Ultima IV...On your browser!!

[Lucas]

 

http://www.phipsisoftware.com/ultima4.html
 



Journey Onward, O' Seeker!!!

[WayAbvPar]

 

SO awesome! Thanks for the link.

[murdoc]

 

[Tebonas]

It even has the History of Britannia embedded as a PDF. Genius find! 

[WayAbvPar]

Ah, I cannot help thee with that. How I haven't missed you.

[Sky]

Also, needing a notepad to jot down things. It was great when I was 14.

[WayAbvPar]

Perversely, I actually enjoy that part. I remember enough of the plot to only have to write down the important stuff- I just have a copy of Notepad open and type crap in there when needed.

[Ingmar]

I forgot how bullshit poison was early in the game. 

[Astorax]

I forgot how bullshit poison was early in the game. 

Yeah, first thing I did was make a bee-line for Paws for the cheap Ginseng and Garlic...Cure reagents aplenty!!!

[Astorax]

I do forget though, how the hell do you pick up the runes?  I keep searching and it says shit like "There might be something here...perhaps you should go talk to someone"...it's like, dude, I KNOW THE RUNE IS HERE, WTFBBQ!

[Ingmar]

I do forget though, how the hell do you pick up the runes?  I keep searching and it says shit like "There might be something here...perhaps you should go talk to someone"...it's like, dude, I KNOW THE RUNE IS HERE, WTFBBQ!

I think you have to actually have someone tell you the rune clue before it will let you find it?

[WayAbvPar]

That is probably it. The first one I found I had to go back and talk to someone/thing I had previously interviewed after being clued in by someone else. Then I got the location and picked up the Rune.

[Slyfeind]

Yech! Artificial cockblocks! However, I can understand why they did that. It's almost like roleplaying!

[Moosehands]

Oh dang.  Ultima IV is THE game for me.  The defining experience of my life as a gamer.  I still remember being 11 and playing for over 24 hours straight with nothing but bathroom breaks (I had shitty parents).  I still remember the map, the mantras, the mystic gear locations, the "right" thing to do with the skull.  All 24 years later.  I still remember being crushed with disappointment by how broken VI was and how it marked a complete change in engine and the kind of base vision of the game.

I think it's about time for me to Journey Onward again.  It's been too long since my last trip though the moongate. 

[Ingmar]

For me, Ultima V was really the best game in the series. I didn't mind the changes in VI, though - seeing ALL YOUR GUYS ON SCREEN AT ONCE RIDING ON HORSES was kind of a "wow!" thing for me at the time.

[WindupAtheist]

Classic game. Blasphemous as it sounds, though, the NES version was better.

[Moosehands]

Ultima V, in retrospect, told a much better story.  At the time though it just rubbed me the wrong way, I think because Garriot's love of putting players in tough binds was lost on little kid me.

But VI was a broken piece of crap.  It was my first experience with bugs in a game.  There was a problem where your characters could get assigned a "swallowed" state by cave worms, that the game would never clear.  Leading to every action in game triggering "Shamino has been regurgitated!", "Iolo has been regurgitated!" forever.  The only fix for it was to mail the physical disks back to Origin and have them send you new ones.  Try taking away your kid's favorite Christmas present an hour after they open it and tell them they'll get it back sometime in January.  Yeah.

VI was also insanely exploitable.  It's lost to time and flooded basements but I used to have a scroll, signed by Lord British, in both common and gargoyle'ish declaring me the savior of the land.  I got it by being one of the first people to beat the game after release, and in less than 24 hours.  When you beat it you got a random code that you called in to Origin so they could verify what you did.  The problem was I beat it more or less on accident.  Playing around with the black moonstone in my inventory, still in Iolo's farm, I wound up porting to the cave where the young, wingless gargoyle lives.  And he had no logic built into his convos to verify you were supposed to be talking to him, which meant he'd glitch you into the gargoyle language quest.

Then you could bum rush all the shrines for the runes, use teleport to get the convex and concave mirrors from Blackthorn's castle and the old Shadowlords tower, and boom!  You win!  Without doing any dungeon crawling, without even knowing there was a pirate map, without chasing that obnoxious ghost around Skara Brae.  It was just a sloppy game, maybe it was rushed out the door or something I don't know.

[Sky]

I never played 6, was out gigging and broke at the time. I did keep my c64 with me and played a bit of 5 during that period. Mostly busy with anatomical research and experimental chemistry.

My favorite of the series would probably be 7.5. I also liked 8 (post-patch!), despite the rabid hate from all mankind.

[WindupAtheist]

Picked this up, started slaughtering Paws just because, discovered that the guy who adapted it added the ability for children to one-shot you. Deleted bookmark. I don't really need some hack imposing his pixel morality on 25 year old classics. Ran slower than shit anyway.

[dusematic]

lol.  I did the same thing.

[Trippy]

Why am I not surprised?