Ultima 1-4 Coming To Good Old Games Next Tuesday!
Uncharacteristically for Good Old Games, who usually are quite jealous in guarding the names of titles they are about to release, news has broken and/or leaked out (I’m not sure which) that the next releases at GOG.com will be Ultima 1 through Ultima 4.
iPhone screenshot of the PC Gamer article, just in case.
That’s right, Dragons and Dragonettes: come Tuesday, August 30th, Good Old Games will release the first three Ultima games as a bundled trilogy priced at $5.99. Ultima 4, meanwhile, will be released for free! (EA must have really gone to bat for Ultima fans in order to make that happen, methinks.)
So…Wing Commander fans had their day, and now we Ultima fans shall have ours! Mark your calendars, Ultima fans; the Ages of Darkness begin anew next Tuesday!
And so it begins.
Not sure I’d pay $5.99 for the first three Ultima games, I was never much interested in them. Ultima IV on the other hand, is a great game.
Just a matter of time before the rest appear though.
I wonder if we’ll see the Worlds of Ultima games?
GOG does offer some other traditionally free games, like Beneath a Steel Sky. It’ll be interesting to see what they offer in terms of extras.
No real surprise that Ultima 4 will be free – GOG have done that with a number of other games and EA would have known there’d be no chance of selling Ultima 4 whilst it’s freely available from their own Ultima Forever website. What is nice though is that the GOG version will come pre-packaged with DOSBox and ready to just install and run.
I will probably buy the first 3 games, mostly out of curiosity as I’ve never played them before, though what I’ve heard of them doesn’t really appeal to me all that much…
Ultima I and (especially) III are actually pretty decent and can still be quite fun if you can bear this kind of very old school gaming.
Ultima II is terrible though – it’s like it took every good things from Ultima I and removed it.
Sadly, the original PC versions are inferior in every way to the Apple II versions with full color and Mockingboard music.
Are the bundled GOG versions the PC originals? And if so, are they compatible with the various fan graphic and music upgrades? Or would alterations violate the GOG terms of service?
They’ll almost certainly be the PC versions, probably DOSboxed.
And I would imagine that the fan upgrades will work just fine with them, and that the use thereof won’t be prohibited by any means.
That said, I’ll probably make a point of testing each update & patch against the GOG versions of each game, just to be sure.
“Sadly, the original PC versions are inferior in every way to the Apple II versions with full color and Mockingboard music.”
Which are inferior to the C64 versions with SID music.
This makes me wonder about the two Dungeon Siege Remakes when EA decides to release U5/6.
Nah, those are safe.
“Sadly, the original PC versions are inferior in every way to the Apple II versions with full color and Mockingboard music. ”
True about Ultima III (but then in this cas the 16 Bits and Mac version are the best), but neither Ultima nor Ultima II had any music so it doesn’t really matter.
I’d actually argue the 1986 PC version of Ultima I is one of the best there is.
Sergorn: Are you sure the original 1980 version of Ultima 1 is better than Ultima 2?
For all I know, the 1986 remake may have been greatly streamlined/simplified.
Except for some slight graphical difference and the obvious change in graphics, the original Ultima and the 1986 Ultima I are pretty much the same game. There seem to be some variation on the quantity of monsters of the world map depending on the port you are playing, but that’s all.
And yes the original Ultima is better than Ultima II… Ultima II is just an exercice in frustration. That’s not to say it didn’t bring good things as well (it’s the game who brough the actual moving around in city to talk to people to get clues aspects), but it’s just terrible for the rest.
And now I have to ask, is Ultima II still going to be broken like it was on the Ultima Collection or did they manage to correctly copy the floppy disks this time so we can actually finish the game??
Go figure I just picked up a PC version of the Ultima Trilogy on ebay last week heh.
Actually I seem to remember that the Ultima Collection version *was* fixed and actually included Moonstone Dragon’s Galactic Patch.
I think it was the Ultima Series I~VI version which was broken.
Yeah the Collection version is broken as well according to the Codex.. I had completely forgotten there was a patch for it.. I think I have it installed in my DOSBox already too cause last time I played it Im pretty sure I was looking at the newer EGA graphics.. Ill have to give it a go later although its gonna take some work before I can get into space to check it hehehe.
I remember there being a bunch of patches for Ultima 2, even before the big Ultima Reconstruction one came out. Moonstone’s was only one of them. I wasn’t quite sure what the difference between them was.
That’s possible, all I remember is that because the three original disks had files with the same names which ended overwriting the Galaxy maps (and replacing them with Earth one hence rendering the game unbeatable) when they put all three disks in a same folder for the Ultima I~VI Series compilation.
But I seem to recall they had integrated a fanmade galaxy fix with UC version years after that… Guess I’ll need to get both my Ultima Series CD and my Ultima Collection to compare this stuff.
There may be patches on the UC cd somewhere, I recently read (I think at the Exult forum but maybe somewhere on here) someone had noticed the U4 1.01 patch is included on the disc so perhaps there are others in there as well.. I wonder if there are different versions between the Ultima Collections that were released?? Mine is the original UC I bought in 99, but I know there were later versions released after like the ‘cheap’ gold box versions and what not (much like Pagan and U7 got re-releases later).
You were right with what happened with Ultima II. DOS didnt support subdirectories so they all overwrote each other when they were copied to the same folder. I guess they were smarter by the time U3 came out so they didnt have this problem with multiple files sharing names..