This is another bugfix release to solve an issue when installing the Forgotten World patch for Ultima 9. All the previous versions would potentially set the movie file location in options.ini incorrectly and stop the movies playing. If this affects you and you don’t want to poke around in options.ini, then uninstalling and reinstalling Forgotten World (or vice versa) with this new version will fix it.
The new patcher can be downloaded from here.
Earlier this week the Ultima Codex posted about a new Ultima II inspired RPG available on iOS and Android called Lowlander. This looked like a game that could have been built with me in mind so I didn’t hesitate in putting the $2 down to pick it up.
Three days later, I’ve managed to finish it and thought I’d pop up a quick review. Since this is a brand new game, like the one on 겜블시티 라이브카지노, I’ll try to avoid too many spoilers and just concentrate on the gameplay.
The Ultima influence is immediately apparent on entering the world and anyone who has played the original trilogy should be immediately at home. The influence only goes as far as gameplay mechanics however, so no copyright infringing Ultima characters or places make an appearance although it does get close on occasion (E.g. Theeves Den). The interface has thankfully been streamlined for a modern audience with the biggest addition being an automap on the middle right of the screen.
There is the option to enlarge the map to fill the game-window section of the screen + 4 levels of zoom available to select from. The world is roughly 500×500 tiles and the automap is a godsend when finding your way around a land of this size. A lot of the fun in the game comes from exploring the unfamiliar world and I spent a lot of time on this screen looking for areas I had missed.
Unlike Ultima II, the player can only carry a finite amount of equipment. This led to me throwing away endless lockpicks or antidote potions later in the game but does add a degree of realism. Money was only an issue early in the game and eventually rolled over the 4 digits available long before I got to the end (Luckily for me the game still kept the correct amount in memory and just missed off the fifth digit). The spells on the right hand side are gradually made available as the player levels up – many of these are the usual sorts of healing/cure poison spells you might expect but there are a handful of more unusual options.
The stats are relatively simple and it’s nice and clear what they actually do. Strength is how much damage you do in combat. Agility is how often you hit. Intellect is how effective spells are and luck is how likely chests are dropped, or the player gets poisoned/frozen in combat. On levelling up the player receives 1-3 points in every stat and gets the option for a further boost in one of the four. I concentrated entirely on strength in the early game before moving over to agility later on. In hindsight a mix of the two would probably have been the way to go but the levelling system used forces a fairly balanced character ultimately.
Spells cost a given amount of mana but unlike most Ultimas this doesn’t recharge over time. Instead it can only be regained by visiting a healer or through the use of mana potions. As such, I don’t think I’d want to play a heavy magic user as I can imagine my mana running out in some of the dungeons all too rapidly. Spells always hit their target though so it might have balanced out if I’d put my money into intellect instead.
Numerous towns and castles are dotted throughout the land and just like any good Ultima, the player needs to explore all of these to get the information needed to beat the game. Most of the characters just have a single line of text but there are more verbose citizens to be found with quests and clues that will send you all over the map tracking down items. The conversations aren’t entirely serious and very much in the vein of Ultima 2. E.g. There is one town full of people telling you their favourite films/books which I assume reflect the tastes of the games author. It’s all good fun and provides variety from the combat.
The main plot involves defeating the evil Sorceress Azamon. There is a little backstory but her main crime for much of the game seems to be stealing the head of a statue in one of the towns. I won’t give any more away here but the plot isn’t really a major component. There is more going on than in Ultima 1-3 but the emphasis is very much on exploration and dungeon delving. I will say that Lowlander is a whole lot kinder than any of those games with quests and hints to prod the player in the right direction and the whole game being more structured allowing greater freedom in stages. I only once found myself stuck but it didn’t last all that long – in hindsight the clue was in the game if I’d only picked up on it.
It wouldn’t be a fantasy RPG without dungeons. Here Lowlander breaks away from Ultima and sticks with the 2D overhead view. Typically there will be a key somewhere in the dungeon that is needed to open a distant door right at the other end. These dungeons are sizable and the automap proves indispensable here – you really need to explore near enough every corridor. Thanks to that automap, this is very rarely frustrating.
There are 2 or 3 dungeons in which the players torch/light spell only illuminates a single square including one particularly nasty maze-like level full of dead ends which must have taken me about 40 minutes. There is no saving in dungeons but the difficulty isn’t pitched too high and the well prepared player should never find them too much to cope with.
I really enjoyed playing this and it took me over 9 hours of game time (not including restoring) to beat it making the asking price look extremely reasonable. The early stages are a little unforgiving and probably the only time I had to deliberately grind for experience but it’s nothing compared to the early stages of some RPG’s I could mention. Any Ultima veteran will not have any real difficulty once they learn the lay of the land. Survive for long enough and the game concludes with the player assaulting Azamon in her castle in a fitting finale.
There are a couple of minor quibbles. The sound is nothing to write home about, just a few sound effects here and there. That’s fine for a mobile game but I could have lived without the low health sound which you will hear every time your player moves if your health drops below a certain percentage. You really don’t need this if the nearest town is a long walk away.
I also got some minor slowdown playing on a Galaxy Note 2 on the world map. This tended to be well into longer gameplay sessions and I’m putting it down to the build-up of monsters the game had to keep track of. I found that Lowlander really chewed through the phone battery as a result, far more than I would expect for something this simplistic.
Other than that, I loved it. I’d say the gameplay was just about perfectly balanced throughout and really captured the spirit of what it was like playing an Ultima for the first time. There aren’t any game guides up on the web yet so I was entirely on my own figuring everything out which ultimately added to the experience. It’s all too tempting to get answers via Google these days when you get stuck and I would have succumbed if it had been an option.
Anyone who enjoyed the early Ultimas or other RPG’s of the era should try this out. I could imagine some Ultima fans being put off by it being inspired by Ultima II (it is usually most people’s least favourite in the series after all), but this is a far better game by modern standards and perhaps recaptures the spirit what it would have been like playing Ultima II back in 1982 before we all knew better. Despite using the Ultima gameplay formula, it is still far enough removed to stand on it’s own and no knowledge of the series is required.
I gather that the iOS release has been temporarily pulled while some bugs are fixed but the Android version ran fine for me and is available on the Play store for about $2.
This post will be something of a departure from the usual topics on this site but it’s an area on which there is precious little information available so I’m sharing this in case it will be useful for anyone else. To give the background first, I was contacted by Barrie Ellis from One Switch who is writing a book about the history of one switch gaming which he intends to sell in order to raise money for the charity Special Effect. One of the earliest gadgets aiding accessible gaming was the Adaptive Firmware card for the Apple II/IIGS but there is next to no information available about it these days. From somewhere or other Barrie had managed to get hold of one of these cards but the snag was he didn’t have the IIGS to try it out or any details about how it worked which is where I came in. I’m not going to go into any great depth in this post but we aren’t aware of there being any footage of one of these being used available anywhere else so I’d like to put this out there for anyone interested. If you want more details, no doubt Barrie’s book will be the place to look.
I can’t say I knew any more than your average person about one switch gaming going into this. I certainly knew about Special Effect largely through the GamerDads podcast and was keen enough to help. Besides which, it’s an excuse to play around with some old hardware which isn’t something I’d ever turn down as a rule. The principle of a disabled person being able to control a game with a single switch sounds simple enough but achieving it in real life another matter. The AFC wasn’t the absolute first device to do this but it was certainly one of the forerunners. As such it’s arguably not the most user-friendly of devices for an Apple II novice trying to figure it out without a manual.
The card goes into slot 5 on the IIGS with the adaptor box plugging into the pin connectors at one end of it. For some reason these are at the wrong end of the card to route the rather short cables out of the back of the machine. The upshot of this is that I can’t put the top on my case when using this. Not sure how this was handled back in the day but I can only imagine it would involve making some extra holes in the case.
The AFC could connect to quite some list of gadgets. For my purposes here, I’m just going to be using a single switch but it could also connect with various specialist keyboards and speech synthesis devices to make the IIGS usable for the blind/partially sighted.
The card comes with a setup disc allowing the user to program the card with control templates. This is a complex tool especially without a manual but I managed to get far enough to create some basic templates. One switch gaming with the AFC is largely based on scanning arrays whereby the user can create a menu of options which will cycle on the screen. The player can select one of these by clicking at the appropriate time and then that option will be linked to a macro, a keypress or another menu. Thankfully, there are some predefined templates on the disk to guide me through some of this so the first thing I tried was a pre-built keyboard template with Infocom classic Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.
Ideally, I’d have the button in screen at the same time but it was all I could do to record a half decent picture off my TV. The clicks are audible enough anyway and it shows how it’s possible to enter text commands with just a button. It’s clearly a whole lot slower than typing but the scanning speed can be adjusted as appropriate for the person using it and it certainly makes the game playable. An alterative to scanning is the use of morse code which I briefly show at the end. If I actually knew more than SOS in morse code, this would a whole lot quicker for this sort of game. The morse code can also be done using two switches (one each for dots/dashes) which would be faster still.
The card will also slow games down which is potentially a useful feature for all gamers. I have to include something to do with Origin in here so I tried this out on Ultima 3 where the introduction seemed to run full speed but then the title screen was clearly being reduced to a crawl. The AFC is definitely not 100% compatible with everything I tried it with, this being a case in point as the game would subsequently run at full speed after the title.
My next effort involved creating my own template from scratch to control Ms Pacman. This was a very simple menu with just the four options each mapping to a key on the keyboard. This showed up a feature of the AFC in that the whole game pauses while selecting an option from the menu making this highly playable even at full speed. It’s quite a different experience becoming more tactical but still quite good fun.
The AFC also supports mouse/joystick commands and I had serious difficulty getting these to work. I eventually figured out that sending an command from a menu would switch the device into mouse mode. From here any menu option outputting a @ character would start up an inbuilt menu with a rotating arrow + C and X buttons to move, click or close the menu. Unlike the other menus this one doesn’t pause whatever program is running and the user clicks when the appropriate arrow is on the screen and either holds down the button or clicks again to stop it moving depending on the set up. This was all well and good except it still didn’t work in many games. For instance, I thought Battle Chess would be a good candidate for this control method but it hung the moment the mouse was clicked. I did manage to run Dungeon Master above but I can’t imagine it would be all that suitable in the long run without a much more complex template.
I also tried mouse control in Arkanoid with a reduced speed, also adjusting the rotating arrows to just have two directions. This was sort of playable thanks to the slowdown but I can’t say I’m entirely convinced. The mouse pointer accelerates through 3 speed levels all of which are adjustable so it can be tailored to each game/user in this way.
That’s about as much success as I’ve managed to get out of this and the above represents a good number of hours of trial and error. I’ve skipped over no end of games which didn’t work in this post. The AFC is quite an unusual gadget effectively turning the IIGS into a multi-tasking machine with the second switch input process being able to run on the card simultaneously to the regular program on the motherboard. I can’t say I’ve found this process always to work flawlessly with numerous titles crashing or input getting stuck. I have a strong suspicion that the AFC does not particularly like working in conjunction with a CFFA3000 card and that it would have been a much smoother process at the time. I wasn’t even able to run a lot of the software that had predefined templates which more or less confirms this. Either way, it’s still quite capable and I’m surprised to see something like this was available back in the mid 80’s. The software isn’t all that easy to use but appears to be extremely flexible – I expect most games could be made playable using the AFC but it would require a deal of programming skill and knowledge for much more than the basic examples here.
I never did get joystick control working despite my best efforts, only being able to get the fire button to respond. I had a look through some of the predefined templates for some guidance but these are relatively complex to figure out from scratch with menu options having little BASIC like macros behind them as above. If anyone reading this happens to have any knowledge (or better still a manual) for one of these cards I’d very much appreciate it if you could get in touch with either myself or Barrie.
Back around 1992, PC gaming was just starting to take off here in the UK. A gaming PC was a long way from being cheap but at least the price was no longer flat out ludicrous and sound cards and VGA graphics were within reach. I’d just upgraded to a 386SX which still wasn’t entirely up to the more power hungry games like Ultima Underworld but there were plenty of games out there and precious little information about which were worth getting. I’d got by with the 2-3 pages in the gaming section of PC Plus magazine for several years before finally spotting PC Review in a magazine shop and never looking back. For a while the buyers guide at the back was something of a bible as to which games I should buy.
I was clearly late to the party as PC Review was already up to issue 7 (May 1992) at the point I discovered it. The magazine also had a predecessor in the form of PC Leisure (several issues of which are available at Thonor’s Vintage Magazine Scans) but that was only published every few months rather than monthly. Neither of these were entirely gaming based with articles on PC upgrades and the like. This minor technicality stopped them claiming the Britain’s first PC gaming magazine title that PC Zone used when it showed up some time later.
![20140814_180244[1]](https://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/20140814_1802441.jpg "20140814_180244[1]")
I never subscribed but I bought PC Review most months for many years after which all of these magazines languished for 15 years in my parent’s loft until I rediscovered them. I scanned the first five copies I have around the time before I started on the PC Zone scans already uploaded on here. I thought I might as well share so there is now a PC Review folder in the PC Zone archive on this site. The pdf’s are on the unnecessarily large side as I must have decided not to compress them too much back when I did the scanning.
As far as any Origin references in these, you don’t have to look too far. I’ve already scanned in all the reviews for this site but in a quick glance I spotted letters about setting up DOS to run Wing Commander, a mention of the Wing Commander strategy guide + a complete guide to Ultima Underworld spread over a couple of issues. There are also reviews of other personal favourites such as Indiana Jones And The Fate Of Atlantis + Another World. Enjoy anyway and if you happen to have any earlier issues you are willing to donate, sell, scan or lend I’d very much like to hear from you.
There is a new version of the Ultima Patcher incorporating Voyager Dragon’s latest Ultima 3 Upgrade. This latest release includes the option to play with tweaks to monster generation and food use in response to some common gameplay issues seen on the GOG forums. If you already have the previous patch (3.0) installed then you should be able to uninstall and reinstall from the patcher to update to 3.1.
The patch is in the downloads or available directly from here.