Random thoughts... - by Tocky
Qooper on 31/1/2023 at 20:02
Quote Posted by Tocky
I'm sorry but I don't know Planescape or UW1. Is that Ultima? I haven't played those.
Planescape: Torment is a top-down RPG with similar mechanics to Baldur's Gate, but it's totally something else. You wake up on a stone slab in a mortuary, quite dead. There's a hovering, talking skull next to ya, called Morte. This game is a combination of several well done things coming together, including refreshing writing.
Ultima Underworld 1 and 2 are first-person RPGs made by LookingGlass Technologies. Paul Neurath, Warren Spector, Tim Stellmach, Doug Church, many greats. They made System Shock 1 after UW2. Great games, but the interface is clunky
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I get in those states where I don't enjoy my pursuits and have to change them for others for a time. Good luck with Anodunos.
Thanks Tocky! Yeah I think it's the same for me. Need to take some distance for a while, a journey.
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I once took five years to finish Omicron because of a game glitch that caused me to only have use of my service revolver. I quit thinking I could never defeat the end boss with such a puny weapon then revisited and found I could hide between rocks and fire enough to win.
Omicron looks fascinating! I think I'll need to give it a try at some point. Also, the game is featuring David Bowie?
Tocky on 1/2/2023 at 04:33
Yes. Bowie. Some didn't like the album featured on this game- Hours- but I liked a few of the songs, particularly [video=youtube_share;5olNUij-sRo]https://youtu.be/5olNUij-sRo[/video] and it was fun to find songs in the game as well. There were a lot of inventive and interesting things in this game. The graphics are dated but so much else makes up for it. It was a first for me in many ways gamewise. The first I ever fought someone to the death in a bathroom, the first I ever gave anyone a Micky, the first I ever had sex with a girlfriend in a game. Take advantage of the training sims. They improve your reflexes and strength.
Starker on 1/2/2023 at 05:13
This game is practically the whole reason I have been willing to cut Cage's disasterpieces some slack for the longest time. Too bad he never directed anything quite as interesting again.
Cipheron on 3/2/2023 at 01:59
Quote Posted by Tocky
I'm sorry but I don't know Planescape or UW1. Is that Ultima? I haven't played those.
If you want a quick look into those I recommend The two Worlds of Ultima DOS games, which were both built on the Ultima 6 engine. (Ultima 7 is considered the pinnacle of the top-down Ultima games, but these are considerable shorter than that. Ultima 8 was a flop: Richard Garriot listened to the marketing guys and they told him the games were too "complex" so he handed off the new game to them and it had a massively dumbed down game system with almost all the RPG and crafting stuff stripped out).
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worlds_of_Ultima:_The_Savage_Empire)
In this one you're explorers lost deep in the Amazon and find a "land that time forgot" type setting with ancient jungle pyramids and dinosaurs. It has an elaborate crafting system.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima:_Worlds_of_Adventure_2:_Martian_Dreams)
In this one you're aboard a Jules Verne style Victorian era wooden rocket that crashes on Mars, Mars is populated by sentient plant life and has a widespread canal system, hinting at a lost civilization. The only gear your party has is what you salvage from the rocket or can scrabble together from the Martian wilderness.
EDIT: I should also add that EA uploaded patched versions of both of these on GOG, for free!
(
https://www.gog.com/en/game/worlds_of_ultima_the_savage_empire)
(
https://www.gog.com/en/game/ultima_worlds_of_adventure_2_martian_dreams)
Anarchic Fox on 4/2/2023 at 04:54
But if you play either Worlds of Ultima game, have a walkthrough close at hand, because the puzzles get quite obscure.
The base game Ultima VI is also fantastic, with an open-ended main quest that leads you to explore the work quite organically. Unfortunately the UI is quite old-school; to play at any decent speed you need to not only memorize the keybindings but learn how to execute sequences of them quickly.
Cipheron on 4/2/2023 at 08:34
Quote Posted by Anarchic Fox
But if you play either Worlds of Ultima game, have a walkthrough close at hand, because the puzzles get quite obscure.
The base game Ultima VI is also fantastic, with an open-ended main quest that leads you to explore the work quite organically. Unfortunately the UI is quite old-school; to play at any decent speed you need to not only memorize the keybindings but learn how to execute sequences of them quickly.
I didn't have any walkthroughs, but I think that applies more to the Savage Empire one that Martian Dreams. I recall it taking some time to work my way through unlocking the areas of Savage Empire, whereas most of the effort of Martian Dreams was mapping the planet.
Sulphur on 4/2/2023 at 09:04
Oh good, fellow Ultima fans. I'm not sure the Worlds of Ultima games are good introductions, short as they may be. They're quite unfashionably oldschool, and even back in the day when I played them they were more cumbersome than fun. Ultima VII is very long, but it's also (relatively) easier to play and get around in and sinks its hooks into you faster, if you allow it to. Plus, Exult just makes playing it that much easier instead of fucking around with DOSBox (part of the charm back in ye olde DOS days was finding a way to run U7 with your sound card and mouse driver while having enough conventional memory available, along with EMM386 configured right, necessitating several reboots until Origin's Voodoo memory manager decided to let you play your game... ah, nostalgia).
If you start there you will, however, miss the very cute conceit that the townspeople in U7 have an uncanny resemblance to their forebears in U6, but in the grand scheme of things it's more of a wink and nudge than causing any real level of FOMO. There are, however, several callbacks to things that happened in the previous 'cardinal' entries that you don't necessarily have to know about, but may leave you feeling like there's a gap in your knowledge all the same.
Anarchic Fox on 4/2/2023 at 11:08
I recall several puzzles in Savage Empire that relied on obscure item interactions. Martian Empire was more a matter of taking copious notes, since it might be hours between a puzzle and its relevant clue.
Ultima VII has a far more intuitive interface than VI and its progeny, but annoyances abound: feeding your party, managing inventory (Exult helps a little with that by consolidating keys), losing a critical item because you didn't quite drag your mouse far enough. The last one happened to Spoony, I believe: while he was reviewing VII 1/2, he lost a plot-critical earring. The combat is bonkers, and monsters respawn the moment their area is offscreen. There's also the problem that Ultima VII presents a corrupted kingdom, but if you've never learned about the Virtues you don't appreciate how it's been corrupted. Finally, this is subjective, but VII felt far more crowded and artificial to me than VI. The latter had large swathes of wilderness and meandering roads, the former crowds everything together, including its absurd mountains whose every inch is filled with space-filling dungeons. (To be fair, people had the same complaint about VI relative to V.)
Honestly every mainline Ultima game from IV through VII 1/2 is a contender for "best Ultima game," but VII is the only one with an intuitive interface. That does give it quite an edge.
Anarchic Fox on 4/2/2023 at 18:00
Now that I think about it, Serpent Isle is the perfect entry point. It has the elegant interface. It doesn't take place on Britannia, so you don't miss out on that world's development. Its lore makes the previous games seem much deeper than they actually were, without actually spoiling them. It has the strongest start out of all the Ultimas. Puzzles are emphasized over combat, which is good because the engine has problems with combat. It even has character development, for the second and final time in Ultima history! (The first time was Captain John, between V and VI.)
Sulphur on 5/2/2023 at 02:00
The only thing about Serpent Isle is that it is literally U7 Part 2 and follows on from the ending of The Black Gate, so for the unaware it's like being dropped into something in medias res. I suppose if this tells us anything, it's that an old series with a rich legacy and a decent amount of continuity is going to have caveats no matter what your entry point is, so we've probably sufficiently deterred anyone who may have been interested from dipping their toe in :D. Job done, if'n you ask me.