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Ultima VI
- elif 10y agothe latest game in this series, Shroud of the Avatar (still in pre-release) is having a free play weekend this weekend. Even though it's not "released" yet, it's a full game, very playable and enjoyable. https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/?page_id=69568 https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/?page_id=69568
- samstave 10y agouhm, playable on linux? EDIT: wow - yep linux DL - fuck yes!
- elif 10y agoyeah, I play on linux on a $250 intel NUC (cheap mini computer resembling graphics laptop architecture). Of course it looks much better with discrete gpu.
- joshontheweb 10y agoUnless I'm mistaken, Shroud of the Avatar seems more in line with the Ultima Online experience which Is a totally different than the single player Ultimas. I could never get into Ultima Online. I would love another classic Ultima though. Any suggestions for games that would scratch that itch?
- kingmanaz 10y agoI'm assuming you've already played Ultima 7. You may also want to try Martian Dreams or Savage Empire if you haven't. The following recommendation might be unpopular: Try the now-antique Final Fantasy 7 for an RPG with an impressive, if somewhat meandering storyline, and a world seen through the lens of childlike wonder. Definitely a non-Western RPG, but about the best in that genera. Anyway, doubt there will ever be anything like the single player Ultimas again, due more to the nature of computing and game production having moved on from a early baroque age of wonder.
- Baeocystin 10y agoI will always be thankful to FFVII for convincing my girlfriend of the time how great video games could be. She went from rolling her eyes at my playstation time to getting her own that Christmas. We had many happy memories of playing games together, or even just watching one another work our way through single-player RPGs. Good times.
- joshontheweb 10y agoYeah, U7 and U7 part 2 were my main jams as a kid. I remember also playing Martian Dreams And Savage Empire but they were in the U6 interface which In comparison was tortuous. Perhaps Im just spoiled. I did enjoy the U5 and U6 remakes but they tended to crash a lot making it hard to actually play through. I still haven't ever tried the FF franchise games. I'll have to try that. Thanks for the rec.
- tjl 10y agoFF7 is an excellent JRPG, but for a different (and more modern) take on JRPGs, I recommend the Persona series, especially 4 (Golden if possible) and the latest 5. Persona 3 is excellent as well and similar in style to 4 and 5, but not quite as polished. Persona blends building relationships (which helps with your Persona customization and hence dungeons) along with doing various day-to-day tasks such as studying, getting a part-time job, going on dates, and even minor things like taking care of a houseplant all of which help improve various stats. Some activities aren't available if you don't have a certain rank in a stat. They provide an interesting exploration into various challenges in the modern world, but without coming across as heavy-handed. I think the only real problem is that Persona 5 holds your hand for a very long time as it introduces the system so it's not until around the end of the first boss area that all the options open up which is about 6 hours into what can be a 100 hour game.
- thristian 10y agoI've never played any Ultimas, but from TFA's description of a game that loves simulationism and exploring and world building to the point where it nearly ignores gameplay, it sounds exactly like my excellent experiences with Morrowind.
- joshontheweb 10y agoThanks, Ill check that out.
- syncsynchalt 10y agoThis was my jam for all of middle school. Thanks for posting this article!
- nsxwolf 10y agoThe projection they used is just super weird.
- frik 10y agoEasier to implement, less resource intensive than ISO projection titles with overlaps.
- lobster_johnson 10y agoFaery Tale Adventure (an Amiga classic) also has a weird projection that mostly looks weird when applied to characters, which all look like they're leaning slightly to the left: https://youtu.be/E5_4DhXWdwo?t=1824 https://youtu.be/E5_4DhXWdwo?t=1824
- smacktoward 10y agoSince these articles on gaming history by Jimmy Maher consistently get voted up to the front page of HN, it may be worth mentioning that he has a Patreon where you can support his work here: https://www.patreon.com/DigitalAntiquarian https://www.patreon.com/DigitalAntiquarian
- GFischer 10y agoReally cool reads. I actually got stuck on a tangent reading about the story of Trip Hawkins http://www.filfre.net/2013/01/seeing-farther/ http://www.filfre.net/2013/01/seeing-farther/ I hope people do support the author (I've almost convinced myself that I will support all the awesome content I come across the Internet if I do "make it" - so many good writers, webcomics, video creators... and I have a 50 dollars/month entertainment budget)
- jdright 10y agoBest game series ever with Ultima VI, VII, VIII and Online possible being the best games ever.
- happytrails 10y agoSo many hours playing VII and UO :) Good times.
- samstave 10y agoSo when UO came out I was working at intel, we had a game lab (building out and testing the celeron SIMD based machines as intel was goaling for sub $1,000 machine) We had 6 UO accounts... We used to be followed around by admins who were invisibe because they were studying how we were so successful at the game. We did use macros - but it was really about the fact that we had an OC-48 and everyone else was on a 56K modem.... and our Hide skill was 100 - but we played on 6 machines all right next to eachother and we had mule accounts - and nefarious accounts... So we had Snoop and Sneek our mules with hide of 100, then we had both Great Lord Phlux and Dread Lord Phlux (me) and same for Mym... We would taunt great lords with our dread lord accounts and then chase them down with our great lord accounts and they would attack us and lose their status and become dastardly and they would lose their shit. We found this great axe that was bugged. It could kill literally any character with one hit. The mods that were following us around wound up taking the weapon, we were pissed - but they deleted the weapon as it was so bugged that we massacred many a foe. we were skilled at kiting dragons to the top of our castle, then trapping them in corners of the castl with chests such that we would train our characters on attacking them. We built houses around the front of the castle to enclose it, then we only used runes to teleport in, but we blocked all the other spots with bags of flour such that you could not rune into the spots... Draygor (our third member) got too stoned and got whacked by the japanese contingent that we were at war with and he failed to put his rune in the bank.... the japanese team runed into our courtyard, and hid until we opened the door with our castle butler and then attacked and they stole every loot we had in a massive store of chests in the castle.... we quite after that.
- 10y ago
- artur_makly 10y agoThe top game of my teenage life.
- beders 10y agoThis was an awesome awesome game. Unimaginable how I played that for so many hours on such a tiny tiny screen :)
- santaclaus 10y agoThe sequel, VII, and VII part 2, are singular achievements in terms of world building. The level of detail that went into NPC schedules, interactions, etc, down to the fact that you can do mundane tasks with no bearing on the actual game like baking bread, were pretty damn cool. The recent Witcher game might come close, but I'm still jonesing for some RPGs on VII's level.
- kingmanaz 10y agoSomewhere on the road between Britain and Cove lies my fondest memory of gaming. Can't recall what it was specifically, either---the mysterious toolshed, the moonstones, the tiny one-room houses by Lock Lake, sundown and dinner at the inn---together it was unforgettable. Tseramed, too, out toward Yew and his little tale: "Youth is her's forever". The phantom mayor of Skara Brae, forsaking his afterlife. The bitter orphan in Paws' workhouse, etc. Serpent Isle was stranger and "colder" than U7 part 1, but likewise memorable. Will always be able to recall the following: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrEAAUq365Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrEAAUq365Y ...seems to somehow better convey the essence of Ultima than what was attempted in writing above: A strange, dreamlike, occasionally-haunting impression from the era when computers were less understood and more full of possibilities.
- henrikschroder 10y agoI remember playing U7 part 2, and got to the part where the Guardian just pops up across your screen and starts talking. Shit, that was scary and cool. "Patience Avatar, I shall be with thee shortly!"
- phodo 10y agoAmazing game. While on vacation last week, I was eating at a restaurant overlooking the deep blue ocean and the background music playing was the Ultima theme song. I seemed to be the only one who recognized it and right there and then, I proudly basked in a glorious solitary moment of radiant geekiness and nostalgia as I thought of shimano, iolo and all the rest of the characters that made up that amazing place called Britannia.
- willstepp 10y agoThat sounds bizarre, what restaurant was playing the Ultima theme song?
- phodo 10y agoQuite bizarre! Yet cool. It was on an island in an undisclosed location and was playing in one of the restaurants there. Luckily, I shazamed it and here is the song: Coral by Bonnie & Klein https://open.spotify.com/track/5A68wTRRwqAPqEpGj2HZgM https://open.spotify.com/track/5A68wTRRwqAPqEpGj2HZgM You need to listen around minute 4:00 for the loop
- pinaceae 10y agoShamino. Shimano is cycyling gear. Iolo. Lord British. The Avatar. The Guardian. U6, U7/1, U7/2 and UW2 were glorious worlds.
- phodo 10y agoOops shamino. I was introduced to shamino before shimano !
- pingpongchef 10y agoThis is not a coincidence. No source but I once read an interview that confirms the name came from misreading the brand name.
- godmodus 10y agoThis is a strange way to implement an text editor.
- scott_s 10y agoThis paragraph resonated with me: The complexity of the world model was such that Ultima VI became the first installment that would let the player get a job to earn money in lieu of the standard CRPG approach of killing monsters and taking their loot. You can buy a sack of grain from a local farmer, take the grain to a mill and grind it into flour, then sell the flour to a baker — or sneak into his bakery at night to bake your own bread using his oven. Even by the standards of today, the living world inside Ultima VI is a remarkable achievement — not to mention a godsend to those of us bored with killing monsters; you can be very successful in Ultima VI whilst doing very little killing at all. I got into western RPGs only recently - I played only JRPGs on the SNES and then later consoles. My first western RPG was Mass Effect 2, and since then I played ME3, Dragon Age: Inquisition and Skyrim. When playing Skyrim, I realized that the wolf pelts I was accumulating by killing wolves as I walked the countryside could be smithed into leather armor! That leather armor would fetch considerably more money when sold than wolf pelts. My first thought: I found a cheat to more money! My second thought: I found a business.
- Swizec 10y agoSimilarly, in high school me and my friends discovered that the best combination of accounts for UO is to have a miner blacksmith and an adventurer of some sort. The miner spends time getting ore, making gear, and selling it to town merchants or other players. You then use this money to fund your adventurer so he can buy good gear from other players who have better miner blackmiths than you do. Minerblacksmith characters were always the richest. There was like a serious economy running on the servers I played. It was great.
- egfx 10y agoAnother way to get rich in UO was waiting for a rune shop to decay. The economy was amazing and unforgiving like that.
- sireat 10y agoBeing a maxed miner battle mage was a blast. You would be merrily mining away in some cave when some unsavory types would come along for the seemingly easy pickings from the poor miners in rags. Little could they suspect that there was the best plate armor(forgot what it was called) under those rags. Corp Por Corp Por!
- cocktailpeanuts 10y agoWho here came thinking it's a new modern Vim alternative?
- gavanwoolery 10y agoReminded me about another bit of info on Ultima 6 / Warren Spector: Spector cites an amusing anecdote from Ultima 6’s in-house testing: "…on Ultima VI, which is kind of where I realized that all this improvisational stuff could really be magical. It was unplanned, kind of a bug. There was one puzzle where the Avatar and his party came up on one side of a portcullis and there was a lever on the other side of the portcullis that you had to flip to raise the portcullis and keep on making progress. I watched one of our testers, a guy named Mark Schaefgen, playing in that area. And he didn’t have the telekinesis spell, which was the way to get past that portcullis. I was sitting there rubbing my hands together going ‘oh ho ho, he’s screwed, he can’t do it.’ He had a character in his party named Sherry the Mouse. You can probably see where this is going. The portcullis was ‘simulated,’ and here the air quotes are around simulated, simulated enough that there was a gap at the bottom that was too small for a human to get through, but not too small for Sherry. He sent Sherry the Mouse under the portcullis, over to the lever, she flipped the lever, and then the rest of the party went through. And I fell on the floor. At that moment I just said to myself, ‘this is what games should do. We should start planning this, not having it happen as a bug.’ That was where I realized this was really powerful." It was things like this that make the Ultima series stick in my head to this day. :)
- pchristensen 10y agoI have my own Sherry the Mouse story. I realized that having a character that could skip portcullises would be useful, so I kept her. I had to make her tougher and I found a way to grind to raise her stats. I gave her a lightning wand (one of the few weapons she could carry), went to a village and found a dog walking around, and had her kill it. In order to get it to re spawn, I had to remove the dead dog body, but it was faster to just put it in my backpack. So I would have Sherry kill dogs until I ran out of room for the bodies in my inventory and then go far away to unload them, then go back and grind some more, shooting dogs with lightning. Once she was strong enough to hold a real weapon, I went to the cave of the giant ants and had her kill ants with a halberd until she was strong enough to wear plate mail armor. A mouse. With a halberd and plate mail armor. Probably my favorite gaming experience ever.
- 10y ago
- bmurphy1976 10y agoOh man I loved this game. This game may have single handedly set me on my career in software development. I'd played many many games before, but this one really opened my eyes to the possibilities that computers offered. I just finished a recent playthrough, no more than six months ago! The game holds up really well. There are obvious shortcomings compared to modern games, it could be a hard slog for younger generations who are used to a more polished product, but if you are looking for a good bit of nostalgia U6 is hard to beat. For comparison I also tried re-playing Bard's Tale 3 recently. I wasted many hours of my childhood with that game. Frankly, I'm amazed at how poor and awful of a game it was and I just I couldn't stick to it.
- bertlequant 10y agoHow I miss my shard over 56k
- WebYourMind 10y agoThis brings back so many memories! Awesome Game!
- sbierwagen 10y agoThe creepy poster of a pole-dancing centaur hanging on the Avatar’s wall back on Earth has provoked much comment over the years… Someone dug up the original art of that poster: http://ultimacodex.com/2015/10/remember-that-centaur-poster-in-ultima-6s-intro-i-found-the-sketch-it-was-based-on/ http://ultimacodex.com/2015/10/remember-that-centaur-poster-...
- CamperBob2 10y agoAwesome, I'd totally forgotten about the Nagel.
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- m3kw9 10y agoUse glass sword on lord British
- outworlder 10y ago>On the evening of February 9, 1990, with the project now in the final frenzy of testing, bug-swatting, and final-touch-adding, he left Origin’s offices to talk to some colleagues having a smoke just outside. When he opened the security door to return, a piece of the door’s apparatus — in fact, an eight-pound chunk of steel — fell off and smacked him in the head, opening up an ugly gash and knocking him out cold. His panicked colleagues, who at first thought he might be dead, rushed him to the emergency room. Once he had had his head stitched up, he set back to work. Hah. That's how you are able to kill Lord British in Ultima VII. I had never understood the reference, until now.
- lokedhs 10y agoI remember looking at the Ultima games at the time as something interesting that I'd like to spend time on, but I never got into them. I guess it's because I was always into faster gaming experiences. I never thought that I would really be able to enjoy any RPG's, but recently I've started playing them. I'm currently working my way through Tales of Zestiria and having a geat time with it. I would like to give the Ultima games a try. Which one should I start with? I'd like one that is somewhat easy to get in to.
- jedberg 10y agoUltima 4 was the pinnacle of the series. It's also very different than most RPGs, it's about figuring out the virtues of the world and sticking to them. I'd suggest that one.
- ido 10y agoIt's really not easy to get into, from a modern point of view. I tried playing 4 & 5 a few years ago and gave up very quickly.
- dewiz 10y agoI remember finding a casino in one of Ultima7 islands, I made so much gold out of the roulette that it became a problem stocking it and carrying it around Britannia.
- reiichiroh 10y agoI don't know if this is true but a friend who worked at Origin regaled me with the story that the U6 box art's avatar model was Starr Long when he had a head of full, luscious hair. Any Ex-Origin able to confirm?