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Mark Lemmert says: -
Mark Lemmert says:
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“Ultima 7 Revisited”: Spot the New 3D Objects – The Ultima Codex says:
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Happy Anniversary to Ultima IX – Forgotten World says:
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Anthony Salter says:
I Don’t suppose I could get a registration for the site, no?
Whats everyone been playing?
I’ve been replaying Ultima IX (and this time, without cheats !!), I’m back to where I was pretty much previously before it bugged out. (Yew, the bird wouldn’t recognize me) and I hope to continue and beat the game.
I feel however, that because I did it previously, I may be missing aspects that I otherwise would have seen. I think once I beat up to the point I was before, I’ll start popping into other areas I’ve previously been and seeing if theres anything I’ve missed.
Honestly, my biggest issue with the game is the fact that the dungeon layouts are just dreadful. I am not looking forward to Wrong, at all. I think I noclipped most of that dungeon out of frustration last time.
Otherwise, I am continuing on my eternal quest to find a MUD to play. I think my major issue is that I don’t *know* anyone that plays MUDs so I can’t get *into* one. It is a shame, really. Anyone here had any experience with such miracles? (Yes, I know about MUDConnect, etc)
Also,
Has anyone had anyone seen in real life/worn http://cgi.ebay.ca/Ultima-Online-RPG-Video-PC-Game-T-Shirt-/320449018233?cmd=ViewItem&pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&var=&hash=item76be67aae0 or http://cgi.ebay.ca/Ultima-IV-4-RPG-Video-PC-Game-T-Shirt-/270475277793?cmd=ViewItem&pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&var=&hash=item84b6ad01ed
I’ve been considering picking one or both up as a present for myself for my forthcoming birthday.
Anyway, enough spam. o/
I’m with Sergorn as regards the dungeons in Ultima 9. They’re pretty awesome actually, although back in the day I recall them being tedious. But even Hythloth — which previously I hated — was pretty decent this time around.
As for what I’m playing…well, I’ve got Galaxy on Fire on the iPhone, and Ravensword as well. Torchlight sucks up a lot of my PC gaming time, and I really should get about to cracking into Epic Mickey.
Oh, and as regards the shirts…I think our friend at the Origin Museum might have one or both of those in his collection.
Games I’ve been playing off and on lately: Europa Universalis 3, Civ 4, Arx Fatalis, and the Penumbra games. I also downloaded the Ultima 5 Lazarus from this site a while ago and played about halfway through it before stopping a while; it’s really a good mod/remake, and incidentally my first play of Ultima 5 and having that gap in my Ultima “history” was pretty annoying. I first started playing Ultima with 3 and 4 on the NES and then went to 6, 7, etc on the PC. I’ve never bothered with 1 or 2, though I suspect I’m not missing much considering much of the series wasn’t really fleshed out back then.
As far as MUDs go, I used to run and program one years ago on a Circle 3.0 base. It was fun, but I took it offline a long time ago. Probably still have it saved on one of these random harddrives sitting around. There are still MUDs out there if you want to get into one, it just depends on what genre you want to play. MUDConnector is by far the best site to search; I played one for about 8-9 years called Threshold but I haven’t played it in a year or more now. It is/was a generic fantasy RPG that was free to play, but did have a perk/reward type system if you donated. Some of the appeals include a decently active user base and roleplaying-enforced environment.
I’ve playing of Two Worlds II and Castlevania Lords of Shadow lately. Two Worlds II is okay, though I think I like the firt one better. Lords of Shadow is pretty much awesome as far as beat’em/Adventure games goes.
@Magnus
I really got to disagree about Ultima IX’s dungeons. I think these are by far the best dungeons any Ultima games have to offer, and I’d definitly rank Ultima IX’s dungeons above most other CRPGs as well. A lot of dungeons are lessons in game design IMO and I wish more games would take a cue from U9 rather than doing mindless hack’n slash romp.
As a matter of fact I especially love Wrong. It could be a tad frustrating ten years ago due to the fact the the game could slow to a crawl with all the guards moving around (guess we’re glad we didn’t put schedule :P), but since it runs smoothly now it can finally fully be appreciated.
I’ve been playing Syberia the last couple of days and started Syberia 2 last night. Really enjoyed the first one and the second seems to have improved on it. There is too much running backwards and forwards for my liking but the beauty of the scenery makes up for it. I think it might be an RPG next as there wasn’t a single game I’ve actually played yet in that top 10 RPG’s of the last decade article from a couple of days back.
I might be tempted by one of those T-shirts but I’ve got my eye on the Wing Commander flight suit that’s up for auction at the moment. Not sure what sort of price it will fetch but I’m going to have a serious attempt at winning it.
How do the dungeons in Ultima IX compare to those of VI? I’ve never played IX, but VI I thought had great dungeons. I also liked the way they tried to synch them to the overworld (though somewhat loosely). Anyway, they were was a far sight better than those in VII, ugh.
Depending on your perspective, U6 has better dungeons in terms of overall scale, I think. U9, on the other hand, offers VARIETY in its dungeons; each one has a distinct look, feel, and puzzle about it.
The less said about U7’s mostly-uninspired dungeons, the better. The dungeons in Serpent Isle were much better, though that came at the expense of being able to sail the seas in that game.
The issue with U6’s dungeons is that for the most part they were just hack’n slash romp. Well maybs hack’n slash isn’t a proper word since it’s not real time but it’s mostly combat. At least I liked the lever puzzles in Wrong/Covetous and the Shrine of Control but some of these were terrible (the Ant Mound ugh..)
U7’s dungeon were pretty boring altough I guess it’s mostly due to the fact there was little room to do them within the mountains. I will say that Hythloth is an exception though: it’s a well designed and thought out dungeons with branching, variety and good puzzles.
I’d say one of the things with U9’s dungeons as opposed to UVI is that obviously they take into account the real time aspect of the game and the 3D – so they would probably feel more “arcadish” in a way though I wouldn’t feel this to be a proper word to describe them.
This depends on the dungeons really – but as WtF_Dragon pointed out their main strenght is their variety: first for their general look and feel, and second in term of content. In some ways you could compare them to Zelda’s dungeons (especcially Deceit which involve shooting at targets with a Bow to gain effects), but it varies a lot.
I just checked out a YouTube video of some guy speed running one of the UIX dungeons. They actually do look pretty cool, although the amount of lever pulling was a bit of a put off. Hadn’t they seen any of the Indiana Jones movies?
Shooting the sun relief with an arrow was cool, but what would have been cooler was having Sherry go through the portcullis to retrieve the keys. Or exploiting the UVI bug of dropping a bag on the ground, pushing a party member onto/into the bag, picking it up and throwing it through to the other side.
The amount of “lever pulling” kind of depend on the dungeon. As we said, lots of variety here. What is nice too is that the dungeons often (albeit not always) have their own bit of story – for instance Despise used to be the lair of a mage, as such it feels like a place which had actually been settled in the past with obvious remnants of civilisation. On the other side you have places like Covetous which used to be a blackrock mine (and thus prevent the use of magic) and has been conquered by a Lich and other cool stuff like that.
There’s no Sherry but in the optional part of Hythloth there is actually a part of the dungeon which requires to magically shrink the Avatar to get into a small vent. Pretty neat!
The funny thing about Ultima IX was that dungeon (Hythloth, I believe) that the designers realized was way too big, so they added a shortcut exit in the middle of it. I wonder how many people didn’t use that exit.
It wasn’t so much the size but the fact that the second part of the dungeons was considered to be too damn hard during QA testing, especially since it came as the second dungeon of the game. And the truth is that this second half IS indeed pretty hard and can get frustrating is you’re not in a puzzle mind, hence the fact they decided to bring an extra teleporter in the middle of it.
I also wonder if this is not a remnant of the time where the dungeon used as Hythloth… was meant to be the sewers of Britain especially since taking into account the design docs leaked from the Bob White plot, the Sewers where kind of a hub area supposed to link multiple regions of Britannia, notably Britain, Cove and the underwater Ambrosia with some areas of the sewers only becoming accessible at specific points of the game. So perhaps the harder part of Hythloth was originally meant to be a part of the sewers than was meant to open up later in the game.