Been a while since I updated this. Trying to get into law school has been taking up all my extra time. Anyway I have decided to attempt NaNoWriMo this year. At the end of day 1 I had hit 1580 words, so a modest start.

OK on to the good stuff.

Ultima

The Ultima series is one of the, perhaps the, major classic computer RPG series. Many of the CRPG conventions that we take for granted got their start in Ultima.

The only remaining vestige of this great series is Ultima Online, running for 10 years this year. It just recieved a major graphical update, which like all things that involve EA and Ultima was pretty much a flop. I have seen game site and game mag reviews as low as 3/10 for the update and the forums are in an uproar (I mean a louder uproar than the one they have been in since consentual PvP dropped).

This blog entry will begin my look at the Ultima series. So here are the set up links for you to get up to speed:

Of course there is the wikipedia entry, always good for an overview.

An older Gamespot feature on the series.

1up.com's recent UO 10 year anniversary feature

The Ultima games got good coverage in Matt Barton's (who writes one of my favorite blogs by the way) History of CRPGs on Gamasutra. You can find the three part series here:

Part 1

Part2

Part3

There was some discussion in Gamasutra's Quantumn Leap awards

There are many ways to get the games today. Gametap has most of the pre-U7 ones available. There are NES and Super NES roms of some of the games, assuming that you *cough* have the original cart of course. There is Haxima.

Ultima 7 is a tough one. Due to the way it was written in no longer runs, not even in an emulator. However, there is Exult, a fan project to get it working on newer PCs, however you will have to have a copy of the original game and that is not always easy or cheap. An inferior version of the game was released for the SNES and is now available as part of an EA compilation for PSP.

And so that's it. That's what you need to get caught up with if you are going to play along at home as I cover Ultima and dive into classic compute.....wait whats that? You say there were Ultimas other than UO after 7?!?!?! Nope can't seem to find anything about those...errrr...games, are you sure they exist, can you prove it beyond the shadow of a doubt. Let's just play it safe and assume that they never happened.