A Most Unfortunate Port of Ultima 5
To celebrate the release of Ultima 5 on Good Old Games today, it seems fitting to take a brief look at the one port of the game that…just didn’t work.
The port is largely considered a failure on nearly every level, not the least of which was its sound design.
We’ll be revisiting the Nintendo Entertainment System port of Ultima 5 later in the title screen and gameplay graphics comparisons, but for now, why not take a moment to suffer through the soundtrack?
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X9YsdGyun0&w=480&h=390]
The horror!
You can all thank Sergorn Dragon for finding that.
What else are we expected to see, other than it’s rubbish? I’ve never had the misfortune of playing NES Ultima V, and I’d mute it real quick if I did.
I’m a bit of an NES music aficionado and I found that to be fantastic.
Well, at least is keeping the harmony… Could be worst!
The music that plays on the title screen (Rule Britannia) and during character creation is actually okay, however the “Wandering theme” (heard on the video from 2:35 onward) is just terrible. I mean the thune is basically 20 seconds looped over and over.
And the thing it is: it is the ONLY music you hear ingame, over and over and over. Combined with the awful slowness of the game it’s enough to drive one’s crazy.
I remember when my cousin got the brand new Exodus for the NES. It was a sad sad thing compared to my Apple II Ultima 3.. After playing that one for about a month, I gave it back to my cousin and never even entertained the idea of picking up ANY of the NES ports.. I think I played U4 for a bit using an emulator and it was just awful.
As a C64 teen who also had the NES and Genesis giving me the best of all 3 gaming worlds (well not counting Amiga/Dos but lower middle class family in the late 80s early 90s I should honestly say I was lucky to have 3 different game machines through High School..) I always found it funny.
Games on the C64 tended to be garbage on the NES (Ultimas, Bard’s Tale, Pool of Radiance), and NES games tended to fare badly the other way around. (Contra, Castlevania, Defender of the Crown.
However Amiga ports to the Genesis were usually fantastic. (Appropriate since both machines were close to the same thing.)
I never really figured out the why though. It was just dumb decisions or laziness most of the time I suppose.
Its not like downgrading a game really made it worse. I’ll take C64 Defender of the Crown over the Amiga version any day. It plays better even if the graphics took a MASSIVE hit.
You can take advantage of a system’s strengths even using the same game.
They just rarely wanted to and knocked out quick ports for cash.
Funniest thing was the hidden Gold Box D&D game, Order of the Griffon. On the Turbografx yet in many ways INFERIOR to Pool of Radiance on a C64 yet on a machine that was VASTLY more powerful in almost every way. I’ve been doing a Let’s Play on my blog about it and much of the Gold Box stuff is missing from a game that came out 5 years or so after Pool and on a machine that first came out about the same distance from the C64.
Lazy developers? Bad publisher with unrealistic release dates?
These are the sorts of questions retrogamers would love to have answered.
Then again, I still have many WHAT WERE YOU THINKING? questions for LB himself.
Ya know I’d actually argue that the NES version of Ultima III and IV were good games – they were simply aimed at the Japan market, hence the differences.
The NES u3 was pretty good, from what I recall. Although I never finished u3 on any system. The u5 NES port was very different in game play — it looked more like u6.
I never played much of the U3 NES game, but from what I have played… it felt very much like the original version, except for the Anime-ish graphics and music.
Ultima 5 was pretty much a remake of the game with the Ultima VI engine… except the NES just didn’t had the horsepower to handle the engine, hence the debacle. It was actually developped internaly at Origin, while U3&4 were created in Japan. My understanding is that by the time they began doing Ultima V on the NES – Ultima VI was out on PC and they felt the public would be expecting more of a same kind of game, hence this U6-ish approach instead of a game closer to the original U5
How dare we forget the most terrifying PC –> NES port EVER created. King’s Quest V! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYlJX9GrSLY
Still looks better than U5 😛
King’s Quest V is an out of left field. Konami also ported the first King’s Quest game to the Master System, as I recall.