Follow the Virtues, Avatar!!!

[Lucas]

(sorry if it has already been posted somewhere)

Yeah, follow them

[Morfiend]

Horrible.

[NowhereMan]

I... don't really know what the hell that was or how to respond to it. Either way it was unpleasant.

[Cadaverine]

[WindupAtheist]

What the hell? 

[Samwise]

Am I missing some context?  I don't understand what was particularly horrifying or exciting about that link.

[Sir T]

I thought people liked heavily photo shopped fantasy images of women?

[Mrbloodworth]

Some (and by that i mean very little) of the symbolism is from the tarot. But I cant read that language its in, and the ads at the bottom throw me off.

for instance, justice, as told by her belt....

[Samwise]

I thought people liked heavily photo shopped fantasy images of women?

We have the T&A thread for that, and most of it is 100x better than this.  I can only assume this got its own thread because it has some other significance that I'm not aware of.

[angry.bob]

Ultima

[Segoris]

But I cant read that language its in, and the ads at the bottom throw me off.

There is an English translation of the description on the right side, but really, they aren't worth reading. Example, this is the one from the image you linked:

Cecilia Rodriguez, little sister of the famous argentinian showgirl Belen, participates for the first time to an importan producion.

In Mystik she portrays the virtue of Justice, and her character is the Druid, her color is Green and her symbol is the Scale. She's pictured in the forest town of Yew, headquarter of the druids and place of the High Court of Justice of Britannia.

[Sheepherder]

[Jeff Kelly]

Dammit. Now I will most probably waste another weekend installing Exult and playing through Ultima VII and Serpent's Isle.

[WindupAtheist]

I posted this on Stratics and among other things got a reply post from it's creator. It's an Italian guy who's a huge insane Ultima fan and is apparently friends with Richard Garriot. He threw this together for some charitable cause I'm not entirely clear on, with Garriot serving as "layout supervisor". Whatever that means. They were careful to avoid including anything EA could sue them for, since EA owns the rights to Ultima.

Now you know.

[Sheepherder]

Yeah, anyone who's played any Ultima game before VII could smell the Lord British.  People entering the series after VI might have missed the whole Yew/Druid/Justice thing.  It's ironic, I took those screens minutes before I saw this thread, which immediately reminded me of corn.

[Lakov_Sanite]

fethers...

[Strazos]

I really don't understand the inclusion of a dude in one of the months.

[Ingmar]

I'm kind of blown away that anyone on f13 didn't recoginze the Ultima stuff...

[Cadaverine]

I played Bard's Tale, and Might & Magic.  No Ultima for me, TYVM.

[Merusk]

I'm kind of blown away that anyone on f13 didn't recoginze the Ultima stuff...

The Ultima players on F13 are a dying breed. Most posters these days probably list EQ or something later as their first MMO.

[Rasix]

That is a very unintentionally hilarious comment.

[Merusk]

Yoiks, yes it is.   But that gives a window into when I first got a PC for gaming 

[Sheepherder]

I'm 22, and have had a gaming computer for all of five years.  How the fuck do I know this shit and you geriatrics not?

[Lantyssa]

I guessed it was something to do with Ultima given the thread title, but I never cared for the series (Six was the only one I played at all).  It always felt like the nerd equivalent of self-insertion fanfic.

[Musashi]

I played Ultima 4 on an Arari 130xe.  I am not dead.  But like most of that series, it was crap.  And so I forgot all about it.  I won't even pretend I knew what this thread was about.  Actually, I'm still not quite sure.  IIRC the game was so terrible and buggy that despite the fact that it had a GUI, Zork was still better.  So I played that instead.  Now if this thread was about naked chicks being stalked by Grues, well, then I'd be on board my friend.  I'd be on board indeed.

[Sheepherder]

I guessed it was something to do with Ultima given the thread title, but I never cared for the series (Six was the only one I played at all).  It always felt like the nerd equivalent of self-insertion fanfic.

That was actually the first computer game I played, it came on a combo disk with Wing Commander.  In hindsight, it was pretty buggy and had the worst UI ever, since like a third of the screen space was used to display the game.

[Strazos]

Never played an Ultima. Not sure how I feel about that.

[NowhereMan]

I'm ashamed to say the only non online Ultima I've played was IX. UO was fun though once I got over the fact that people would kill me and take my stuff (I was new and didn't stand a chance, that just seemed plain unfair!)

[Sheepherder]

Don't judge by Ultima IX, that was far after Garriott was past his prime.

Link

That came out the same year as the original Final Fantasy.  Among other thing I'd like to draw attention to is the GUI inventory, the text parser they used for NPC interaction (it highlighted appropriate things, they later moved to a multiple option system), the (bad) attempt at an optional mouse driven UI, the two weapon slots (it allowed some bizarre combinations*), the moon phases/sun thing (it had a day/night cycle, including eclipses).

* You could combine pretty much anything one-handed, including weapons that could be thrown (axes, daggers, spears, flasks of oil, boomerangs) or shields.

[WindupAtheist]

U5 actually came out in 1988, while FF1 came out in 1987. The point stands nonetheless. Garriot had invented that entire top-down tile-based style of RPG all the way back in 1980, and had fully refined it by the time U3 came out in 1983. In the eighties Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy were the inferior kiddy-console knockoffs of Ultima.

U6 was weird and clunky by modern standards, but back then the idea of making the entire world and every single city one huge seamless map and letting people control the entire game with just the mouse was pretty ambitious.

By U9 Garriot was, as stated, past his prime.

[NowhereMan]

Yeah, I enjoyed U9 as an interesting action RPG with some pretty graphics but I wasn't really under the illusion that this was the sort of gameplay that had catapulted Garriot to his iconic place in game design. I can imagine that if I'd experienced the other Ultima games I'd have disliked it or even if I'd experienced better open world games like Morrowind I'd have ignored it but at the time the game was quite fun and had some good moments (due more to atmospheric graphics than gameplay). It never produced as many memories as UO though (like pretty much none. There was a moment with a dragon on an ice floe I think that looked very cool, that was it.)

[Sheepherder]

U5 actually came out in 1988, while FF1 came out in 1987. The point stands nonetheless. Garriot had invented that entire top-down tile-based style of RPG all the way back in 1980, and had fully refined it by the time U3 came out in 1983. In the eighties Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy were the inferior kiddy-console knockoffs of Ultima.

U6 was weird and clunky by modern standards, but back then the idea of making the entire world and every single city one huge seamless map and letting people control the entire game with just the mouse was pretty ambitious.

I should have checked the Japan date on FFI.

That being said, it pisses me off the later Ultima games removed the dual-wield options, removed the grid based inventory for that free-for-all bullshit, and over-simplified throwing weapons.

[Rasix]

 

[WindupAtheist]

That being said, it pisses me off the later Ultima games removed the dual-wield options, removed the grid based inventory for that free-for-all bullshit, and over-simplified throwing weapons.

I personally liked 5 the best. It was their final iteration of the whole "keyboard commands, battles and cities in separate maps" formula and it was nice and polished. I loved running around as a solo guy with the magic axe and some invisibility rings. I solo'd a shadowlord once. An Tym for the win.

[Tarami]

I loved looting Lord British' armoury using skeleton keys.