Part 3 of my countdown of Origin games brings us to the middle of the pack.

30.2400AD

Starting us off is the last of Chuckles’ Origin games. 2400AD is a sci-fi RPG with an engine bearing striking similarities to Ultima 4/5 although I gather that it didn’t use either. It’s a simpler and smaller game than the Ultimas in which the player has to help the underground resistance of Metropolis fight back against the invading Tzorgs. 2400AD really didn’t sell especially well at the time but was something of a hidden gem in the Origin catalog as far as I’m concerned. Origin’s early output was extremely heavy on the fantasy RPG’s so a futuristic setting was a pleasant change of scenery if not genre.  A sequel called 2500AD was planned at the time but was canned after the poor sales as were most of the home computer ports.

29.Super Wing Commander

Super Wing Commander almost didn’t make the list but since it’s got a different name to the game it was based on it gets a spot of its own. In some ways Super Wing Commander is everything that was wrong with the early era of CD gaming. I.e. pointless lengthy cutscenes and truly horrible acting. I can’t say I was exactly a fan of the new artwork – it takes a bit of getting used to after years of playing the regular Wing Commander series. It’s still Wing Commander underneath though so how bad can it be and the flying sections when you get to them did look a good deal shinier than the already aging original. My main complaint is the lack of proper analogue controls with the 3DO joystick support or this would have been considerably higher up.

28.Abuse

This has to be the only game I’ve ever played that was programmed in LISP. It was developed and sold by crack dot com before being published by Origin around the mid 90’s. I seem to recall it being described as a 2D platforming version of Doom but I reckon it would be closer to say it’s Robotron from the side instead of overhead. It uses mouse/keyboard rather than twin stick (since none of us had twin stick at the time) but the same principle is there. The gameplay is polished but there is little variety and no plot to the game so it doesn’t build toward any sort of climax as such.  If Abuse had incorporated some of the Origin flair for presentation it could have been a bit of a classic.

I gather this is quite a rare and expensive title these days having seen it on a list of the 10 most overpriced retro games recently. All I say is this definitely wasn’t the case when I picked up my copy as I don’t think they could give them away.

27.Wing Commander Armada

Armada was an attempt to turn Wing Commander into a multiplayer game. This was long before the internet was in common usage and I remember playing this one over a null modem cable back in my student days. It was the first Wing Commander to be in full 3D coming out shortly before Wing Commander 3 and I have to say that the graphics in Armada really looked glorious in their day. They were far more colourful than Wing Commander 3 in fact although only in VGA rather than SVGA.

A basic strategy element was added to the game involving resource mining and ship building to break up the combat. Prowess in the cockpit would always win out in the long run but I had some fun with this at the time. Maybe it was just the way we played it but combat was in essence a series of head on chicken runs and did show the limitations of Wing Commander physics in a multiplayer environment. It still bridged the gap to WC3 far better than Academy managed.

26.Shadow Caster

Shadow Caster was a strange game developed by Raven that could perhaps be described as a first person slasher as much as an RPG. It was based on the Wolfenstein engine but you would be hard pushed to tell as it was quite the looker back in 93. The unique selling point was the ability to morph between different creatures which was required to get through the varied worlds in the game as each creature would have different strengths and weaknesses. I can’t say the gameplay was ever truly successful with too much melee combat but it got away with it largely thanks to the presentation and I did play this quite a bit at the time. It’s probably doesn’t hold up especially well today though.

25.Savage Empire

I always liked the Ultima 6 engine which for me marked something of a sweet spot between the pure RPG’s of Ultima 3-5 and the more adventuring/exploring nature of Ultima 7-9. As such I was always bound to like the two spin off games using it which proved to be the case. Savage Empire was designed from the outset to be Ultima-lite though and the setting never quite gelled with me. The plot is fairly lightweight with a lot of individual quests but not that much of an overarching plot. There is still a decent RPG here and as an introduction to Ultima it did everything it needed to. Ultima 6 and Martian Dreams had more meat on their bones and are much higher up the list.

24.Wings Of Glory

Wings Of Glory was the last in the “Strike” series moving further back in history once again to WW1. The simplistic nature of the planes actually made the game more approachable and showed off the 3D engine far better than Strike Commander in the process. The tacked on plot was hokey and clichéd but the gameplay lifts it above its two predecessors as far as I’m concerned. Wings Of Glory had one ace up its sleeve with head-tracking support on the VFX-1. This sort of game is a perfect match for VR since the in-game player never gets out of their seat. I’m hoping some of these old VFX-1 games can get modern VR support one day.

23.Ultima 5

Ultima 5 was the last in the series to be what I would consider a traditional RPG, i.e. heavily based on character stats and combat. It continued to iterate the previous formula with larger conversations, a bigger game world and introduced the famous day/night cycle for all the residents of Britannia. The plot was much better developed than Ultima 4 with more subtlety and this is undoubtedly a great entry in the series. It no doubt deserves a higher place on the list but doesn’t get one for the sole reason of the pace of combat which just dragged the whole game down for me. Every other aspect of Ultima 5 shines through and for anyone who can enjoy that combat, this could easily be the best of the series.

22.Space Rogue

It may be almost entirely forgotten now but Origin’s first attempt at a space sim wasn’t Wing Commander but was in fact Space Rogue coming out a year earlier. Paul Neurath’s Space Rogue is something of a cross between Elite and Ultima 5 consisting of 3D space flight/combat sections and tile based RPG sections when you land on planets and stations. The difference between the two components is jarring but I still love the whole idea of combining these gameplay styles and Space Rogue succeeds in creating something not quite like any other game I’ve ever played. It’s something of a prototype Privateer with added RPG.

21.Cybermage

Cybermage was an FPS designed by DW Bradley (of Wizardry fame) around the time of all the Doom clones hitting the market in the mid-90’s. It distinguishes itself from the pack by being in SVGA, having a plot told throughout the game and including vehicles that you can drive/fly around the map which was a real novelty at the time. The comic book plot is fairly nuts and largely delivered in one go by a bipedal talking tiger but I still reckon this game was way more fun than nearly all of its contemporaries. I’ve always had the feeling I’m about the only person who likes it so you may not want to trust that opinion.

Just 20 games to go now and part 4 will get truly into the big hitters in the Origin back catalogue.

Without further introduction, here is part two of my countdown of Origin games in order of how much I personally enjoyed playing them:-

40.Ring Quest

This was a Dallas Snell adventure game originally published by Penguinsoft before he brought it with him to Origin and they republished it in a new box. Adventure games are my favourite genre which was always going to make me like the game to some extent. The big innovation with Ring Quest was the huge amount of graphics packed in for each location of the game. Looking at it with a modern sensibility, this is more of a hindrance when comparing it to the Infocom games of the same era which eschewed the graphics for a more sophisticated parser. It’s above average for the time but there have been countless better adventure games since.

39.Times Of Lore

The game that brought Chris Roberts to Origin, Times Of Lore was an action RPG with far more action than RPG. Unlike any other game at Origin, it was coded to be playable from cassette on a C64 since disk drives were way out the reach of all us Europeans back in the mid 80’s. As such its quite an impressive game for the platform and I do love Martin Galway’s intro music (sadly lacking during the game itself). There isn’t enough variety to make it close to being any sort of classic but it’s a decent game within it’s limits.

38.Ultima 1

Since this is a list of Origin games, I’m going for the remake here rather than the original Apple II/Atari 8 bit version of Ultima 1. Ultima 1 as a game hangs together a little better than Ultima 2, presumably as Garriott knew what he was doing with BASIC and could concentrate on the design. The fantasy element is still mixed together with space travel but it’s more of a modern RPG in some ways since it’s basically about completing a series of quests. The space section is more fun than Ultima 2 also. I find this game strangely playable for such an ancient relic and must have finished nearly every version of it at this point.

37.Knights Of Legend

Anyone who read my blog at the time would probably expect me to have put this way further down the list. Knights of Legend was yet another RPG from Origin but with a heavy emphasis on strategic combat. It’s a game that could have been designed to put a roadblock in the way of someone trying to blog their way through every Origin game by taking many months on its own to complete. The combat system was extremely slow and complex and the distance between save points enormous. I basically gave in on the game after losing 2-3 hours of gameplay several times in a row. This is not a game to play if you don’t have a lot of time on your hands.

If you do have the time to spend with it, there is a lot of depth and many things to like. This sort of game really is a relic of another era in the dedication it requires but I would imagine highly rewarding if you put that effort in. As such I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt. This would be one of my desert island games, purely on the basis that would be the only way I’d ever have the time to play it properly.

36.Caverns Of Callisto

This game was my holy grail of collecting for more years than I care to recall. Once I finally got a copy, I then got the opportunity to buy 3 more within the next 6 months including a sealed copy and none of them were that expensive. This sort of experience is fairly typical as a collector, the moral being not to pay crazy money on the first copy you see.

Caverns of Callisto is an enjoyable arcade shooter and a whole lot more playable than plenty of other similarly rare games I could mention. The full version included a map of the caverns and so the gameplay becomes as much about mapping out the location of all the items and then figuring out the best route through the game. It’s eminently beatable with some practice and actually worth the effort.

35.Strike Commander

Strike Commander’s visuals and presentation were like nothing before it. The game was so large it wouldn’t fit on most people’s hard drives at the time over here. Outside of those visuals, it was never entirely my cup of tea with dogfights involving far too much endless weaving around and bombing runs being something of a hit and mass affair. I tend to agree with Warren Spector’s comments that it’s something of a waste having such a great engine when you never get near enough to see the enemy planes. I’d have preferred another Wing Commander at the time this came out but for those more inclined to real world flight sims there is plenty to enjoy.

34. Runes Of Virtue

It’s hard to regard the Runes Of Virtue games as having anything much to do with the rest of the Ultima series given their whimsical nature but as simple puzzle/arcade games they are always entertaining and were very well suited to the Gameboy. Outside of the puzzles, there isn’t a whole lot of meat on this gaming bone but they were ideal for a quick game on the move.

33. Runes Of Virtue 2

There isn’t much to pick between Runes Of Virtue 1 & 2 so I’ll put the second directly ahead of it for the increased plot + the fact that it got a SNES port. Gameplay was largely identical to the first game.

32. Ultima 3

This was Origin’s first release and it’s the game where the Ultima series really got going. It still wasn’t Britannia but Ultima 3 introduced the Underworld for the first time and was just a far better crafted game than it’s older brothers. The world is much more coherent with the space sections dropped completely along with all the futuristic technology like phasers and air cars. I do particularly like the manuals for Ultima 3 also, especially the individual cleric and wizard spellbooks. Ultima 3 is this far down the list because later Ultima games would improve so much on the formula established here. The main element missing as far as I’m concerned is the conversation system introduced in Ultima 4 that would add real character to the population of Britannia.

31.Tangled Tales

Tangled Tales was a quirky RPG-lite released at the end of the 80’s. It had some adventure game like elements with first person views of certain locations and items to collect. It was quite an odd game really with a strange interface and didn’t take itself too seriously. It certainly doesn’t have the depth of an Ultima but I took to it at the time and it’s just something a little different in a world of similar fantasy RPG’s.

It either says something for the quality of Origin’s output or my own levels of fanboy-ism just how much I liked the games I’m already up to on this list. Something I have noticed compiling this is that I do have a tendency to like the more unusual games. When I was effectively forcing myself to play through all these titles, something a little different was often welcome. As such, you can definitely expect to see some of Origin’s more outlandish titles as I work down to #21 next time.

It’s time to bring this site back to life again. The original plan was that entire month was going to be Ori-January (yes Ori-June would have worked better but I didn’t want to wait). There was going be a post of some description every day for the entire month and prior to Christmas I’d already got the first few posts drafted and plans to get a dozen or so more lined up for the new year.

Of course life doesn’t always work like that and after having had a river flowing through my house over Christmas (like thousands of others in the North of England), I’ve had far too much cleaning up and sorting out to think about anything else. It’s going to be some months before everything gets back to normal but let’s see if I can’t manage a post or two a week at any rate.

The new year seems like an appropriate time for drawing up lists so inspired by the Ultima Codex’s recent podcast ranking all the Ultima games, I thought I’d go one further and rank all of Origin’s games in order of preference. This list will of course be entirely from my perspective and I expect other people’s opinions to vary wildly from my own. Feel free to tell me why I’m wrong. It doesn’t help that I only played some of these games for an hour or two, 7 or more years back so my memory of them is getting hazy. I’ll be including the pre-Origin Ultima games in the list but not including the UO games since I never played them and I’m also not including expansion packs.

That still leaves 55 games to get through so I’m going to split this over 5 posts. First off the bottom of the heap, games 55 through to 40.

55.Metal Morph

The bottom game on this list was an extremely easy choice. Metal Morph is a justly forgotten SNES game that was half mode 7 shooter and half generic platformer. To be fair it wasn’t truly awful, just bland, poorly implemented and supremely forgettable. It plays like a cheaper version of dozens of other SNES games of the era and has nothing to recommend it.
54.Escape From Mount Drash

Not strictly an Origin game but I thought I should include it in the list. Given the rarity of an original copy, this is possibly the least game for your money in the world of retro gaming. To be fair, I can kind of enjoy playing the original VIC-20 version for what it is but the ASCII combat is just unforgivable. The hardware was limited but games like Jeff Minter’s Gridrunner show what you can do on a VIC-20.

53. Akalabeth

Playing the precursor to the Ultima games on an Apple II is a painful experience these days thanks to the speed of the game. Increasing the speed in an emulator, does make it playable to an extent but there still isn’t much game here in all honesty. It was significant in its day but it’s too primitive to be playable these days for anything other than historical interest.

52.Windwalker

This was the sequel to Greg Malone’s Moebius, both of which were RPG’s featuring real-time martial arts combat. The years since I played this have mostly wiped it from my memory but I don’t recall it improving on Moebius original formula. That formula had already gotten stale by the time I’d finished the first game and we really didn’t need this sequel.

51.Wing Commander Academy

Wing Commander Academy was brought out to satisfy fan demand for a Wing Commander mission editor sometime between Wing Commander 2 and 3. It had unique features with a couple of ships new to this game and being able to fly the Kilrathi ships but without the storyline to link the missions together I found it a hollow experience.

50-48.F-15, Longbow, Longbow 2

I’m clumping the 3 serious flight sims together as I find it hard to pick between them. Had I any interest in serious flight sims, these games would be much higher up the list as they are all well regarded in their own right. All are very good games but not for me.

47.Ogre

Ogre was an adaptation of a board game made during Origin’s brief collaboration with Steve Jackson. Their other effort would turn out far better but Ogre is much nearer to the source material. It’s main claim to fame is being one of the earlier games to support a mouse outside of the Apple Mac. It’s a faithful enough adaptation of the board game but has nothing much else to offer.
46.Moebius

Moebius was one of Origin’s first handful of released games and was more advanced than Ultima in some respects, not least of which graphically. The disembodied heads wandering around the worlds of the game did look a little strange but it certainly had a lot of character and depth. Unfortunately it ran quite slowly and was ultimately repetitive and frustrating. This is probably a game I’d remember more fondly if I’d played it at the time.

45.Ultima 8

Without a doubt my least favourite Ultima, Ultima 8 was a game stifled by its technology. The world was vastly reduced in scope with a monotonous colour palette and a much too narrow view of the world around the avatar. The horrors of jumping in the original version are remembered by anyone who experienced them but even when fixed the underlying game was a chore to grind through. It’s the only game in the series that I wouldn’t want to return to.

44.Omega

Omega is a curious title which involved programming the AI for tanks so that they could fight other AI tanks to see which came out victorious. Omega used it’s own simple programming language and came with a monstrously sized manual because of it. You could save your tanks to disks and battle your friends with them and Origin even held competitions to find the best tanks. It’s quite a neat concept actually and Omega marks the point in the list where I start to actually like the games. It’s a bit too close to my day job to be my idea of fun though and beating the single player campaign was far too easy.

43.Ultima 2

Ultima 2 was Richard Garriott’s first attempt at assembly programming and as such was much more playable than it’s predecessor. It gets a bit of unfair treatment really as it tends to get compared to the Ultima 1 remake which came out 4-5 years later. I love the game for the box and cloth map if nothing else but in terms of gameplay it was something of a sprawling mess. There were loads of elements thrown in but they didn’t connect together and large chunks of the game (dungeons, towers and most of the planets) could be ignored. With a little imagination, the game does have something of an epic feel (for 1982).

42.Bad Blood

This was the last game Chris Roberts would ever work on that wasn’t a flight sim of some description (so far at least). In essence this is Times Of Lore in a post nuclear setting. The graphics were updated but it didn’t have a whole lot more to offer as I recall despite targeting much superior hardware. Fun to play for a bit but nothing special.

41.Pacific Strike

The middle of the Strike series took the arcade flight sim back in time to WW2. This was far enough away from being a real sim to still have some appeal to me and the way the real events of WW2 could be changed depending on your performance was a nice touch. I also seem to recall some 3D terrain being used for the islands of the Pacific as opposed to the flat horizons of Strike Commander. The presentation of the story was a little sub-par making it a less enjoyable experience overall than Strike Commander even if the actual game was arguably improved. It was very much following the Wing Commander formula rather than trying too much new also.

That brings part 1 to a close and I’m already into the games I quite enjoyed. It will be just 10 games per post from here on out as I count to #31 next post.