Ultima – Apple II Original Version

Posted on November 17, 2011 by Pix

Ultima was first published in 1981 by California Pacific. It was written almost entirely in BASIC with a few assembly routines used to draw the screen. The original release never made it to the PC and the version included in the Ultima collection is a 1986 remake. The original release only had ziplock packaging like Akalabeth and didn’t include the maps and coins or any other extras that would become a staple for the later games.

In the past I’ve played the PC remake a few times + the C64 version more recently on my Pandora. The C64 version was basically identical to the PC with nothing to choose between them. I’d never played the Apple II original though, despite being all for playing the first release of a game in most cases and it’s about time I did.

The introduction sequence of the remake is gone and there is just a single screen, making it less impressive than Akalabeth if anything but it’s not a huge loss.

After going through the character creation, I’m surprised at just how familiar the game looks. I was expecting something a lot more primitive somehow, but the major difference to the remake is the lack of animation which isn’t all that noticeable. The other obvious change is the speed of the game. It really isn’t quick and unlike Akalabeth, it passes a turn if I don’t move for too long meaning I can’t just stick the emulator on maximum speed. I settle for upping it to about 3x normal which is very playable although still not what you would call sprightly.

I quickly stumble into my first combat. I don’t get to see the creatures approaching in this version and they just spring out of nowhere directly in front of me when I’m moving around. Combat isn’t directional either and I just have to press A to attack and it figures out if I’m in range or not. The other difference is that I’m attacked by bands of creatures (represented by the one sprite) which I have to kill one by one. Each kill gives me gold and experience, meaning that you can actually level up quite quickly in the outer world in this game but it is a lot more dangerous until you get yourself equipped to deal with it.

I head for the nearest town to stock up on much needed provisions. Everything here is very familiar, and will become more so as every town in the game looks exactly the same. At this stage I can only buy basic equipment, and should probably have tried stealing (which allegedly can get you the stuff they aren’t selling yet) but it didn’t occur to me until now, so I started out the game the hard way.

The dungeons are straight out of Akalabeth but there are plenty of additions with new monsters, coffins to open, force fields + the option to search each location to reveal traps and doors. There is nothing in the remake that isn’t here as well with the only change being the same agonizingly slow redraw rate seen in Akalabeth. I did notice a proliferation of traps in this version but you can avoid these retrospectively when using an emulator by searching the area after a quick restore from a savestate.

The start of the game is really quite testing in Ultima but once you get through it the game gets a lot easier. After several dungeon raids, I stack up enough gold to buy a frigate and take to the seas at which point I can start to build my character up.

The familiar Ultima 1 levelling system of trailing between various signs to raise stats is present here and the maps look to be about the same as I’m used to in the remake. I’m soon going backwards and forwards between convenient pairs of signs upping my stats and grabbing weapons. The frigate appears to make me nearly invulnerable and it’s cannons quickly take care of any monsters. The cannons even appear to find monsters I haven’t actually seen yet and since I don’t have to aim in the combat in this game (except in towns and castles), I gather a lot of gold and experience while I’m travelling around. This grinding is the main part of the game and I must have done going on an hour of it before I felt well equipped enough to start trying to complete the dungeon quests.

These quests are straight out of Akalabeth and involve killing particular monsters for 4 different Kings/Lords. There appear to be a few bugs in the game regarding remembering which quests you have and haven’t done. I stacked all four quests up to do them in one trip and this worked OK for 3 of the them but I ended up having to do the most difficult quest to kill the Balron twice.

Once these were out of the way it was time to buy a space shuttle and take to the skies.

Given the speed of the rest of the game, I was expecting the space section to be fairly awful but it actually runs well. The star field looks pretty decent and smoothly speeds up and slows down when entering hyperspace, although we don’t get the stars stretching out effect at the end.

The map of space is a little more basic than the remake though and all you get is a 3×3 text square of your immediate surroundings. This means that you can potentially get lost so it’s a good idea to keep track of where Earth is. On the plus side, I didn’t appear to have to pay docking fees so you can swap ships as much as you like, making the whole section quite easy.

The space combat has the familiar tie fighters and they look better in this than the remake if anything. It appears to have lost a wing in my one and only screenshot but they were both there in the game. The combat involves steering the fighters to the center of the screen and firing. It’s not exactly taxing but it’s a fun diversion in the middle of the game. I couldn’t find any real skill to this and whether you have enough time to shoot any given ship before it fires at you appeared to be random.

The fighters always came in groups of 3, rather than 1-3 as in the remake. Although I couldn’t go into the overhead view to change direction, it was possible to hyperspace out again before killing all 3 which is just as well as I started out in a ship which I discovered couldn’t survive a single hit.

I soon reach the rank of Space Ace, although again the game forgets this and I have to go back and do it again after rescuing a load of princesses fails to net me a time machine.

Rescuing Princesses turns out to be a great way to gain gold and experience and by the time I’ve gone back to regain my Space Ace’ness, I have a serious amount of gold and experience stashed up. The guards are tougher than ever and the best approach is to run them around Benny Hill style rather than trying to kill them off.

I should really have spent the gold first to get my HP up, but 9000 HP was always enough in the original and I’m keen to push on. I quickly find the time machine and jump in….

I don’t remember Mondain’s lair being quite this plain, but I head straight for his gem, grab it and start blasting away.

Modain transforms in a bat after a punishing skirmish but then just sits still so I can fire at him with impunity, which is just as well as I’m all but out of hit points by now.

I kill him a few times but he always comes back to life, so I try closing to point blank range and ‘Getting’ the corpse which apparently does the trick. There is no end cutscene, just a final message (and yes that is a strange way to spell complete).

There is an address instead of a phone number this time to contact California Pacific. It’s interesting that both this and Akalabeth asked people to report to them if they finished the game. I can’t help but wonder what you got for this and if there were completion certificates for these original games. If there were, I’ve never seen them mentioned anywhere.

Playing these games back to back for the first time since I started this blog, Ultima 1 feels like the game Akalabeth should have been. It’s adds a story (of sorts), some new quests, grindable stats, a fun little space shooter and an endgame. The space section is out of place but it makes the whole thing that little bit more epic. For it’s age, it is still quite a fun and varied game to play and were it not for the slow movement, there wouldn’t be much to choose between this and the remake. If I’d been a little older and rich enough to own what was a ridiculously expensive computer over here at the time, I’d have loved this game back in ’81. It desperately needed to be done in assembly though and the move to that for Ultima 2 had to be the way to go. Anyone who thinks Ultima 2 wasn’t an improvement should try playing both games at their original speeds.

I’ll be having a look at the VIC-20 version of Escape from Mt Drash next.

Akalabeth – Apple II

Posted on November 15, 2011 by Pix

Akalabeth was originally self published in tiny numbers by Richard Garriott in 1979 before being snapped up by California Pacific and sold on a large scale. It saw several versions with different cover art and manuals over the space of 2 or 3 years before California Pacific went out of business leaving Richard Garriott looking for another publisher for Ultima 2. The full story is well known, so I won’t repeat it all again but you can find it in the Official Book Of Ultima or 95% of the interviews Richard Garriott has given over the last 30 years.

In terms of getting hold of an original copy of any version, it’s relatively uncommon and still in high demand making it by far the most expensive game I’ve ever bought. At least 30,000 copies were sold though so there are probably several thousand of them still around. Disk images are of course available in the Asimov Apple II archives for those who can live without the real thing. Until now I’ve only ever played the MS-DOS remake included with the Ultima Collection but if I’m going to pay hundreds for a game I reckon I ought to at least play it.

Before I actually get to the game, something that may be of interest is that with software written in BASIC on old home computers, you can usually break out of the program while it is loading and list the code. Akalabeth was entirely written in BASIC so if you fancy poking around in the code written by a youthful Lord British all those years back, press CTRL-C while the game is loading and then type catalog to view all the files on the disk. From here type load filename and then list to view the contents of any the files. This trick also works with Ultima 1, although you can’t quite see the entire source code as a few small portions were written in assembly.

I was expecting not to see any real differences to the PC remake in all honesty, but perhaps the biggest difference is evident right from the start in that the game has a 3 screen introduction. This isn’t all that spectacular but it is definitely better than nothing which is what we got in the Ultima Collection version.

Character creation is exactly the same. There is a patience sapping option to continue rerolling stats but it’s not worth spending too long on this on the whole. There is a choice to play as a wizard or a fighter. I’d strongly recommend the wizard as ladder up spells come in extremely handy but it wouldn’t be too hard to win as the fighter either.

The early aim of the game is to explore an overland map and find Lord British’s castle to receive a quest. The one time I went to a dungeon first to build up some stats, the game restarted as soon as I tried to accept this quest. This game is not without bugs like this although this was easily the most severe I encountered. The overland map looks much the same as the remake and you move around in a 3×3 grid of line drawn tiles. This map was exactly the same in each game I started so it appears that only the dungeons are random in this version.

The dungeon quests all involve killing progressively tougher monsters. On the whole these tend to be found at lower levels of the dungeon each time but this wasn’t always the case. The key to beating the game is the use of magic amulets to cast the ???Bad spell. This either turns you into a toad or a lizard man dividing or multiplying your stats depending on which. At first this may seem entirely random, but I discovered that the game actually used the same sequence on each level of the dungeon. Exiting that level and returning reset the sequence, so it’s a simple case of finding a level where the lizardman spell is cast first, then exit come back and repeat until you have godly stats.

In a similar manner chests reappear each time you enter a level, so you can max out gold just by finding a chest near a ladder and grabbing it over and over. After a little of this my character was comfortably well off and mostly invulnerable with the exception of Gremlins which are a serious pain stealing half my food with each hit. The strange food mechanics from Ultima 1 apply here where your food goes down with every step and if you reach 0 you die instantly. Thankfully my beefed up wizard could kill pretty much anything in one swing of an axe at this point so Gremlins were not too much of an issue provided I spotted them quickly. Judicious use of save states certainly helped but the game is easily completable without.

The dungeons play much the same as the remake. The main difference was that monsters often retreat when you have damaged them a bit, then come back and attack again later, although it’s not too advanced as they only ever retreat in a straight line backwards. I also noticed that I didn’t tend to get beset by monsters quite as quickly so I don’t think they have any pathfinding skills beyond the direct route.

After completing 4 or 5 quests, I get my final mission to take out a Balrog. My tactic is to save my amulets on the way down using ladders, traps and trap doors to get down levels as quick as possible, carry out a hit and run on the Balrog then cast ladder ups all the way back to the top. On my return to LB, I’m rewarded with Knighthood and a phone number to ring, which I’m sorry to say is 29 years out of date.

It’s hard to be objective going back and playing a game this old, especially on hardware that I didn’t own at the time. One of the things that will strike anyone playing this is how slow the drawing algorithm is, giving away the fact that it was written in BASIC. We all had a lot more patience back in 1980 and I was happily playing games that took 10 minutes to load off a cassette well over half a decade after this came out. Even so, this really is slow by any standards and you can see it draw each block of the maze after every single move, even if nothing changes such as when in combat. If I couldn’t put the emulator up to maximum speed, playing this would have been painful.

Ignoring the speed, it’s not an especially well designed game relying mainly on a simple exploit with the talismans and spotting the games lack of randomness to progress. It was quite complex for the time with its RPG style stats and different player types but there is no significant way to develop your character after the start of the game. LB advances your stats by 1 after each quest but I can’t imagine this making any significant difference. With the additional of levelling up stats through combat, this could have been a full fledged RPG but Ultima’s avoided what would become traditional levelling systems for years.

This was still a great effort for a game that was after all never intended for public sale but Ultima was a big step forward and a far more rounded game, at least the Ultima that I’m familiar with. I’ve never actually played the Apple II original however which is what I’ll be looking at next.

Times Of Lore Review – Computer Gaming World

Posted on November 14, 2011 by Pix

This is from the January 1989 issue of Computer Gaming World:-

That’s all the scans for today. I’ve a couple of other things to mention while I’m posting. I thought it might never happen but Replacementdocs has started to approve some of my submissions presumably thanks to the new editor Pelleas. I never intended to host them all myself so assuming this continues, I’ll be removing them from this site as they are approved from now on. If you want them in high quality, grab them now.

I’m long overdue for some more gameplays and have decided I’d like to take a look at alternative versions of some of Origin’s classics. I’ve been adding some of these to the collection recently which is one of the things prompting this + I’ve got the urge to replay some of the games. I’ll be starting at the very beginning with the original Akalabeth on the Apple II.

Ultima 5 Review – Computer Gaming World

Posted on November 14, 2011 by Pix

This is the full review of Ultima 5 from the May 1988 issue of CGW. It’s got an interesting piece of trivia stating that Roe R. Addams (who consulted on Ultima 4) was represented in the game by Hawkwind and Skara Brae was only in the game since that was where his alter ego came from. He also consulted on Bard’s Tale, which is why the same town is in both games.

The review is largely positive although there are some complaints about how long combat can take (which I fully agree with) and omissions in the documentation (which I’m less convinced about):-