Spoony's review of Ultima 6: not entirely fair?
Sadly, he isn’t all that kind to that which I count as my favourite Ultima title:
Good story, bad interface? Well...
I don’t share many of Spoony’s criticisms, although that is partly due to the fact that, per the game’s day/night mechanics, I rested my characters when it got dark! The few seconds of lag time that it caused in my adventuring didn’t really faze me, and I never thought anything of it. It got dark…the party rested; it got light again…adventuring resumed. (Admittedly, eclipses were a bit of an annoyance, infrequent though they were. I usually just had the party sleep through them.)
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Ultima 6: The False Prophet is a 20-year old game, and its inventory system in particular is, arguably, a pioneer and ancestor of modern inventory systems that feature in modern RPGs. It’s easy to look back 20 years later and point out the flaws with it, but it was a pretty good system for its day, especially if you mastered its various quirks and used those to your advantage to carry way more than your Avatar’s Strength stat theoretically permitted. I was actually genuinely frustrated not by Ultima 6‘s inventory system, but by Ultima 7‘s…which didn’t have those same quirks, and which introduced a primitive notion of object volume that only seemed to serve to cause bags and backpacks to become “full” far too quickly.
I entirely agree with Spoony’s comments on the plot, however, and some of his critiques of the music are also relevant (although it serves to note that the music is only really quirky like that because of the speed of modern operating systems and processors; played on a computer that just meets its requirements, it doesn’t display that issue at all). But I do think he treats the game’s UI rather unfairly.
Toss in your thoughts in the comments.
Well, the Ultima VI interface honestly is terrible.
I think the interface didn’t aged well, but for its time it was good.
I do agree that the interface was terrible. It’s mostly the reason I never really tried to play the Worlds of Ultima games (I started both but the interface is to annoying for me) and am hopeing that Nuvie one day hits off and adds a nicer view to the game…
I didn’t like Spoony’s lengthy chuckles thing and bashing the graphics is a bit overreacting.
As far as view goes, the WoU are better than Ultima VI on account of having a camera that feels a bit more scaled back and smaller sprites/icons.
This is especially true about Martian Dreams
-Sergorn
I believe that to truly appreciate the innovative value of Ultima 6, one should have played in his time. I played it the year it was released, not knowing much English, and without reading the manual. It really was an intuitive system for the time!
The one thing we can say in Spoony’s defense is that he’s not blindly hating on old-fashioned interfaces – he LOVED U5 in his previous review.
So this interface isn’t just “ugly” for him but genuinely uncomfortable.
I posted in the comments that it was an unhappy compromise between the oldschool keyboard-driven Ultimas and what we got in U7, and should be viewed in that light.
Another thing about U6:
The people who say it’s a tale about “social tolerance” are just parroting Richard Garriott’s words from the little videos that came with the Ultima Collection.
It’s really nothing of the sort, since the Gargoyles aren’t part of Britannian society yet – that came in Ultima VII. They’re just an alien civilization.
If anything, the gargoyle conflict in Ultima 6 is a reference to the Cold War (not quite over yet when the game came out) and/or religious conflicts in the Middle East.
I agree with him on the UI. I hated it and it made me shelf the game for a year before I felt obliged to finish it out of guilt.
The dig on the graphics didn’t make sense though, since it was the early 90’s. It would have been more relevant to comment on the evolution between U5 and U6.
I’m with Manuel on this one; I played Ultima 6 in its day, and to this day I do not mind the interface one little bit (though finding a good keymapping in iDOS is a bit of a challenge, I must admit, but only because the game requires more than nine keys to use).
But yeah…it really doesn’t bug me. I actually quite like it. Maybe I’m just in the minority…though that was probably already the case, since I actually think of Ultima 6 as being generally superior to Ultima 7, save in the graphical department.
I’m also with Infinitron, at least in part. Ultima 6‘s story is a very poignant departure from other RPG “kill the big baddy” story frameworks, even going to the point of having no final boss fight of any kind. That’s a daring storytelling move by any account, even by an Ultima account (most Ultimas end in climactic battles of one sort or another).
But is it about social justice or whatever? Not exactly; it’s about addressing a hostile and alien culture in a way that doesn’t involve — in a way that is actually hampered by, in the long run, — the use of force of arms in return. Simply killing all the Gargoyles makes the game impossible to complete!
In a way, I see it as more of a Cold War analogy rather than as a Middle Eastern analogy, if only because at least in the Cold War the other side was willing to listen to reason at some point. I’m not convinced that’s the case in the Middle Eastern conflict, which is much more…existential in nature.
Personally, I think U6’s greatest flaw, which Spoony didn’t address, was that the game felt unfinished and unpolished.
We all remember the infamous Quenton quest. I also remember Moonglow, I think, being practically empty (though there were a few more NPCs nearby at the Lycaeum).
Then there was the ability to teleport directly into the Gargoyle world right off the bat using the Orb of the Moons. It made the discovery of the dungeon passage via Hythloth and the dramatic meeting with Captain Johne a bit meaningless.
Now I’m curious about how the U6 Project improved on these issues. I’m waiting for the final version of it to be released.
Glad you wrote this article–cause if you hadn’t–I would have written the same thing in your forums!
Spoony is a funny guy. I enjoy his humorous reviews, but I always thought that he a general complainer, and that he swore too much.
I never thought he was much of a reviewer, because he never says that any game is good, and if he *does* mention that a game is at least enjoyable, he’s gotta balance that out with 6 minutes of ranting and swearing over ‘suck-i-ness”.
What he complains about in Ultima 6 just gives creedence to my belief that he is not a true old-skool gamer. The interface that he is complaining so much about is one of THEE first ‘point-and-click’ icon-driven RPG games EVER (beaten only by Times of Lore, another Origin game). It was the most innovative interface of it’s time, but 20 years of revisionist comparisons made it look ‘clunky’. It’s like complaining that a Victrola sucks because you have to crank it up after every song, and that the stereo sound is horrible. (DUH!)
The NPC schedules are also what brought Ultima 6 to life. In 1990, it was an amazing new concept that people in the game actually slept at night, worked during the day, and went to the pub in the afternoon! Spoony’s complaint about not being able to wake L.B. was total ignorance for the first ‘virtual reality’ of gaming!
I could go on, but suffice it to say that Spoony, while humorous, certainly shows his lack of credentials for reviewing games.
(allright–I laughed like hell at the Chuckles impression). 🙂
I would have loved if he had shown how to kill LB in sleep with a glass sword… 🙂
Infinitron raises a few valid points, although it’s worth noting that one can find plot fragments and unexplored possibilities in several Ultima titles. I mean, hello…Serpent Isle. Or The Lost Vale, for that matter.
And to be fair…using the Orb to get to the Gargoyle lands prematurely wasn’t a complete cop-out; I found that the Gargoyles would revert to attacking me (the drones would, at least) if I submitted to Draxinosum too early on in the adventure.
Joe raises a point about the NPC schedules, which Spoony kind of touched on during his complaining about Lord British sleeping whilst Spoony’s avatar was poisoned. Actually, that sequence was particularly funny, given that he could have easily limped his way down to Nystul’s lab and consumed a red potion…
…which Joe touches on as well; he’s right, I think, when he points out that it shows an element of Spoony’s lack of credibility. He played the game, he passed the game, but he didn’t grok the game.
Dominus raises an interesting point, though I think what Spoony (or anyone, really) should do is put together a montage of all the various ways to kill Lord British in all the different Ultima titles in which it is possible. There’s the sign in U7, the poisoned bread in U9…
I don’t feel that he is “bashing on the graphics” anachronistically. What he says about the torches is true. Nobody who plays the game for the first time looks at that icon and says “torch!”, which really defeats the purpose of the entire gui. Hell, just watching the video it took me a couple of seconds to remember that he was pointing at a torch. The icon based gui should have made getting around easier and more intuitive, but when you spend so much time just trying to figure out what the icons are it doesn’t really work.
Clearly they were getting into uncharted territory with a lot of the gui decisions. They were used to dividing the screen up like that with the previous games. That said, it was the wrong decision for U6. More stuff was actually going on in the overhead map screen than in previous installments, and taking up so much screen real estate with those other gui elements was a bad call.
The keys thing is also true, but I count that as just one of those quirky Ultima things.
Looking at it today, the most fun thing about the game is the humerously bad ren-fest voice acting that the FM-Towns version is blessed with. If you search around Youtube you’ll find that someone was kind enough to isolate all of the best of the bad acting for your viewing pleasure. I recommend it heartily.
He played the game, he passed the game, but he didn’t grok the game.
Thing is, he actually didn’t play it. He’s just reminiscing and showing somebody else’s gameplay. That’s also why he can’t show any “cool stuff”.
I’m not sure if he’s actually played any of the Ultima games for these reviews. I hope he does for U7 at least.
To clarify, I mean that he didn’t play it for this review. Presumably he played through the game way back in the 90’s, didn’t really enjoy it, and hasn’t touched it much since.
I dunno, Handshakes; I never had an issue with the torches, or any of the sprite assets for inventory items. I mean, yeah, they were small, but a quick Look command would learn you some knowledge if you really needed it. And I didn’t find I needed to Look that often.
I mean, okay, yes, they were small sprites, probably in the 32×32 pixel range (if that). That couldn’t be helped, really…especially when the display resolution of the game was…what? 320×240? That the display is able to communicate as much info as it does with such a limited amount of pixels to do it all in is a testament to Origin’s ability to work wonders with very little.
@Infinitron
Spoony *does* play the game for the reviews, but he doesn’t necessarily complete the game. He gets screenshots of the later/end game stuff from people who have mucked through the full games.
U6 had a cumbersome interface. Whether or not other games did it better at the time (btw, Faery Tale Adventure – 1989), or whether or not you figured out little insider tricks to help the interface become less painful is besides the point.
Yeah no really, having just replayed the entire Ultima series from start to finish I just don’t see anything particularily wrong with U6’s UI for its time – unless I guess if you tried to play it with the mouse in which was it was kind of bad.
As far as keyboard interface go – it’s much much MUCH better than Ultima I~V really.
The main issue IMO is not the UI per se, but for than the view feels a tad to closed on the character – it would have required a bigger field of view (but then that might… have been problematic to do back then). But other than that it was fine, and got really improved by each subsequent WoU game (to the point where you could actualy move around with a mouse with no issue in Martian Dreams).
@Handshakes: But that’s kind of my point; I figured out some shortcuts — not exactly insider tricks either, just a little bit of applied logic — but fundamentally, I fail to see what it is about the interface that is so awful. I’ve never had a problem with it; it doesn’t bother me.
On rare occasions, sorting through a stack of items found on a dead body is tedious…but I usually just take the gold and run. And since the gold is usually right on the top of the pile…
There were things that he was talking about that he should’ve known if he played through the games he talked about – like why the Avatar “forgot to read part of the codex”, or why it was in “outer space”.
True to a point, though if he was going for a speedier playthrough, he might have simply ENTERed his way through the relevant dialogue, without giving it the necessary read.
I think he’s just dishing up cheap laughs, which I can appreciate. Even though I enjoyed alot of what U6 has to offer, I can still laugh at what I love. He’ll nitpick flaws unfairly, like the spaceship in U1, or not being able to wake LB in U6, except with “dispel magic,” but I think it’s all for the sake of fun. What I didn’t like about this review is that there was so much more material he could have mined.
Hur.
Actually, he may have pointed out he didn’t understand a society that was medieval and sold space shuttles at the same time and called it a plot hole, he also called it one of the most awesome things in gaming history.
Even the games up until U8/U9 he liked less, he probably loves, he’s just capable of poking fun at even the things he loves.
Personally, I think the space shuttle, U2, and the Lost Worlds make rather a lot of sense, if you look upon Mondain’s gem of immortality, being a gem gives him immortality by freezing his body in time. His body remains as it was the moment he created the gem; while not making it impossible for him to gain more knowledge and power and continue to walk at the same time. To create something like that, probably shattered the space-time continuum. A shop with space shuttles, and phasers and stuff isn’t something that’s actually normally part of that society, it’s stuff that was pulled from all over the multiverse through cracks in time and space.
Minax time apocalypse spell in U2 did similar to Earth. And the Lost Worlds, the inhabited planets of our solar system, that dropped into our universe with those spells, were literally lost, sent back to where they came from, when the Avatar restored everything upon slaying the gem/Minax.