The Real Texas: Now on GOG
The Real Texas is an odd little game. It first popped up online in roughly May of 2012, touting itself as being inspired by Ultima 6 (at least in part). At first glance, it’s difficult to see the connection: the game is not a fantasy title, is not set in a far-away world, and features a range of Old West firearms as weapons instead of swords, halberds, and crossbows. To say nothing of the fact that it seems like a game that tries to amp up the weird and the comedic as much as possible.
Initially, the game was only available for purchase through its official website, but I noticed late last week that the game had been made available for sale on GOG as well.
And also, it has a trailer:
Reviews of the game seem to suggest that it’s actually a heck of a lot of fun, so I suppose I’ll tentatively recommend picking it up and trying it out. It certainly won’t set you back that much to obtain, at any rate.
This game is really a heck of a lot of fun. The closeness to Ultima is in the generally great writing, exploration, npc schedules, and inventory usage (including text parser for secrets).
There are a lot of ways a game can be inspired or influenced by Ultima. I haven’t played this one, but think about all the arguments and discussions we’ve had here about “what is an Ultima” and apply those to any number of games. Any game inspired by Ultima VI is clearly about the mechanics and world simulation aspect. The same goes for Ultima VII. Neither was really known for its story, unlike Ultima IV and V. While Ultima has had some great stories and characters, I’d argue the main inspiration experienced by other developers was the gameplay mechanics in combination with the world simulation. That’s not “what an Ultima is”, but rather what was most inspirational about it.
“Neither was really known for its story”
wat