other change I spotted was the missing water in the “dangerous privy”.


I decided to jump down here to see what happened. After a long fall, there is a short message saying that level 2 isn’t in included and it’s back to the rolling demo again. I never made it to the NW part of the level and didn’t fancy restarting so that’s as far as I got. As demos go this is a substantial size effectively including 1/8 of the final game, but there wasn’t anything I saw to make in worth playing in addition.

Wing Commander 3 Funny Tape

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I managed to make the time for a speedy look through my parcel of Origin goodies before Xmas. Let’s face it, it had to be done. Going through it all properly is going to take ages but suffice to say I’m happy with the contents and there are a few real gems in there.

Among everything else there were half a dozen VHS tapes. The snag with this is that I’ve not had a VHS player in a long, long time. You’d have to be fairly out of date to own one these days really, which is where the parents come in. Since I was conveniently over there for Xmas, I took the opportunity to transfer all the tapes over to DVD and as a late Xmas present to WingNuts, I’ve re-encoded one of them and stuck it on Youtube:-

As far as I know this hasn’t made it onto the web before, although much of it will be familiar to anyone who has seen the bloopers video from the WC3 Special Edition. That ran for less than 9 minutes so there is a lot more footage here. The quality isn’t exactly perfect – it is after all a 15 year old tape but it’s not too bad. I should possibly mention that there is some strong language for those offended by it.

A full set of Origin games!

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I’m back home again after doing a tour of the family homes over Xmas and apart from being a little tired, raring to go with the next Origin demo. Boxing day is made for gaming as far as I’m concerned and I intend to make the most of it.

The main reason I’m tired is that I was up in the middle of the night bidding on my personal collecting holy grail, Caverns Of Callisto. It figures that I wait years for a copy to come along and it arrives right at the most expensive time of the year, just after I’ve already spent a small fortune. I didn’t let it put me off as I’ve been looking for a copy for so long it was going to be mine the moment it was listed no matter what it took. It finished way, way under what I was prepared to spend. The last copy I saw on Ebay went for $100 more and didn’t even have the box so I’m considering it a bit of a bargain. Others may disagree but it was worth more to me.

Anyone who has read much of this blog will know that I’ve been looking for this game for over a decade and have been mentioning it as often as possible in the hopes that someone would offer to sell me one. When I get my hands on it in a few weeks that will at long last complete the set of every Origin game and book about 12 years after I started collecting them. Granted I could and no doubt will keep going with foreign/alternate versions and various other bits and bobs but all of that is optional extras. Top of the list now would be the soundtrack CD’s, NES Ultima 5, SNES Savage Empire & SNES Ultima 7, 3D0 WC3, WC3 & 4 Playstation and the toolkit for Autoduel. The soundtracks will be tricky but the rest won’t take too much finding. The hwid spoofer is where one can get hacks and tricks to progress in a game.

Any of that stuff will have to wait though. After recent weeks, my new years resolution is to not spend a single penny on anything to do with gaming until April. We’ll see how long that lasts….

In the meanwhile, I’ve got a whole parcel of Origin goodies to go through. Expect to see something a little bit special for the Wingnuts on here later.

Wing Commander Prophecy – 3dfx Test Demo

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I thought while I had my Win 98 machine connected up, I ought to have a go at the Wing Commander Prophecy demo. There are actually two of these of which this is the first. It was released as a 3dfx hardware test for an early version of the game engine. The demo is 3dfx only so it needs Glide in some form to run and can be downloaded from WCNews.

It’s a fairly simple demo with no FMV and consists a 5 minute gauntlet against Kilrathi ships. On the intro screens it states that the best score any of the testers achieved was 17 kills, although the readme file says that one of them had since got this up to 24.

The mission starts off at a slightly different looking Midway with a few quick video messages to set up the scenario before I autopilot to the nav point and get stuck in. It has to be said the engine does still look good although it’s less polished than the final product was. The nav point marker is a couple of white lines and the space background doesn’t look quite right among other things but the gameplay is all there. I’m up against a never-ending stream of Vaktoth’s, Dralthi’s + another Vaktoth being flown by Thrakhath (which is actually easier to kill than the others).

I found the demo to be fairly unstable and my PC kept locking up and needing rebooting so I only actually played through the once. I’m sure this is my PC and not the demo. Most of the components are from one of my old PC’s which wasn’t running too well at the time I upgraded it. I’ve been underclocking it to keep it running which had been working but it looks like it’s on its last legs now. I’ll have to track down the faulty part and swap it over the holidays.

Aside from the crashing, I had a great time playing this. It’s frantic action with no holding back in an attempt to get as many kills as possible. I didn’t realise it until it happened but you get a second set of missiles after 15 kills. I wouldn’t have held back on my missiles so much if I’d known. The other tactic I’d try differently is to send my wingmen home at the start. They tended to drift away from me taking Kilrathi with them, leaving me wasting precious time afterburning to the next fighter when I’d cleared my area.

I still managed 18 kills, beating the initial target at least. I did have a screenshot to prove it among others but apparently missed copying most of the jpg’s onto my phone so this post is a little lacking on pictures. If I can get 18 kills on my first attempt, the testers can’t have had much chance to try this out when the splash screen was created. If it didn’t keep crashing I’d have gone for the 24 kills which would be far more challenging.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the movie segments on WCP when compared to WC4 (although I’ve heard they nearly didn’t happen at all), but the gameplay still stands up brilliantly and I could have spent ages trying to up my kill score. Any WC fan should have a look at it and I’ll probably be going back myself when I get my PC fixed up.

A couple of bits of news to finish. First off, Amazon Canada have cancelled my pre-order for the Wing Commander Academy DVD set for the creative reason of not being able to get hold of it yet. I presume this is happening to everyone who pre-ordered. I suppose I’ll place my order again and go to the back of the queue.

Much more importantly, my parcel of Origin bits and pieces from Rhea Shelley has arrived just in time for Xmas. I don’t know if I simply got lucky or British customs officers were showing some Christmas spirit (not likely) but it got through without any added VAT. I’d been steeling myself for a huge bill, so this is a welcome early Xmas present. There is still some shop posters and the like which were too large to send regular post which will be following on in a month or so but it’s the bulk of the value. I didn’t buy any of the games which are currently up for auction on Ebay for anyone who wants them, with loads of shrinkwrapped copies of Origin titles among other things. I might have a go at one of them myself if it stays cheap but I’ve got other plans for the money I just saved.

In the meanwhile, I’ve not had time to even open the parcel yet and may not get much chance to start going through it all until boxing day. I won’t be posting again before then so happy Xmas to all.

Wing Commander 3 Demo

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This will be a short post, partly as it was a short demo but also because I couldn’t grab any screenshots. The WC3 Demo is available from WCNews, although I got my copy off the January 1995 PC Format coverdisk.

This came with an electronic Origin catalog which isn’t in the WCNews download so I’ve uploaded it here for anyone interested.

This has sales pitches and screenshots for loads of Origin games including Wing Commander 3. The catalog is a windows program but wouldn’t run on 64 bit Windows 7. It ran fine on my Windows 98 machine however, which is what I ended up using to play the demo.

Running the demo at all proved to be more difficult that I expected. It started up in Dosbox but crashed as soon as the initial speed test was finished. I tried tweaking memory setting and cpu types without getting anywhere. I had the same problem running it from the command prompt on my Win98 PC but it did run ok if I exited to DOS mode. The snag with that is that I haven’t set up sound drivers for DOS as the hardware in that PC is just a little too modern. I ought to follow Loaf’s example and set up a DOS machine at some point. I’ve got enough old hardware around here to knock something together without spending any cash, but it seems like overkill for the sake of a demo + I’ve not got room for a third box. For now, I took the easy option and played without sound.

The demo is in two parts. The first is a rolling movie of clips from the FMV. I didn’t spot anything new in here although I was watching it without any sound. The FMV was stuck at the top of the screen instead of the middle but I’ll blame this on my video card. Pressing escape brings up a demo mission.

The demo mission is nice and simple and just involved fighting a load of Dralthi in an Arrow at a single nav point. There are enough of them to be something of a challenge and it shows off the game engine well enough. Other than a message popping up telling me when my missiles had hit or missed, I didn’t notice much difference to the final game.

Playing this mission meant dusting off (literally) my Thrustmaster joystick which turned out to be far better behaved in DOS than it had been when I was trying to play Longbow 2 on the same machine. There was no drifting at all and it was as accurate as I could have wished. Another reason to build that DOS machine maybe. There is something incredibly retro about using one of these old joysticks that needs real force to move around.

After clearing out the NAV point, the demo returns to looping the movie so the whole demo only takes minutes to get through. It certainly leaves you wanting more and back in 95 persuaded me to buy WC3 the moment it came out even though my PC wasn’t up to the job.