f13.net

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/040524/245198_1.html

"As an added bonus, included in the Ultima Online 7th Anniversary Edition package will be a full version of the classic Ultima(TM) IX: Ascension, the last game in the Ultima series that was hailed as one of the greatest fantasy adventures of all time and was the catalyst for Ultima Online."

Umm, don't the have the order kind of backwards here? I seem to recall UIX being released well after T2A, and being more of a thing to help fuel the hate for EA. The dropping of support while there were still killer bugs, massive patches just to make it playable,  etc.

You remember correctly, UIX was hailed as the harbringer of DOOOM for Origin, it was a buggy piece of crap that had very little to do with Ultima..

This ofcourse demands my favorite quote from UIX "What's a Paladin?" - The Avatar.

At least someone had fun with Ultima.

http://www.it-he.org/ultima9.htm

Personally, I liked Ultima 9.    I played it all the way through to the end.

Sure I had to quit every half hour to settle the memory leak (which took about 10 minutes of constant disk thrashing) when I ran it on my Win98 OS (I'm wondering if it can run, at all, on WinXP).     However, the story and storytelling was relatively good, the level of interaction that was allowed between player and the environment was pretty good (when bugs didn't screw things up), and there were some fairly nifty memorable moments to those who stuck it out.   City archetecture was nice, for example, and the peasants and other people had fairly good and well defined personalities.    

Aside from the catastrophic bugs (, a little tip: save often and alternate save slots in case one gets corrupted,)  the only real issue I have with the game is some of the monsters looked too polygonish.   Of course, by today's standards I imagine just about everything in UO9 will look too polygonish.    Oh, and it's going to dissipoint anyone whose hoping it'd be less like Ultima 8 and more like Ultima 7.   In Ultima 9, once again it's just you the avatar alone against the world, jumping around in 3D platformer fashion.   At least the spell system and the world feels somewhat Ultimaish.

What grated me most about Ultima 9 were the remnants of the planned Ultima 9 (for example the Cut Scenes, some of them didn't even make sense in the reworked game) in it. You knew there WAS a good game somewhere in there, before they cut it down in size and substance.

At least with the patches Ultima 9 works under XP.  Looks awful though.

Maybe this game would have been better as a console title, because back in the day it really felt like a Zelda 64 wanna be..

Ultima9 was a great game - its only failures were a badly shrunked world and an unstable release. After patching, I enjoyed it. Some of the storyline could have been written better, but for what it was, I liked it.

PS: the reason the Avatar has a dialogue option "whats a paladin?" is because its not fair to assume that every person playing the game will know what that word means, especially considering that there isn't a good substitute for paladin in many non-English languages. As I recall, that was a conversation tree option in Trinsic that also asked "Tell me about Trinsic" which of course, The Avatar would already know everything about; but many players may not.

Dig the avatar, RKDN. Grim Fandango for the win!

Sorry, back to your regularly scheduled topic.

I have to disagree Arc. I felt the game simply wasn't an ultima. I even enjoyed the widely-panned Ultima8 a lot. Played through it two or three times, even. It set up U9 so well, and U9 didn't deliver on any front, really.

One of the darkly happy moments of my life was when I was moving out of an apartment, found my U IX CD, and snapped the fucking thing into flinders. God what a huge disappointment that steaming pile of excrement was.

I suppose I'm in Sky's camp. As someone who kinda-sorta enjoyed U8 - regardless of it deviating severely from the previous titles in gameplay and style - I still found U9 to be an endless wealth of poorly conceived quests and mechanics, apocalyptic bugs, and horrible, horrible writing. It's like Origin decided to let the spectre of Ed Wood try his hand at game design. The overall product really felt that bad.
(For the record, I believe an actual game by Ed Wood would have turned out to be much more enjoyable than U9.)

Don't forget in Ultima 8 you screwed over a perfectly content Titan whose only pasttime was to heal and ressurrect people. Really virtous of the Avatar...

That said, 8 would have been a rather good game if not for the high expectations one had in an Ultima, and 9 would have been a good game if one knew nothing but Console roleplaying games up to that point.

I played UIX for all of 15 minutes before my machine died.  Then I had to reinstall the OS.  It had the type of quality I expect from the Battlecruiser series.

Tebonas, good point, I had forgotten about that. I do remember struggling with some portions of the game, and it was actually intentional, if a bit of a bad fit. The whole idea was to see if the Avatar would break his moral code to save Britannia, concocted by the Guardian (who was a pretty crappy archvillian imo, despite the quality of the games he was in).

I initially hated U8, but the patch made it a much better game, especially the whole 'click here to jump here' thing. After that the jumping stuff didn't bother me, because it, you know, worked.

I might have to reload UIX and give it another whirl, I seem to remember doing so before I reinstalled my OS the last time around and the movement seemed very quirky, which might be due to the modern computer + XP.

Finished Ultima 8 twice.  Once without the patch, another time with.   Second time was much, much easier primarily due to the jumping post-patch landing you where your crosshairs were vrs fixxed distances pre-patch.  The plot was even harder to follow than Ultima 9, at times (I'm not sure what that madness involving the first Necromancer's old obstacle course was about).

Ultima 8 had it's up sides, but a lot of us were rightfully ticked when it was no Ultima 7.   Ultima 7 and Ultima 7-II: Serpent Isle both kicked major ass.    Many people consider them the last "real" Ultimas.   There's an emulator to get Ultima 7 to run on new Windows systems as well as platforms it was never released for, but I never tried it out.     Ah, here it is (http://exult.sourceforge.net/).

Yeah, Exult is awesome, I was playing through Serpent Isle last year. 7 and 7.5 were my favorites in the series, though I only seriously played 4, 5, 7 and 7.5.

So I'm thinking we should set up a free shard...

Ultimas vrs Ultima Online.  Very different creatures, those.

I wonder why they don't just include all 9 Ultimas.

Because 7 of them wouldn't work on WinXP without some serious emulator help, and EA cannot be seen to legitimize any sort of emulators.

Really?  I'll have to see if I have that U1-8 CD-ROM.

This is probably the fault of that NT core.

I liked ultima 7 for the few hours I played before I reached a known gamestopping bug with no solution other than go back to an old save and then I uninstalled and never went back.  Some dagger I was supposed to find on a corpse but never did.  I took less time to get to that part of teh story than I spent wandering around not knowing where the story went.  Eventually I saw the FAQ that said it was a known gamebreaking bug. At the time the FAQ also pointed out at least 2 other game breaking bugs and I had no urge to mess with that shit.

U8 and U9 I was able to play start to finish with no game breaking bugs.  From the comments of others I got lucky.  But how much OTHER people enjoyed a game is pretty unimportant to MY impressions of a game.

U8 was 'okay'.  U9 had a stupid preschool level plot of 'shrine janitor'.  I enjoyed it while playing though, and frankly never hit any bugs other than the memory leak, but I could still play for almost 2 hours before that got bad on my system that barely met min requirements at the time.  It ran real choppy, but nothing in the game really needed strong framerates.

Ahhh, then that must have been the reason. I did not realize EA was also selling U1-8. If so, then that's all the reason they need not to include them.

Wow. Someone enjoyed U9 and didn't like U7! Just....wow.

Noted.

I couldn't get into the U7 graphics, thus I never got very far in the game before pushing it aside (it also took a lot of tweaking with moslo to run at an acceptable speed).  Never played U9 due to the amount of hate it got all over the boards.  I try to avoid things classified as "buggy pieces of system slowing shit".  Sometimes I fail in that endeavor and end up playing SWG. *rimshot* U8 kind of annoyed me.  The jumping most of all I think.

My first computer of my own with games other than Frogger and Prince of Persia was a P75, so, there's only so much with bad graphics I can put up with.  I even tried Wasteland which is supposedly the inspiration behind my some of my most favorite games ever (Fallout series) and couldn't get by the graphics there.  At leat bad graphics in Nintendo games had style; bad computer graphics are just brutal.

Nope, not what I said.  I liked U7 until it decided to become unplayable.  I would not have minded if this was shortly after release, but this was about four fucking years later and there was no patch to fix known gamebreaking bugs.

I just got lucky through U9 it seems.  It was a shitty game though.  Didn't stop me from enjoying it.  Note I also said I enjoyed what I played of U7.  so go somewhere else for your notetaking.

I'm more suprised that you were able to play U9.  Buy a lottery ticket.

A WINNAR IS YOU!

Not really, think about it...

I was able to play a mediocre at best game to conclusion while the better game flipped me the bird and told me to fuck off repeatedly.

How this life experience equates to good fortune escapes me.

U9 required me to type format c: /s in order to get back to my regular gaming enjoyment.  Luck's relative.

Even U9 didn't do that for me, it took the 'special' patch for AO to require that.

Still better than Pool of Radiance (the new one) that deleted c: on its own when you deinstalled it...

Now that was by far the most screwed up installation I ever saw.

You can't argue against the extreme efficiency in which that new Pool of Radiance removed itself (and everything else) from the hard drive, however.

(I actually fret when uninstaling things because of that game... which I never bought or installed.)

I think Descent to Undermountain also deleted c:\ upon uninstall.  But frankly you had it coming if you bought that piece of SHIT.

But you could have reverted to an old save, you said. If you liked the game, why didn't you? Doesn't make much sense to me. That's why I assumed you didn't like it. I've had a few games over the last ten years go wonky on me to the point I had to reload, but I never quit them due to it.

I got it out of the bargain bin. Maybe a patch or something fixed that, because I uninstalled it less than an hour later and it served as my 'worst pile of crap' coaster for a good while. God that was an awful game, makes U9 look great. Seriously.

Because I had two saves, both after the game ending bug that I didn't know about till too late.  There was no crash or anything, the story just stopped and fizzled.  I didn't KNOW there was supposed to be a dagger on that corpse, I just figured I missed something.

And I have never gone back and totally restarted a game because of a bug.  I uninstall games that do that to me, or I wait for a patch and THEN try again.  U7 had no patch to fix that.  And it was apparently (according to the FAQ I read) one of about 4 places that similar things could happen.  The only way to fully avoid it to my knowledge was to get lucky or play with the walkthrough on your lap.  The latter is not an option in a story driven game for me, and I already had shown my lack of luck with this particular title.  I moved on with my life.  It was only $15 bucks blown for the game an the expansion out of the value bin anyway.  No big loss.  The game also ran abit wonky with moslo and all that stuff.  Either too fast or too slow, never smooth.

While we're all being honest, WW2 Online had a BETA patch (that is, a patch that only beta testers tried out, not an official release patch) which would delete any files in C:\.  Not a recursive delete, just any files there... unfortunately, some of those are usually critical.  Terrible, yes, but the patch was only out there for a few hours, only a few people were affected, and it never made it out to the mass player base.

I know nothing about PC installers/uninstallers, but this seems to be a common problem, I presume from not setting a path variable correctly in the scripting language.

Bruce

I haven't run into that problem with 1.5 million installs using WISE (an install packer). It handles all uninstalls automatically (they all do usually). Anything installed gets removed.

Every time you pack a new version you run the risk of screwing something up though (routine can get you every time).

And, hey, that is what beta testers are for. So the game breakers don't make it to the paying players.

Heh- I remember that. I just missed getting caught by it; I just happened to check the forums before I patched.