Origin Systems historian Pix has decided to play through another console port of an Ultima game. This time around, he has chosen to attempt the Super Famicom port of Ultima 6.

Box contents

And after some commentary about the relative availabilities of the Japanese and US versions of the port, he dives in and begins exploring Britannia.

Garg…gargfolk?

My generic Avatar is dumped straight into a battle with the gargoyles to start the game. This gives me a chance to have a look at the new interface which is a radical departure from the PC original. The first thing to note is the full screen graphics. One of the criticisms I’ve heard over and over of the U6 engine is that the viewing window is too small, especially when combined with the lighting effects at night which shrink it down even further. Lighting effects are still here but with a full screen view of the world, it’s visually a lot more like playing Ultima 7 which can’t be a bad thing. This is limited on the SNES to a degree as the world isn’t always on one map and loads when entering certain buildings and rooms.

The combat itself is intuitive using a self-explanatory menu system. There is even an auto option which appears perfectly adequate for bashing at the nearest opponent. I would argue that the control scheme used in the rest of the game doesn’t make good use of the multitude of buttons on a SNES gamepad. Almost everything can be accomplished with just the A and B buttons through menus which works but it would be far quicker to use the rest of the buttons to speed certain tasks up.

He does express some issues with the inventory management UI, and bemoans the lack of an explicit character creation sequence (hence his “generic Avatar” comment, above). But in general, his first impressions of the port are positive. Whether this will hold up once the various limitations of this version of Ultima 6 rear their heads remains to be seen.

Click on through to read the rest of his comments, and to see several photographs of the game in action.