Ultima iii dosbox6/4/2023 ![]() ![]() In the screenshot on the right you see me pilfering food from the ride-thru window of McDonalls, for example. This game is awfully hard to solve without being dishonest. For example, it wasn't until i got a "blue tassle" that I was able to take over pirate ships and thus rapidly improve my stats. It took two hours for me to go from level 0 to level 3, but once I had a boat, I was level 10 in less than an hour! One appealing aspect of the game, slthough it's a bit silly, is that killing enemies nets you huge numbers of ran dom items whose value you must eventually figure out. In Ultima II, aquiring a boat in any of the eras is practically wins the game, because it enables you to kill anything and rapidly acquire gold and experience. My experience in the first two or three hours over the past couple of days was much like my experience with Ultima I and Akalabeth-The game is very slow, until you randomly find something very powerful, and then it begins to speed towards its conclusion. The game has some serious balance issues, though, notably the fact that dungeons and towers are irrelevent to the game, and mages and clerics can only use their spells in dungeons, making them also irrelevent. Another step forward is the creative use of time gates to link several different overworld maps that reflect different eras of the Earth. The huge leap ahead is the change from one-screen towns with different names that signify nothing to towns full of people who sometimes say unique things (even if many of them are inane-Note Robert Woodhead in the screenshot), and with unique subplots within the town (insofar as stealing a plane is a subplot). The game has both steps forwards and steps backwards from Ultima I. The instruction manual is amusing, and appears to be written by someone who was unaffiliated with Garriott-sarcastically commenting, for example, on Garriott's choice to make being male give you extra strength, while being female gives you extra charisma. ![]() Lord British can raise my hit points but demands tribute to do so, for example. Why didn't she just go back in time and kill me before I killed Mondain? :-O Anyway, I am given the quest to stop her, and in typical RPG fashion, absolutely no help whatsoever in doing this. ![]() The basic story is that Minax is pissed at me because I killed Mondain and came to Earth to corrupt the timeline. Not the Earth we know, of course, but some wacky Earth where everything is way, way smaller and the world issparsely populated by computer nerds and wizards. So the second game, as I mentioned last time, takes place on Earth. Ultima III may be a bit more annoying on the Apple, due to more disk swaps, but I'll live. Plus, I have finally gotten used to using the enter key and backslash instead of the up and down arrows. I chose to play that version when I discovered the graphics update for Ultima II on DOS is rather unlike the original, and also that DOSBox doesn't like it. I am happy to report that the Apple version of Ultima II runs nicely without any notable bugs. ![]()
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