The Excalibur Brothers review Underworld 2
Not quite as laugh-out-loud funny as Spoony’s work, but also lacking in Spoony’s customary profanity:
I didn’t have a chance to watch the whole thing, but the snippets I sampled seemed pretty even-handed. The reviewer doesn’t seem to betray much of a modernist bias, and is willing to evaluate the game in a frame of mind that accounts for the extant technology at the time of Ultima Underworld 2’s release. He notes, for example, that the music is evocative and may even inspire the player to hum along, despite the fact that it won’t sound all that polished to the ears of modern gamers. His evaluation of the game’s engine seems similarly fair.
*yawn* at the sing along part I had to turn it off. The accents were highly annoying throughout…
Cool review. I don’t even mind the accents, they lend the review a sort of oldschool mock BBC flair.
Underworld II was really my first Ultima game (although I don’t usually count it because it isn’t what people think of when they think “Ultima” type games), and I respect it a lot. Technically speaking, it was super impressive for the time… But damn the game is incredibly obtuse (as they mention in the review). That tips manual was also practically useless as I recall.