I’ve been getting in the occasional hour or two on Ultima 5 over the last week but this will be a short post as there isn’t much to say about it. There is a lot less to do in this Britannia than I’m used to and I’ve spent most of my time travelling to and fro from the shrines and codex completing the various quests. I’m glad to say that I’ve now achieved all of these but it took a while.

I know the game a whole lot better now and have been fully exploring all the towns as I go. There isn’t much going on in any of them with the most extreme example being Jhelom which looked to have a population of 2. The residents do have some basic schedules at least but they don’t move around in the usual sense and appear to teleport when I’m not looking. Finding the clues needed in the towns is pathetically easy and the story of the game is seriously lacking to the extent of being almost non-existant. The towns aren’t even affected by the Shadowlords unless I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate to miss them every time.

Something I should correct from a previous post is that I discovered that food does have a use being eaten each time my party sleep in their tent. Without it I don’t heal making food pretty essential as I discovered when I ran out.

The combat has proven tricky on occasion although I’ve not gone out of my way to get any decent equipment which would no doubt help. The shrines usually have some tough creatures on hand but I’ve been able to dash in and out if needed on the magic carpet. I ran into an interesting bug where my Avatar turned into a ghost after being hit but I wasn’t returned to Castle Britannia to be resurrected and could carry on playing with none of the monsters able to attack me. I was sorely tempted to stick with this but with only one save slot on the cart I figured I should stick with the regular approach in case I ended up running into a showstopping bug when in ghost form.

I reckon it’s safe to say by now that this particular Ultima 5 isn’t very good. It’s not offensively bad (at least with the sound off) but there is nothing much to make me want to keep playing. This Britannia is bland, basic and more than a little boring and I’m wondering why I didn’t go for Ultima 4 on the SMS instead. I’m hoping some dungeon exploration will liven things up.

Apologies again for the brevity of this post and any worse than usual grammatical errors that may have slipped through. My usual PC is currently out of action and I’m typing this up on my TV which isn’t easy to read at this distance + the small form factor keyboard is determined to make me overwrite text by placing an up button where the shift should be. What caused this is that after 10 years of faithful service the PSU in my gaming/office PC went out in a ball of smoke a few days back. I had been weighing up whether to swap it before getting a new GPU but this decision has now been made for me. Hopefully it didn’t take anything else down with it but I won’t find out until I pick a replacement up later today. There is a new GOG installer out for Ultima 7/Serpent Isle and I’ll be churning out an updated Ultima Patcher as soon as I’m up and running again.

Lastly, I’ll give a quick plug for the Crusader fan site Echo Sector which has made a welcome return after being down for about a year. It should be returning to it’s place in the links on the right hand side shortly after I post this.