Linguistic Dragon, having recently resumed his Ultima Journeys blog, has wasted no time in becoming a Space Ace and defeating Mondain in Ultima 1.

There he was, cloaked and robed in a fiery chamber, chanting over the still-forming Gem of Immortality. That was my first goal, I knew – if Mondain completed the Gem, then all of my hard work would be for naught! So I hurried my way over and smashed the Gem to bits – and wracked myself in the process! It hurt, a lot – I went from over 8000 hit points to just barely above 2000. I slung a few spells at Mondain, discovering that Kill spells only seemed to make him stronger, before resorting to my blaster. Time and time again I fired at him, until he turned into a bat. I chased him into a corner, where he turned back (!) into his wizardy self, my world shifting as he shot his telekinetic attacks at me, before I forced him to flee as a bat once more. After a good deal of chasing (and crashing into a wall for even more damage at one point, in my gusto to defeat the evil wizard), I finally managed to strike the finishing blow, undoing all of Mondain’s evil actions as they echoed through time.

The effects put me in stasis of some sort for a thousand years, back to the present, where Lord British expressed the gratitude of himself and his people for my actions – which left me wondering how exactly he knew what they were, if I changed time and all. But in any case, the wizard is dead, and Sosaria is at peace again.

So ends the tale of the First Age of Darkness. It didn’t take me all that long to finish up the game today, but I certainly felt powerful while doing it (I think the fact that Pandora decided to blare Nightwish in my ears while dungeon crawling may have aided that along a bit)! It was a fun romp this time around, giving me a chance to play around with aspects of the game I haven’t really done much with before – the destroy spell really helped a lot more than I expected! It was also the first time I’d seen Mondain transform back from a bat, and it was the first time I tried a kill spell on him as well – which the game claimed made him stronger. All in all a good time. I’ll compose some final thoughts on Ultima I in the coming days, and then it’s off to the next game. I hear Mondain had an apprentice who’s none too happy with Aric now…

This is pretty decent initial progress for Linguistic to be making, so soon after restarting the blog. Granted, he didn’t have a lot to do to finish Ultima 1 when his hiatus from it began, so it will be interesting to see how quickly (or not) he is able to digest Ultima 2.

Still…it’s always fun to read these blogged playthroughs. And as you can see above, Linguistic is (fittingly) quite good at telling the tale of his efforts.