Pix has made more progress in his playthrough of the Sega Master System port of Ultima 4, and he seems to be enjoying it greatly:

The SMS port has been everything I could hope for with no concessions made in gameplay that I’ve been able to notice as of yet.

And despite his struggles with the apparent scarcity of boats in the game, he has made good progress:

I have all the runes and am now 2 parts Avatar and ready for all the other virtues except honesty. One thing to note is that every time I need to use a mantra at a shrine or elsewhere I have to key in it which theoretically means that this game may be completable without bothering with all the conversations after all which is a nice touch for experienced players.

I’ve slightly mixed feelings about the conversation system keeping track of everything for me. It saves keeping notes for the most part but it’s not unreasonable for a player to go around asking everyone about mantras and runes once they get the idea of how things work in Britannia. I do like the freedom of a text interface at times but the keyword system still represents an improvement on the whole.

He hasn’t yet started on the process of venturing into the dungeons, so he still has a significant amount of the game ahead of him; we can likely expect a few more entries in this article series. That said, they may be a tad delayed if he ends up getting sucked into a playthrough of Elite.