![]() #Apple 2 ultima iii image full#Īlso included are various fan-authored remakes and ports (such as Exult and XU4), full documentation for every game, and just to add insult to injury a series of videoclips of Richard Garriott (a.k.a. This, therefore, seems like a good time to talk about the Ultima games and their progress through the years. The first Ultima game I played was Ultima II. I remember staring at the fabulous box cover art in a software store - in 1982, when the idea of a store that sold software was itself an innovative and risky idea - and saying to myself, "I must have that". The packaging was part of the excitement of the game - it came with a wonderful cloth printed map of the Earth. The goal of Ultima II was to kill the Enchantress, Minax. I wasn't too clear on why she had to die, but the game manual said so, and I was a big believer in obeying authority. (Minax, it seems, was the apprentice of the wizard the player allegedly assassinated in the first Ultima game, but I hadn't played that yet). Sure, it's standard fantasy garbage, but it was very well packaged standard fantasy garbage. The Queen is the King and the King is a spy Ah, innocence.Īsk me no questions, I'll tell you no lies At the age of 13, I found the very idea of a powerful, evil villain being a woman to be very surprising, even transgressive. I liked that it took place on a map of Earth rather than in some amorphous fantasyland. I liked that it had time travel, and that the portals you walked through were called "moongates" - that sounded really cool and science fictiony. I liked the various eras you could travel to: there were frigates in the seas in the middle ages, go back far enough in time and you're in Pangaea, go ahead far enough and you find yourself in a world after the nuclear holocaust. I liked the little staticky sound the game made when you hit a bad guy. The game centered around combat, which was fast and furious: enemies walked up to you in the wild and you beat on each other until one of you died. Despite this focus, there was a plot of sorts. ![]() You could talk to every townsperson 90% of them had nothing interesting to say (every fighter, for example, would say "Ugh, me tough!" and every cleric would say "Believe!") A small minority of townspeople (often behind locked doors, almost always standing still) would give you bits and pieces of the plot, or clues about where to look next. ![]() Just because you could make it a GEM app, doesn't mean you should! The MS-DOS versions of most of these don't limit speed, so they are unplayable on modern machines unless you find a patched version.One of the best parts of the game, for me, was the space travel. Ultima II on the ST is particularly awful. Took too many liberties with the graphics and spoils the charm. I don't like the ST/Amiga versions of some of these. Not sure how playable it is with the slow disk access The C-64 has more flexibility here, so it's version looks best of the 8-bits (IMO) It has all the colors, but not the color bleed of the Apple II, and better music. Atari Can't really do that in high-res mode for a tile based came. The game was designed for the 6 colors of the Apple II, so the game really needs red, greed, blue, purple, white and black to look proper. Other Ataris can easily have abysmal color schemes like red water, blue foliage or some other scheme that looks way wrong. The optimum color scheme for Atari seems to be green foliage/ purple water (purple can pass for red or blue). It used artifacting, so you needed the right chipset in your Atari for the colors to even look right. I'm surprised that people think the Atari 8-bit versions had superior colors for this game. (Not to dis the Atari ST, since I love that and that series dominates my hardware collection. I also then got Ultima II and IV for the Atari (retail boxes) eventually which I enjoyed but never finished (tis on my bucket list since I finished Sundog for the ST) and I got a "pirated" Ultima I back in the day but never played it much. I will say I started with Ultima IV on the Apple on a friend's computer and then my parents bought me Ultima III for the Atari (which I think we encountered a bug that wouldn't have let us finish concerning the Mark of the Serpent (but even if it was a bug and not our gradeschool understanding screwing it up, we got around it with a sector editor). But the Apple had Ultima V and the Atari 8 bit only went to IV (officially). In my opinion, as someone who played them back in the day and also played the Apple versions.
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