Quest of the Avatar in Nintendo Power Circa 1991
Nintendo Power was published in-house by Nintendo of America during the late 80s and 90s, and covered some of the most popular releases for the NES, SNES, and Gameboy. They frequently published detailed hint guides to the most anticipated releases of the day, including the Ultima series. What was especially wonderful about these publications were they often included bright full-page colour graphics and custom illustrations.
In February 1991, Volume 21, Nintendo Power produced an 8-page article featuring Ultima: Quest of the Avatar, which had been released the previous Christmas season. The article gave the game a rating of 3.3/5 for graphics and sound, 3.4 for play controls, 3.5 for challenge, and 3.7 for play and fun, making it the highest ranked of any of the Ultima games released for the NES.
Here for your viewing pleasure is the complete 8-page Nintendo Power hint guide.
Also, here is a scan of the original map that came with the NES Quest of the Avatar, thanks to the Codex of Ultima Wisdom. There are several naming differences including Tsuku Lake and the previously unnamed Deadman’s Island.
Sweet set! Thanks for posting it.
Remind me to slip you the login details for the @ultimacodex Twitter account, so you can (in the future) go on and post a tweet whenever you post an article.
Cool, I’m also going to need some help figuring out an easier way to make galleries. I currently am adding images 1 at a time manually, and it’s time consuming and not fun. There must be an easier way, but I can’t find it.
I remember that article. It looked absolutely gorgeous, even comparable to Final Fantasy.
When I click on the link to the map, I get the error, “The requested content cannot be loaded. Please try again later.”
Oh weird, WordPress tries to directly display externally linked images instead of linking to them normally. I’m changing the page so it links to the correct article instead. Let me fix the link, but this sounds like a software bug. Thanks!
Yep, it works now.
Not really a bug…now that I see what you were trying to do, I get it. I have a setting enabled which tells WordPress to try and render inline links to “media” (videos, images) as the actual media, rather than as a hyperlink.
I should probably disable that. It can cause havoc if I’m not careful.
This was actually the first Ultima I ever played. And I pretty much memorized this article. Weird to think it got such middling scores now. I had played Final Fantasy just before it, but but was never anywhere near as obsessed with it as I was with this game.