Linguistic Dragon has posted an update to the Ultima Journeys blog, detailing his latest adventures on the planet Mars as he plays through Martian Dreams (one of two Ultima spin-off games Origin Systems developed using the Ultima 6 engine).

An excerpt!

Hellas stood in rather stark contrast to the bustling Olympus that I had just left. Whereas Olympus had been a Martian settlement now taken over and made suitable for a sizeable human population, Hellas – a hub of sorts for the canal system, it looked like – seemed to be mostly abanadoned and untouched by human hands. There were remnants of the Martian population everywhere. Musical instruments that still wheezed when anyone attempted to make use of them. Gardening tools were stored near a greenhouse. A room where the Martians could kick off their footbags (what I surmised passed for shoes among their kind) and soak their… roots? Feet? What *do* you call the extremities of sentient plants? Wherever I turned, there were new facets of Martian culture to take in. Jewelery, money, scrolls and writing implements – here was the best sense I could yet get of what Martian day to day life had been like. Yet it took brought up new questions. What had happened? Why had the settlement apparently been abandoned? It did not seem like answers were going to be swiftly forthcoming.

In my explorations of the city, I came across a Dream Machine, which I left alone until I had a chance to find and talk with Marcus. I eventually found him in the greenhouse, and he seemed very glad for the company. Indeed, he was the only resident of the empty colony, and he was evidently starved for human interaction. Emphasis on human – according to Marcus, there were berries in the gardens that allowed him to talk with some of the Martian machines, though he could not fetch them very easily due to the fact the gardens were overrun with jumping beans. He had much to tell us of the Machines – the long and short of it were that they pulled you into a dream world ruled by imagination. There was a substance there, dreamstuff Marcus called it, that could be shaped by force of will into whatever could be imagined. He claimed to have seen Lowell and others in the Dream World as well – he theorized that the Elysium crew had been trapped in nightmares while Martians already in the Dream World took over their bodies. A chilling prospect indeed, if true – but it made sense, based on what we had heard. According to Marcus, visiting the Dream World left your body vulnerable, and if someone made it back to it before you did… well, possession didn’t seem like such a far-fetched idea in light of that.

He informed us that the machine there in Hellas wasn’t working, but perhaps we could ask it what it needed, using the berries he’d mentioned earlier. So it was off to the gardens to do some weed-pulling (in the form of culling jumping beans) and berry collecting. Along the way, we passed a building we could not enter due to a rusted door. Upon using a flask of oil we had on hand, we managed to work our way inside and were rewarded with what appeared to be live Martian seeds, as opposed to the dead ones we’d seen in the power plant. This seemed like a valuable find indeed, and we took them with us.

As usual, there is much, much more; you’ll want to set aside a bit of time to read the whole thing. That said, I’ll spoil a bit of Linguistic’s closing thoughts here, because they speak to the astoundingly good design of Martian Dreams:

I absolutely loved the dream sequences, all of them stretching the engine and mechanics to their limits to accomplish a large breadth of things. Equipping the throw rug to distract the bull, dealing with the mixed up controls, figuring out how to properly use the items I’d been given, there were so many different things going on in the dreams and each of them felt unique. It felt like it really stepped up the interactivity from Ultima VI, what with the large variety of things I could use and mess around with (some of the stuff I got from dreamstuff in Wells’ dream was enjoyable to play with, even if it proved utterly useless), but did so in a more approachable manner than Savage Empire, which felt like it overcomplicated the process a bit, especially with the rifles and bombs one could make in that game.

Seriously, if you haven’t ever checked Martian Dreams out, do consider doing so; you can grab a copy for free by signing up for a GOG account.