Crusader (both parts) for sale on eBay
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And this time, the seller isn’t asking for thousands of dollars!
Apparently set in the Wing Commander universe!
Actually, the asking price — $19.99 — is pretty reasonable; I’d be tempted to put in a bid myself, but for the fact that the seller will ship to US only. I could get around that, of course…but there is also the fact that I have to focus on development for Return right now, which means the last thing I need to do is pick up yet more gaming distractions.
So anyhow, good reader…if you feel like grabbing a piece of Ultima 8 history (since both episodes of Crusader — No Remorse and No Regret — were built from a higher-resolution version of the Pagan engine, here’s your chance!
I really need to play these games one day. It’s one of those many Origin era game I didn’t really got a chacne to play on account of crappy computers.
So… when it Pentagram support coming ? (Don’t hit me!
I saw a load of requests on GOG for these two games back when they had a wish list. You wouldn’t think an action game would work too well with the Pagan engine but they are both great fun. Its a pity Origin never finished off the trilogy.
Someone should pick them up at this price. They both run flawlessly in Dosbox.
I never played the second game, but the first was a great time. My favorite thing about it was all of the cinematic action movie cliche ways you could take out your enemies. Oh, and the silly FMV cutscenes!
Hmmm…I never looked that much into the Crusader games–I have a few artifacts, like a WEC jacket, and a resistance jacket (both from the film shoot), butI should work on getting the actual film footage in hi-res. That would be pretty cool.
[*jots down some notes in the grail diary*]
Joe
Do not understand, why Pagan also had no hi-res. Most Ultimas were ahead of its time technologically.
To be fair, the use of SVGA in video games was still in its infancy in early 1994 and Ultima VIII had been in development for two years already.
Keep in mind this was a game that required very powerful PCs to run properly already – I can’t even begin to imagine if they had put a SVGA mode!
I’ll admit wondering if there was any plan for the cancelled Enhanced CD version to have SVGA graphics though.
Oh well, no we can have hi res with Pentagram 🙂
I’d have expected SVGA support as well from a company like Origin that has always pushed technology. SVGA was starting to become relatively common in 94 when Pagan came out. There were games like Magic Carpet, Theme Park, Wing Commander 3, 7th Guest, Little Big Adventure, Syndicate, Under a Killing Moon, etc…. I’m sure the system specs required would have been ridiculously high but it wouldn’t have been any worse than something like Magic Carpet.
None of us being able to afford a PC that could run the game in SVGA isn’t the sort of thing that stopped Origin in the past. When Strike Commander came out the installation alone was larger than my entire hard disk. It was a couple of years before I got to play it.
I think I read somewhere that between the development costs of U7 and the manufacturing costs of pumping out all of those floppies for the game, Origin actually lost money on the project. Maybe for U8 they wanted to make decisions that made more business sense, and decided SVGA wasn’t worth pursuing.
The thing about SVGA games in 1993 and 1994… it that these were pretty much all the early CD-Rom games, while Ultima VIII was still planned to be a floppy disk release.
SVGA graphics would probably have required many more floppies, thus making manufactering costs a lot more expansive for Origin. Which is why I was wondering if the cancelled Enhanced CD version would have featured SVGA graphics in addition to full speech (which from what we know had apprently already been recorded).
Also in spite of all its cuts, Ultima VIII actually suffered a lot of delays, in part due to the delays Serpent Isle caused as well. But it really was meant to come up sooner that that.
As far as VGA floppy disc went, it was goergous at its release in any case.
I wasn’t thinking so much of higher res graphics, but just keeping the same ones and showing more of the world at a time. Ultima 8 always felt too zoomed in for me, almost as if it had been intended for SVGA in the first place.
I’m sure it would need to have used a system like Crusader where the screen only moved when you got to the edge or chose to center it. There is no way it would have scrolled smoothly in SVGA but I think it could have worked well for all that.