In part to mark the end of the Underworld Ascendant Kickstarter campaign, Origin historian Pix has launched into a playthrough of Ultima Underworld for the original Sony PlayStation console. This port received some significant graphical adjustments, by the way:

The introduction is now in FMV with newly drawn art and voicing. This is a shot for shot reproduction of the original and I really quite liked it. The acting sounds far more convincing in Japanese than it ever did in English but I’m hardly the person to judge when I don’t understand a word of it. I really like the way this has been handled but I may have been less impressed if I was coming to this as a new player – you could do a whole lot more with FMV after all.

Character models were also made fully 3D:

The biggest difference to the environment is that all the sprite models of the original game have been replaced by all-new 3D ones. Some of the original UW sprites were pretty appalling (e.g. the bat that looked to be about a dozen pixels) but these were much improved in the sequel. Time hasn’t been entirely kind to most 3D modelling of the mid 90’s and these new models do look basic and cartoonish. They don’t move around the world smoothly either and give the impression of being pre-rendered in which case I’d far rather they had skipped the 3D modelling part and just redrawn everything the old-fashioned way. Most of them don’t look too bad — the giant rats are kind of cute, looking more like giant mice. The rotworm is possibly the worst and looks more like something left behind by one of the giant rats.

Of course, this port is only available in Japanese, which language Pix does not speak. As such, he probably won’t stick with it through to the end. Still, his pictures of the game on his television screen — click on through for those — are worth a look; it’s interesting to see the changes that were made in bringing Ultima Underworld to Japanese console gamers.