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.
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.
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.
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 :)