Save Vs. Dragon was a lurker on a recent Spam Spam Spam Humbug recording. Even more awesome than that, however, is the fact that he has been blogging about introducing his young son to Ultima 6 over the last several months. Here’s a sample of their adventures together:

Tuesday night’s game started innocently enough with Joshua pouring over the map of the world. He pointed at a dragon symbol and declared that we needed to slay it. Alrighty, we set off. I wasn’t entirely sure that the symbol actually meant dragon territory, so it was a learning experience for both of us.

The encounter started innocently as well.
“What is that?!” Came a customary shrieking outburst from Josh.
“That,” I began, twisting a finger in my ear.
“Is that a dragon?! It looks like a TINY DRAGON!”
“Josh!”
“Sorry…”
“Calm down, yes I think it’s a dragon.”
“It’s small.”
It was. I took a few more steps toward it and turned on combat mode.
“Are we gonna kill it?”
“Yes, I thought-”
“YES! We’re going to KILL IT!”
“Calm down, yes, we are going to try.”
We attacked. About two swings in, another tiny green dragon came into view… and then another.
When the large winged yellow dragon came into view, it was rather apparent we were in trouble.
“Josh.”
“Yeah?”
“Should we run?”
“NEVER!”

We awoke later in Lord British’s castle. I have no idea how full party kills are going to affect experience gain. I wanted to let Josh drive, but I think I’m going to need to put the breaks on sometimes and take over navigation.

And, as if that weren’t enough, Save Vs. is also working on a bit of an Ultima fan project, using Minecraft as its basis:

I only have a few hours to work on my own hobbies each week, but progress has been fairly steady.

I started with the overland map of Britannia and took several running leaps at finding a good starting point. Mistakes were made, but it’s been its own kind of adventure.

The first problem was a shallow ocean, I had a small conniption fit when I realized it was only two meters deep. World painter doesn’t like to work down, so coastlines were made and remade 3 times until it looked right. The next problem was that UO was as flat as a pancake, I added a lot of hills and took several liberties with mountain ranges. and lastly…

THE RIVERS MAKE NO SENSE!

Like, seriously, they were just extensions of the ocean that wound like tendrils into the continent. I am making some improvements to them and may add creeks and streams later.

It will be interesting to follow further developments on both the playthrough of Ultima 6 and whatever this fan project shapes up to be!