Spoony Reviews Ultima Underworld (Both Parts!)
He wasn’t sure he was going to do it, and wasn’t sure he could secure a copy of the game, but Spoony evidently managed to overcome both doubts. Here is his (just shy of) ten minute review of Looking Glass Studios’ classic, Ultima Underworld:
Too much time wasted on bad voice actors!
Of course, it’s the first of a two-part series, meaning that at some point Spoony will get around to reviewing Ultima Underworld 2. I suspect that’ll be another lengthy review, akin to his summary of Ultima 7.
Just in brief, I don’t completely agree with his criticisms of the game (although the voice acting is rather awful…and something I don’t remember being present in the diskette version of the game), and I wish he’d spent more time on just what a technical marvel the game was in its day (as compared to its closest competitor in the first person realm, the first Wolfenstein game).
That said, the bit where he’s protesting in full medieval garb is rather funny.
Update: And just like that, a day later, he’s posted his review of Ultima Underworld 2:
Uh...um...what?
A bunch of you have commented below — correctly, I think — that he really doesn’t get the game, and could should have had a nice warm mug of RTFM before he undertook his attempt to play it. In fairness, I can somewhat sympathize with how he struggled with the sewers, because I find them quite difficult as well. Still, it’s not like the fact that you’re supposed to circumvent the headlesses is any kind of arcane knowledge. Ditto the reaper guarding the armoury key. Both of these things are there for the truly hardcore gamers to try and beat — and good on them if they can. For the rest of us, there’s a side route.
Infinitron commented that after the glowing review Spoony gave Ultima 5, there might have been a reasonable expectation that his review of later games would have been similarly positive. I would argue that it became apparent with Spoony’s review of Ultima 6 that no such even-handedness was to be expected. Ultima 5 got a pass because it occupies a special place in Spoony’s heart and history as a gamer, but almost every other review he’s turned in has been of a decidedly modernist bent. He doesn’t review these games in their historical context; he reviews them (essentially) as though they were new releases in this day and age, and lambastes them accordingly. Game mechanics have changed, evolved, and improved since the halcyon days of Looking Glass Studios’ epic series and John Carmack’s raycast pseudo-3D imitations thereof.
He does contradict himself a bit, since he complains about the plot and even getting to the Isle of the Avatar, and yet it’s all there in the manual (and many parts of the game!).
I also noticed a few bits where he showed the second Underworld game, most notably the mapping.
The only thing that I dislike about UW1 is the user interface. Everthing else was amazing at the time, and still good today (well, I’ll concede about the voice acting, but I only had the disk version too, so I only heard that later).
I’m surprised it’s not been remade really, since it would be possible to use Oblivion or something to do it.
There have been a few projects trying to remake Underworld in Morrowind and then Oblivion. But as with most remakes, attention spans often aren’t as long as the development process.
The reviewer commits some mistakes in my opinion. It is Cabirus who idealizes populating the Abyss. And Tyball was trying to save the world, but Garamon ensure you (as far as I remmember) that he would fail.
On the other side, great review. Voice acting in the game was not too awful, but Corwin’s was one of the worst I’ve ever heard. I could barely understand what he was mumbling.
And Oblivion would be a nice engine for remaking the Underworlds, since it mainly relies on 1st person perspective.
I don’t usually like Spoony’s criticisms of games, and this one is no exception. His criticisms of the plot are without merit (read a manual much?), and the voice acting is very-VERY good for a game of this time, if you take into account that all of the voice work was done by Origin staff (Yes, that’s Richard Garriott as the narrator *and* Baron Almric). Considering that only a handful of games had speech in 1992–for cripes sake–give ’em a break! [by the way WTF-all of that speech was *most definitely* in the original floppy version of the game].
Another issue that I have with Spoony is that he always seems to mispronounce everything, but holy moly–AT LEAST GET THE NAME OF THE FRIGGIN’ GAME RIGHT! It’s pronounced, “STY-GEE-AN”–Corwin, the captain of the guard actually SAYS it–no excuse.
And the antagonist is pronounced, “TIE-BALL” not Tibble…You’re fighting a powerful mage, not some old woman’s cat from Monty Python!
Now I gotta give Spoony some street cred on his humor…the open-mouthed screenshots at his tirade of being the Avatar had me giggling, and comparing the etheral void to an acid trip had me in hysterics! Humor rating-5.0 🙂
It’s also worth noting that Ultima Underworld was released more than 2 months before Wolfenstien 3D. John Romero himself admits that he saw an alpha of the game, and described it to John Carmac, asking if he could duplicate the real-time 3D effect. The result was Wolf 3D. Also of note is that Underworld was ‘True’ 3D, while Wolfenstein [and even DOOM] were not. This means that in Underworld you can actually walk *UNDER* things, while Wolf and Doom were a 2-dimensional plane that craftily gave you the illusion of a 3-d environment.
@Origin Museum: You kind of rocked my world, so I had to look this up.
According to numerous online dictionaries, it actually IS Stidge-ian like Spoony says (and how I’ve always said it). So actually yes, the crummy voice actor apparently gets it wrong. Maybe in the rens-fair where they picked him up they actually do say STY-gian. And ‘verily’, no doubt.
As for the plot… Meh, I don’t feel it needs to be apologized for that much. The fact that a game back then even bothered with a plot beyond kill the badguys at all is good enough. Obviously if you look for them you’ll be able to find some pretty gaping plot holes, but why bother?
There was in fact voice acting on the original disks. I’m assuming those of you who didn’t hear it didn’t have a sound card capable of speech, or didn’t have it set to the correct settings.
As for the game: This was one of my favorites of all time. Truly cutting edge technology when it was released. Nothing even came close for years.
I’m thinking that was probably the case, Crusader. If memory serves, the 386 PC I first played Underworld on (or was it the 486? That was quite some time ago…) didn’t have a sound board, only the PC speaker.
So yeah, I guess no voice acting for me. Not that it seems I was missing all that much.
I don’t think UU even had separate disk and CD versions. You’re confusing it with System Shock.
@WTF I would guess you were playing it on a 386. The 486 came out the same year as UU (and possibly after) and was mondo expensive. Did it play smoothly?
I remember playing UU2 (probably on a 486 by that time) and it got dodgey sometimes, but we put up with that sort of thing back then, didn’t we? Crashing out was something you just dealt with by saving every couple of steps (in the case of Lands of Lore, I mean that literally we would take two steps and save), and we never thought to complain about it!
Yeah, must’ve been the 386 then.
Ah, well, as I say…doesn’t seem I was missing that much. Though I never knew that it was Garriott himself doing the voicing.
Yeah….Spoony was obviously doing something very wrong in Ultima Underworld 2.
Just watched the UW2 video, and it does seem abundantly clear that he really needs to read the damned manuals. For example, the secret room is mentioned in the manual, and is on the map! It’s not like these things are hard to come by, thanks to places like replacementdocs.com.
The only valid points he made were about the interface (clunky, especially by todays standards) and the lack of your shiny U7 equipment (which occurs for both gameplay reasons and so that they can just reuse most of the art from UW1).
The voice acting of UW1 stands as proof that Britannia English should never ever be used along voice acting.
On a side note I personally played UW2 and UW1 on a 386 DX 40 back then and it ran realy smoothly.
Regarding reading manuals well: what do you expect? There’s a reason games hardly have a manual nowadays, people don’t read them. Meh.
The Origin games manuals were the best.
Sergorn: Addendum: there’s a reason EA just decided to not ship paper manuals with its games anymore.
Well yeah I heard of the ecological reasons… but the truth of the mater is that manuals don’t have any point anymore. The purpose of manuals is to learn how to play games… but since ALL games include some form of ingame tutorial, they have no point anymore and people don’t bother reading them.
As for “historical manual” like Ultima or Wing COmmander did well, they’ve always been in the minority so…
I don’t understand why people don’t at least skim through the manuals, at least for PC games. Do you really have something better to do while your 2-DVD game (I believe they’ve gotten that big by now) is installing?
Manuals these days are pretty crap, and often aren’t quite as helpful as they should be.
The Ultima manuals were special, containing a lot of information about the game, the world and the gameplay.
After watching the spoony review I took a look over at the manuals for UW2, and they are quite a good read. Just the sort of thing to look at while you’re installing the game, as you said Infinitron.
I guess it just bugs me that he’s blaming the game for his inability to read the manual. I can only imagine his problems with the headless (something I dealt with when I wasn’t even a teenager…) were due to him creating his character incorrectly. Perhaps he neglected his combat skills?
Mind you, I’ve just realised he didn’t mention anything about the “labyrinth of worlds” beyond showing a clip of Talorus. I wonder how far he actually bothered to play?
Yeah, a few other commenters and myself heckled Spoony a bit over his er, minimalistic demonstration of the game. He posted that follow up in response – fair enough.
The follow up doesn’t really cover all the points that people are raising though, and I still maintain he’s misrepresenting the game. The lack of mention of the various other worlds is essentially missing out 70-80% of the game!
Bah. Perhaps I’m taking this too much to heart because of how much I enjoy UW2. I’ve just never found the beginning that difficult, it only got hard for me in the later worlds.
After the glowingly positive and nostalgic Ultima V review, there was an expectation that Spoony would proceed to give that same kind of treatment to the rest of the series (well..until U8 and U9).
Clearly, that expectation was wrong.
That’s his right, but it’s a shame that a bunch of Spoony fanboy kids are now convinced that “UW2 sucked”.
I can’t say I’m surprised that Spoony didn’t like UW2. If you know Spoony, you know that he hates sewer levels with a passion. UW2 is, unfortunately, front loaded with sewer levels. It was not to be.
As for the headless, they were like the bosses for the first part of the game. They are relatively close to the entrance of the sewer, and are really easy to just stumble into on your first time playing (I don’t remember, but I think one of the NPCs kind of sort of warns you about them, but mostly you just stumble into them and die on your first run). And, as Spoony shows, they will absolutely wreck your crap if you aren’t leveled up. If you notice in his video he is level 1 when he is fighting the headless. That is a bad call, and is why he is getting smoked. You actually have to skip the headless and monkey about in the first two levels of the sewer until you are a bit stronger and better equipped.
The gazers are also really easy to just stumble onto at a way too early point in the game. Forgiving, UW2 is not.
Spoony raises a good point about the skills, I think. Did “charisma” ever actually do *anything* in UW2?
I learned today of a recent occurrence in Spoony’s personal life. This has softened my opinion of his review considerably. Perhaps we should cut the poor guy some slack.
Infinitron: Regarding Spoony’s personal life, that is unfortunate.
I hope he’s doing all right. Bad review or not, one hates to see others go through rough patches.
I played all ultimas since VI, still have boxes and disks and i must say that this guy is just a bad fun-less copy of the Angry Video Game Nerd.
As you’ve said before he barely advances into the game and neither reads the manual (something ultra needful back in the 90).
And the next game that he is going to talk about is Serpent Isle? What is he going to say about it? It is an excelent game unbeaten even today (although it could be better if they had kept the original plot). Nobody has made a true 24h hour routine for every NPC in the map.
BTW forgive me if i made any mistakes with the English, it’s not my primary language…
Oh Spoony. What have you done? You took one of the greatest first-person dugeon crawls in the history of the genre and twisted it to the point of alienating thousands of future fans.
(But at least I know what I’m going to be for Halloween this year!) 🙂
“Nobody has made a true 24h hour routine for every NPC in the map.”
Gothic 1&2 and Risen would like to have a word with you.
Oook i assume i was mistaken, Gothic and Risen (both made by the same studios) also made it, Oblivion had also some kind of routine for their NPCs.
I confess not having played Gothic and Risen but was their routine as good as the Ultima ones? IE, did they wake up, ate something for breakfast, went to work, stayed working (sometimes making some real work, look at the baker in Britain in U7 whose name i can’t remember right now that made “real” bread, look at those blacksmith that made swords and armours and when they had finished started another one look at.. and i could continue), going to the tavern after work (and some of them going to the brotherhood masses)and finally going to their houses to sleep.
Is the routine in those games as good as this? At least in oblivion and morrowind i can asure you that no, it isn’t.
Yup the schedules in Gothic 1/2 and Risen were pretty much as impressive as what you can find in Ultima VII.
All NPCs go to sleep at night, they eat, move around, work (that might be ironing out a sword, doing stuff in a field) and so on. There can be bigger variations too, for instance in the first Gothic you have everyone gathering around the area in the old prison camp since this is where people will fight and such. There IS a reason why some Ultima fans nicknamed Gothic “the game Ultima IX should have been”, because it pretty much nailed the world simulation aspect in the way U9 meant to.
Oblivion’s schedule wasn’t quite as good, but still pretty good on the whole. Skyrim looks very impressive in that aspect with NPCs being able to do a lot of stuff, and not just moving around.
Alas Gothic/Risen and TES (well Fallout too now I guess) are amongst the rare games that still try this kind of stuff and try to follow/expand on the Ultima game design philosophy.
No really, read the Book of History!
It’s a shame but also comes not as a total surprise. His reviews aren’t known for being objective or fair and he likes to focus on small bad things 😉
So, who cares much if he dislikes UW2 and his fanboys have a bad impression of the game? It’s not as if they would actually play UW2 or even manage to play it further than the first hundred steps. Let’s face it, people accustomed to todays games will not enjoy UW (or any of the other Ultimas) unless they really are into rpgs.
Off topic @ wtf:
It’s strange that one can post with the name of a registered user.
Dominus:
Hmmn, that is a bit weird, although to be fair the comments form isn’t exactly…rigorous like that. I’ll see if I can find a way to prevent it, though.
Okay, Dominus…try being an imposter again. 😉
Couldn’t 😉
Nicely done!
“imposter detected…”
Mua ha ha.
Actually, it was trivially easy to find a plugin that handled this exact issue. I love the WordPress community.
Dominus nailed it.
I don’t agree with the UW2 review either, but I still found it entertaining… Which is kind of the point. I mean, we’ve all played UW2 anyway and already know how great it is. We didn’t watch a ten minute review just to have our views affirmed.
This is what Spoony does! He finds all the little plotholes and questionable bits of game design (and yes, there are faults worth mentioning in every game, even the very good ones like UW2) and he exaggerates them for comedic effect.
Besides, not all games strike all people the same way. I’ve never been able to stomach a Final Fantasy game, for instance, even though the series is often said to be one of the best in all of gaming. UW didn’t sit well with Spoony, that doesn’t mean he is some young gamer whippersnapper who is too lazy to enjoy a real game like we had in the old days – and I think his exceedingly kind treatment of the earliest games in the series proves that. I mean, U4-7 is easy to fall in love with. U1-3, on the other hand, takes some real perseverance.
Spoony is demonstrably NOT a young whippersnapper. He’s a true oldschool RPGer, and a member of UDIC to boot.
That’s what makes the review somewhat disappointing.
The Final Fantasy series was always flawed and never truly “good”, but it was engaging and accessible in a way that few western RPGs were, at the height of its popularity.
Final Fantasy is an awesome series. Which actually own quite a lot to Ultima too.
“I mean, U4-7 is easy to fall in love with. U1-3, on the other hand, takes some real perseverance.”
It’s all a matter of context. U1-3 were easy to fall in love 30 years ago too. It just becomes more difficult as games ages and that’s true even of the later Ultima games.
Agreeing with Sergorn; I first played Ultima 3 on the NES, when my only other experience with RPGs up to that point had been Dragon Warrior on the same system. Comparatively, Ultima 3 was much more complex and interesting.
Especially considering Dragon Warrior for the NES is the most mind-numbing and hopelessly unbalanced and repetitive RPG ever produced. I played that game when the NES was still popular, and the game is terrible.
Will you take me with you?
No
Yes
No-But you must!
Will you take me with you?
No
Yes
No-But you must!
Mix and repeat 100x. I DON’T WANT TO TAKE YOU WITH ME PRINCESS!! Why give me a conversation option if only one is actually acceptable?!?! Argh!
I suspect that the designers of games with “But thou must!” scenes believed that the illusion of choice, no matter how fleeting, provided realism and immersion.
After all, very few people would actually ever select “No”.
I seem to remember that it let you make the epic wrong choice at the end when confronting the Dragonlord when he asks if you’ll just share the world with him instead of fighting, though.
Spoony’s reviews were fun at the beginning, but now all he seems to do is whine at the games one after another. Each review is feeling pretty forced, like a sequel made just to reach the end of the series.
I didn’t that damn princess with me!
Wait–What happened in Spoony’s personal life?
I don’t like gossiping on this blog, but – his girlfriend, who was also his webmaster, dumped him. (remember that “Scarlettopia” link? it’s not there anymore)
Just watched the review. Good, but crazy.
The awesome: Great beginning with its cursory glance at the game, great music, clever and entertaining Pythonesque silliness throughout. Chuckles would be proud.
The good: The music uses MT-32, AdLib and sequenced/sampled tracks throughout. While refreshing, it should have been more serious in selection and duration. At least it was well represented.
The bad: The Isle of The Avatar was always volcanic. Even if there was no visible lava, its mountains suggest volcanic formation. Britannia’s entire southeast region is volcanic since Ultima IV, and more dramatic tectonic and seismic shifts had occurred earlier in its history.
The ugly: Spoony should explore the game mechanics in more detail and the story less. He also should have said that the misrepresentation of the Avatar as someone no one could recognize is a plight facing normal people, every day. The “Avatar” of legend was always questioned and viewed with suspicion, probably because of con artists pretending to know or be him at any given time. We all think we’re important, yet few recognize, trust or back us in times of need. That was the Avatar’s peril in Underworld. Semi-mutual abandonment and dissolution.
this game started it all for me, 16 years old and playin on my dad’s 486 packard bell pos. also about the same time as the first wing commander. 2 games that will go down in history as the grand daddy of all pc gaming.
I love how Spoony starts up an Ultima game without consulting the included documentation.