The copy pasting job I wanted to do from blogger to here isn't working too well, it's annoying and I don't wanna do it. I'll go as far as to say that the gamespot blogs suck serious ass now that I've experienced REAL blogging sites.

So if you want to read my blogs go check me out at http://ultimatrip.blogspot.com/

I repeat, go check me out at http://ultimatrip.blogspot.com/

See you there, hopefully.

Ah Ultima I, sure brings back a lot of memories. This might very well be the first game I ever played. Back when I was a kid my dad would jack up my character to all max attributes using a trainer and I would just run amock in the world of Sosaria. I honestly don't know how many times I killed Mondain but it must have been a lot.

I finally finished the game without a trainer in the early 90's..but by using a walkthrough :| I did the same for Ultima III. I was 10, 11 or maybe 12 years old when I did it. At the time I was pretty proud of it, thinking that finishing an Ultima without the aid of a trainer was quite the feat. Eh. I also remember being very surprised at the brevity of Ultima I.

So I remember somewhat the goals of the game. Get the four gems to put into the time machine. I just have no idea how I'm supposed to get the gems, but I guess I will have to solve a bunch of quests, rescue princesses and go in space to kill some baddies. That should net me the gems.

I started off by creating my trusty Dwarf fighter which I promptly called Shogun in honor of my dog of the same name. I'm thinking that my dog is already the greatest hero the universe has ever seen so I might as well put that heroic luck on my side and name my character after him. Even the Dwarf looks like him, a stocky well built little dude. Awesome. My dog is probably more Ranger than Fighter though but I didn't have a choice. Talking about my dog, he's currently complaining because I should be feeding him right about now. I keep telling him to give me five more minutes but he's not listening darnit.

Now I was a bit surprised at the astounding speed I was building my character up. One small little trip to the dungeon and I was already pretty strong when I came out of it. I just kept going into the dungeons and pretty soon I had a lot of money to spend so I bought weapons and armor you name it I was stacked.


Look at this dark knight to the right just missing. Logical he can't touch me I'm like a superhero. HIT AND MISS SUCKER.

Oh and am I the only one who thinks it's hilarious to be able to sink frigates with a measly axe? There's no logic in that but it's still awesome!


I already have a boat, in fact I already have an aircar and the red gem. I'm progressing very quickly at this point. I'm probably going to visit every sign in existence and visit every castle for every quest and then buy a shuttle and go do some 'Star Wars' dogfighting up in the stars. Yes I did say dogfighting go Shogun!

YES YES I WILL REPORT MY JOYOUS DEED TO LORD BRITISH!

Okay so I just finished the game on level 10. I will be honest with you guys, I actually liked it! I like those dungeon crawler type games, and I like 'em even more when they're simple like that. I loved being all jacked up going down the levels and putting the smackdown on the monsters. Lovely.

It was awesome to kill the balrog in one punch (or claw swipe I guess). Take that demon of hell!

So now I'm ready to tackle Ultima I after this surprisingly enjoyable trek through Akalabeth. BTW sorry for the lack of pictures but I couldn't take any because I was playing the ms-dos version (and not in dosbox). I will take some for Ultima I.

What does he mean am I foolhardy enough to try level 2? Are you telling me that I need to restart a new character from the beginning? I thought it just scaled up automatically to 10.

Oh well, no biggie, it'll take me 5 minutes to boost my char up to 1000 points in every stat anyway. :D

Level 10 here I come!

I would just like to mention that my strength, agility and stamina are all in the 800's with my wisdom and hp in the 500's.

The only thing I should have done though is to find Lord British BEFORE doing the lizard men thing because now for my first quest I need to go kill a balrog, or rather a balron :| When I played with my fighter my first quest was to kill a Carrion Crawler.

I miss that first quest now :(

I started a new blog on blogger called "My trip through Ultima". I have decided to finish every game in the Ultima series one after the other and I will relate my progress in the blog. You can find the blog at http://ultimatrip.blogspot.com but I will copy paste it over here since it's a blog about gaming which fits well into the context of Gamespot. Here we go.

Akalabeth Day 1 - II -

Man this game looks to be hard as hell. I entered a dungeon and one thing led to another I fell down like 3 traps and I had no idea how to get back up. Lovely.

Okay now I have no idea what's happening. I go in the dungeons, kill monsters, but when I go back out I'm not getting more HP or Gold so I end up running out of food. The hell? Oh no I do gain HP and I get the gold in the dungeon, logical. Okay okay let's play this thing seriously now.

I think I'll actually have to map this freaking dungeon :| Or maybe not.

Okay so I've played that game for a solid 45 minutes. At first I created a fighter with pretty good stats and played with him for a bit. It went well but eventually I started to realize the slow pace of my progression and I remembered Ophidian's comment about mages, amulets and lizard men. So I scrapped my fighter and started a mage.

First thing I did is get some amulets and cast Bad??. At first it backfired but I got it the second time. I was and still am overjoyed, it's really awesome to be a lizard my stats are awesome! On top of that I just realized that the Lizard Man's stats are STACKABLE, which means I can cast it over and over and my stats will just keep going up! I don't know if there is a time limit on being a lizard man but at the moment it does seem permanent which is awesome. In a couple of minutes (It is currently 7:18PM) I will go back to it and I will just use the amulet over and over to get my stats up real high, saving beforehand each time to make sure I don't become a toad or whatever.

Sorry about the lack of pictures, I'm playing the msdos version and it seems I can't take screenshots. Ophidian has a bunch of pictures of the game on his page if you want to check it out.

Akalabeth Day 1 - I -

Okay so I think my technique will be to keep the blog open at all times and just comment when I feel like it when playing the game. That will make for a natural sounding blog I hope.

So let's boot up the game shall we..oh just to keep you guys (and gals) in touch I'll be using Dosbox for Akalabeth, running it in Direct Draw and using the HQ3X filter. Not sure what good that will do to such an old game but we'll see. Let's start it up!

Okay just I just ran the setup and it detected my sound card (or at least the emulation of it). I had no idea I needed a sound card to play Akalabeth, are there actually sound effects in this game? Music even maybe? :| There isn't any music in UI and II so why would there be in this one?

Hey this is Ultima III's music, it was probably added at a later date, sort of like a 'remake'. Okay so here I am creating a character, it asks me what my favorite number is I type in 27 and the game crashes to desktop. Awesome, let's try this again.

And it crashes again. Okay so what is going on here? I'll check out the manual in case it is some form of copy protection, seems like a weird question to ask me.

Oh crap it seems that akalabeth doesn't run on the current version of dosbox. There is supposedly a dos remake somewhere that does work :|

I found the Dos remake. Seems to have added color to the game and some midi tunes. I'll download it and check it out.

I finally settled on the windows remake called Akalabeth 2k1. Seems nice enough, I hope there aren't too many bugs in it :)

God DAMN am I not lucky with this game or what? This thing is nearly unplayable it barely registers the keyboard for crap's sake! I'll try out that freaking dos remake version *grumbles*. Holy crap even that dos remake seems to be working funky, somehow once I buy some food the game freezes or something because I can't do anything. This is unreal can I please play this game? Someone? Please? Yep the moment I buy ANYTHING the game freezes. Awesome, simply awesome.

Okay let's try that Windows remake and jack up the keyboard sensitivy to like 10000.

Okay nothing's working I'm pissed off this sucks as all hell as ever sucked before. I'm not playing Akalabeth. It's not even an Ultima anyway grrrr.

OH crap. I managed to get it to work. After all that talk of playing the remakes in dosbox and whatnot I finally realized the akalabeth that comes on the Ultima Collection CD actually works in Windows XP simply by running the executable. Crap.

So I guess I'm off to play Akalabeth. I'll close this post for now since it's so long and convoluted.

So I've decided to try my hand at Ultima

Hey all, this is my first post on Blogger. This looks like a really awesome blog, much better than other similar sites such as myspace, xanga or livejournal. Looks clean and tidy, just like I like it :|

So yeah, this will be about Ultima and all about Ultima. I recently stumbled on Ophidian Dragon's quest to finish every Ultima game in existence one after the other and I thought it funny that someone had the same idea as I at pretty much the same time. I didn't intend to blog about it at first, in fact my goal was to end up doing a video review of each Ultima game which I would have posted on youtube and gamespot videos but after seeing Ophidian's blog I decided to try my hand at it also.

My blog will probably be quite different from his for many reasons. The main one is that I have not finished most of the Ultima games, in fact the only ones I have done are Ultima I and III. I have barely played Ultima II, V, IX and both Underworld games. I have never played the two games in the Worlds of Ultima series. I have played a lot of Ultima IV in my younger days but I never got anywhere and I tried my hand at both Ultima VI and VII in which I also never got anywhere. Finally I played a lot of Ultima VIII in the late 90's, I probably wasn't too far from the end. So when you look at my general inexperience with the series compared to Ophidian it's obvious that our blogs will be very very different.

Another difference will come from the desire to play the original versions or in fact the lack of desire from my part. To me, if I can make the game prettier and better I will. That means playing the UI remake and applying every patch possible to Ultima II,III, IV and V. In fact I'm thinking about playing the NES version of UIII instead of the PC one and hopefully the Sega Master System version of Ultima IV if I can find it. I have the console but the game might be hard to find. If I can't find it I'll just grab a copy of UIV for the NES, that one should be both easy to find and cheap to get. The logic behind this is that I already finished Ultima III on the Commodore 64 in the early 90's so it will be interesting to play another version of it and as for UIV, although I never finished it (not even close) I played it a lot as a kid so again it will be like a breath of fresh air to try my hand at another version.

Finally the other big difference will be our views on gaming. Ophidian is an old school gamer who feels like games aren't what they used to be but I disagree with that sentiment. In fact, I think Games today are better than they ever were before. I would be surprised if I found an Ultima better than something like Planescape Torment, Star Wars: Knights of the old Republic or The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It could happen, maybe when I'm done with Ultima VII I'll think of it as the best RPG ever, who knows. When I think about most genres in gaming I feel that they are all superior today to what they were 10 years ago. First person shooters, racing games, real time strategy games, fighting games etc are all better. Japanese RPGs lately haven't been as good as they were in the PS1 era but I feel that this might be about to change with the trio of games Mistwalker are going to put out for the 360. Western RPGs, although not plentiful these days I feel are quite healthy with Bioware and Bethesda at the top of the heap. All in all I am quite happy with the current state of gaming so this will affect my writings a great deal I suppose.

My interest in Ultima stems from the fact that it was my late father's favorite game series. I grew up watching him play Ultima III and as soon as I was old enough to touch the keyboard my dad put me on Ultima I. So I have a very strong nostalgic bond to the Ultima series. I didn't have a PC until 1997 though so I missed out on Ultima VI, VII and VIII at the time of their release. We had Ultima V on the Commodore 64 but the loading was brutally long and there was no freaking music so I never really played it. All in all we had Ultima I, II, III and IV. I thought II was horrible with its fluorescent colors and weird gameplay and although I liked IV it was much too complex for me to had done anything in it.

At first I didn't expect to play through Ultima I and Ultima III because I had already finished them but now I guess I'll go through them again just for old time's sake. I also didn't intend to play Akalabeth since you know...it's freaking old and horrible looking but now I guess I don't have much of a choice :) I will also try and get my hands on copies of the Worlds of Ultima games but that might be quite hard and I refuse to simply download the games without owning them so I'm not sure I'll be able to play those.

So I guess this is it, let's begin!

P.S: I understand that my English is pretty bad, especially compared to Ophidian's but bear with me English isn't my first language :)

I sure as hell wasn't expecting that. Last week I was looking at the best buy/future shop boxing day flyers and I was seeing a whole bunch of sweet deals. At one point I noticed that they were selling the PSP barebone pack (not value) for 179.99$ and I thought that was a pretty sweet deal. The reason why I was interested in a PSP in the first place is because I don't have a mp3 player. I've never really needed one, I always lived close to school before so it took me less than 10 minutes of walking to get there; an mp3 player at the time just seemed like a hassle to carry around and listen to. Although I did get a sony MD player I just hated it and like I said earlier, I thought it was a hassle :)

Eventually we moved and at that point I started going to CEGEP with my car. Once again, I didn't feel like an MP3 player would be approriate, listening to the radio felt simpler. I like simple if you haven't noticed, I'm one hell of a lazy bastard. But now that I'm going to college, things have changed. I'm taking the bus/metro to get there, and it takes something like 40 minutes. It's starting to feel a bit lonely in there you know? And I don't like to do 'active' stuff when in transit, wether it be bus, car as a passenger or metro. That includes stuff such as reading or playing the Nintendo DS. Sometimes I see people study in the bus/metro and I sure as hell wouldn't want to do that. So I need something passive, something like listening to music all the way.

So I thought about the PSP for 179.99 and well it was kinda expensive for an MP3 player, especially since I'd need to buy a Pro Duo memory stick and those don't come cheap. So I took a look at the mp3 players they had for sale and DARN, they had some good deals! I was particularily interested by a Sandisk Sanza 1GB http://reviews.cnet.com/SanDisk_Sansa_m240_1GB_silver/4505-6490_7-31563923.html
of which they also had a 2GB version. The 1GB version was 49.99$ Can, the 2GB was 69.99$ Can. The 2GB was better value for the money but I don't need 2GB, I'm the kind of guy who listens to the same 5-10 songs on repeat and once I'm tired of them I just changed the song set. I'm definitely not a huge playlist dude since when I do that I get a bunch of stuff that I don't necessarily want to listen to right now, it's not because I listened to heavy metal like crazy a month ago that I will want to hear any of it now.

So I tell that to my friend, about the MP3 players and the PSP and whatnot and he tells me "hey I'll sell you my PSP if you'd like". I was like uh? Seriously? Hmmm, well what do you have with that PSP? He says I got the PSP value pack, a 2 year warranty at the Sony Store and 4 games: Lumines, Metal Gear Solid Digital Graphic Novel, GTA Liberty City Stories and Guilty Gear. He also has a 2GB Pro Duo but he wanted to keep it. So I ask him, how much would you want for all that? He tells me 200$ Can at least.

Dang, 200$? That was a good deal right there! 4 games plus value pack AND a 2 year insurance for 200$, it's pretty much a steal. But it was still a bit expensive for me. I wasn't expecting to spend 200$ on anything at the moment! On top of that I knew that I would have to buy a Memory Stick Pro Duo which woulc easily had 60-70$. So I had an idea, I'll just shave off the games I don't want and lower the price. So I managed to shave off Liberty City Stories and Guilty Gear, lowering the price of the package to 155$ Can.

Honestly it's almost like stealing the PSP. I asked him if he was aware that I was screwing him over, totally. He said yeah. Heck as long as he's aware of it :)

So I got a PSP for 155$ . Not too shabby. I then got a 2GB Sandisk Pro Duo on bestbuy.ca on sale for 49.99$. I could have gotten a 4GB, but like I said earlier I'm definitely not a playlist kind of guy, so 2GB will be more than enough. So it's an awesome deal overall.

Now, what do I think of it? Am I satisfied with the product? My first impressions of the PSP were EXTREMELY strong. First off, I'm a hardware lover. I like stuff. I know some gamers who don't like the hardware they play games on but only love the games. I'm not like that. It's like comparing someone who likes cars only because they allow them to get to point A from point B and the other dude who not only likes cars because they allow him to do that but loves cars because they're cars. He knows everything about his car and the parts that are in it and it actually excites him. I'm totally like that for gaming consoles and computers.

A couple years ago when Microsoft showed off the Xbox 360 at E3 they kept talking about all this stuff that had nothing to do with games. They talked about integrated custom soundtracks for every game, the marketplace stuff, the four gamer type settings etc. I remember thinking at the time like many besides me that it was all a bunch of bull, the only things that were important were GAMES and Microsoft didn't really talk about those! At the time we pretty much deemed the MS conference a failure while crowning the Sony conference as being champ, mostly on the strength of the killzone movie.

Well DARN am I biting my lips now, because I love all those things I spat on back then. It's to the point where when I play older consoles who don't have a million things integrated in them it feels lonely and barebone. In a way, that's how the DS feels to me compared to the PSP at the moment. The DS is a great gaming machine, but that's all it does. There's no flash no nothing, it's "boot up your console, boot up your game, play" while the PSP seems to be more of a mini world. You can have your videos, your animes, your music, and then of course you have your games. It's definitely more impressive to me. Of course the games aren't as good as the ones on the DS but as of right now the PSP won't really be used as a gaming console, it's going to be used as an MP3 players that plays games. Pretty ones at that. Too bad it doesn't have achievements

Did I mention that I got Valkyrie Profile for it? Awwww yeeeeah. Well basically my friend lost a book I had lent him a while ago (how the hell did he manage that?) and as exchange he gave me Valkyrie Profile Lenneth for the PSP. PRETTY DARN SWEET IF YOU ASK ME. The book was the hardcover version of Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa, which I had bought for 40$ Can or so a couple years ago on amazon.ca so obviously he didn't trade me that game for some 10$ paperback. he also owed me 6$ on top of that.

This blog post is getting quite long, and the worst of it is that I have some other stuff to talk about, mainly about school and stuff, I guess I'll try to hold it in for a couple more days :D

The other day, against all expectations, I bought a one year subscription to Nintendo Power. I was a subscriber from roughly 1992 to 1997 but stopped when I ditched the Nintendo 64 for a PlayStation. Now almost 10 years later I'm subscribing again. What gives?

Well what gives is that they have a darn sweet deal of a free Twilight Princess player's guide and a bonus soundtrack if you subscribe. All that for 27.95$ CANADIAN. When I opened my copy of TP for the GC and saw that I couldn't resist.

Now a friend of mine was also interested in the deal, but when he realized that the soundtrack was uncomplete he told me it wasn't worth it. Sorry, what? I thought about it for a very little while and my conclusion is this:

He's full of crap.

From my standpoint it's an awesome deal. I was already shopping for a game guide for Zelda before seeing the deal. In fact I had ordered the Gamecube bradygames guide for Twilight Princess on amazon.ca. Since you get free shipping if your order equals 39$ before taxes, I added a couple of novels to get my order to that point. So for a guide, I had just spent 40$ Canadian. So when I saw the offer for a guide, a bonus mini soundtrack and A FULL YEAR of Nintendo Power for 27.95$, I thought it was a much better deal than the one I had on amazon.ca. Granted, the Nintendo Power guide isn't as good as the bradygames guide (at least it looks like it). Even worse, it's a guide made for the Wii version so everything will be mirrored; quite annoying but I can deal with that. But it just doesn't change the fact that it's one hell of a cheap deal.

Look at it this way. 27.95$ Can is already cheap for the subscription WITHOUT ANY BONUSES. For canadians it does seem like the cheapest gaming mag you can get. And then you had a free player's guide and a mini soundtrack. That's almost like getting a free subscription to Nintendo Power.

Of course, the thing is I was already looking for a guide so the deal was awesome to me. From his perspective what he wanted was the soundtrack so when he found out that it was a mini soundtrack he was very disappointed. He probably doesn't care for the guide (heck he doesn't even have the game and even if he wanted it he doesn't have either a Wii or a Gamecube) and he probably doesn't care that much for Nintendo Power, at least not to the point of paying a full yearly subscription for it. The way I see it, even if the cheap guide is worth 10$ can and the mini soundtrack 5$ can, that still means I'm getting a year of Nintendo Power for a measly 13$.

There's no losing in this deal, and that means I'm a winner. All hail that Grahf dude!

Okay so I've been playing Ridge Racer 6 a lot lately and I've been liking it so far. I just completed the world xplorer mode and I was pretty proud of that. Honestly I was seeing the 100% achievements completion coming quite quickly! I thought I would one of the few to get that superb number in this game.

And then I tried the no nitrous and no collision races.

W T F

no nitrous is quite easy, but no collision is crazy! At first I thought hey this is can be done, it's not as hard as people say it is, but that was on the first two courses. After that it just became nearly impossible. That really popped my bubble. I had big dreams of achievements and they've been dashed. Dammit!

There was this special recently at best buy canada where if you bought Splinter Cell Double Agent for X360 you got a free 13 months Xbox Live Gold card with it. Obviously I jumped on the deal and since SC isn't necessarily my cup of tea (I can still enjoy a game like that, just not at full price) so I put the game up on gametz.com to see what I could get from it. I settled on getting Far Cry Evolution Instincts for X360 + $20 US for SC. Far Cry isn't the game I wanted the most for Splinter Cell but I liked the $20 US. Now the only problem is that I'm wondering if I should go get another Splinter Cell + Xbox Live Gold card. I could trade Splinter Cell for Dead Rising this time, or sell it on ebay or on gametz and get almost 100% of the money back.

I don't really know, I'm usually not the kind of guy who really jumps on deals to get the maximum out of them but this might just be too good to pass up on.

There was this other deal where if you buy any Xbox 360 game you can get Call of Duty 2 for 9.99$ Can. I got Ridge Racer 6 for 18.49$ Can and with that I could buy COD2 at the reduced price. The Call of Duty 2 that is carried in stores nowadays is the Game of the Year 2005 edition which has an extra making of DVD and a coupon allowing you to download the skirmish map on marketplace free. That's all and good, but my COD2 GOTY 2005 game doesn't have the coupon. I emailed Activision customer support and they told me to return the game but I'm not sure I honestly want to do that. What do I care if I don't have the coupon? I play those games primarily for the achievements and COD2 has no multiplayer achievement. There's always a WHOLE bunch of maps in the game and 2 maps aren't going to change a thing. I'll most likely never try every multiplayer map that is included with the game anyway.

But still, it is my right as a consumer to have a complete product, so I'm kinda torn. Do I go through the trouble for something that is kinda useless to me or do I just let it go? I'll most likely just let it go.

I'm surprised at how much I like Ridge Racer 6. I think the previous Ridge Racer game I played on an home console was the first one on the playstation so it's been a while. I have Ridge Racer DS but it's awful. So I wasn't expecting much out of RR6 but I was pleasantly surprised! The racing is fast and exciting.