The CRPG Addict took some time out of his busy gaming schedule to review Ultima: Escape from Mount Drash. As you might well expect, it…didn’t fare well in his rating system.

Naming the game Ultima had been a cheap attempt to cash in on the growing fame of Garriott’s series, and while this didn’t work in the way Sierra intended, it ironically worked decades later. Over the years–particularly as Ultima fame grew–Drash became known as a famous “lost” game. When copies first started to emerge in the early 2000s–one famously discovered at the bottom of a cliff in Vancouver, where some retailer had dumped unsold games–they sold at auction for thousands of dollars. Only about a dozen or so original copies are currently known to exist. For most games, we don’t even bother to tally the number of known physical copies, but the Ultima title has made Drash undeservedly famous.

The consequences of this undeserved fame extend to my blog, where, for the sake of its Ultima pseudo-history, I am offering an entry on it despite it being 1) not an Ultima game and 2) not an RPG. It is specifically lacking all three of my core RPG elements: there is no character development, there is no inventory, and combat is entirely action-based. Your character has no attributes, never finds anything, never gets any stronger, and doesn’t even have a name.

…

The final score of 8 puts it at the second-lowest rating I’ve given. To be fair, it never claims to be an RPG–it’s much more an action/arcade game–and as a erstwhile VIC-20 owner, I think I might have had a modicum of fun with it when I was 10.

Mount Drash never reviews well, and to my mind stands out as the most egregious example of a publisher — Sierra, in this case — attempting to cash in on the Ultima namesake. One might be tempted to nominate Lord of Ultima for that dubious honour, but at least Lord of Ultima was, for its genre, a competently-executed game. It was enjoyable in its own right, at least for those who enjoyed playing Evony clones (which is not as small a market space as you might think).

But I digress.

The Addict also took the time to review The Stone of Telnyr, a rather obvious Ultima clone. And by “obvious”, I mean this:

The game manages to earn nearly double the score that Mount Drash did, which isn’t exactly a noteworthy achievement. The Addict also notes that there were three sequels released — yes, there is a Telnry series — and remarks that he may some day attempt to play these and/or track down the developer.