It’s been a while since I posted so I thought I’d share some more of the swag I bought from Rhea Shelley a couple of years back. These are a pair of proofs for full-page Ultima 8 adverts with their negatives:-

As you can see, they have suffered a bit of damage with the prints being stored face to face at some point in the last 20 years resulting in them sticking together.

This first one on the left took the brunt of the damage. It’s dated the 4th November 1993 with the other being from the 30th of the same month. Aside from swapping out some screenshots the sales pitch was reworded and reorganised in that month with the latter being a clear improvement in my opinion. I thought it was particularly odd that the earlier advert lists compatibility with EMS and XMS memory in its short list of selling points as this wouldn’t have been high on my list of reasons to buy a game. Playing with DOS config files was par for the course for PC gamers back then the way I remember it. I’m sure this has to be a nod to the difficulties people had with the Voodoo memory manager Origin had used for Ultima 7 which was especially particular and continued to make the game tricky to run for years afterward.

All being well the next post on here should be the final stages of Ultima 5 on the NES. I got a new graphics card last week which is why it has been dead around here recently with any time I’ve spent gaming being on relatively modern titles but I’ve decided that I’m not going to be beaten by Ultima 5 and will start a new playthrough as soon as I’m done with Max Payne 3. I’ll be using an emulator this time with the plan being to speed back to where I was as quickly as possible.

The first dungeon I decided to tackle was Covetous due to it supposedly having the Avatar’s Arms at the bottom of it which sounded like they would be just the ticket for exploring the depths. The dungeons turned out to be quite large despite the move to 2D and I didn’t get the impression I was being short changed by the dropping of 1st person perspective and missing floors. They aren’t especially visually interesting of course but the maps sped me through them and I didn’t spend a lot of time exploring. The maps don’t show the exit to the underworld on the bottom floor so I had to stumble into that myself but it was reasonably easy to guess.

The underworld is lush,green and not all that dangerous making it quite the different experience to what I remember. From the few sections I’ve been to so far, each dungeon has is own little independent underworld with no blinking required (or even possible) to get around the map. Each dungeons underworld section just had one area of interest which I’d stumble across after a bit of aimless wandering. The picture above shows the Avatar’s Arms which were full sets of magic shields + armour for the party with a magic bow, axe and sword thrown in. These made my party more or less invulnerable and my Avatar could take down near enough anything in a single hit with a magic sword. I should definitely have come down here much, much sooner.

I thought I’d sell off some spares and ran into another strange quirk with this game in that merchants will only buy very specific items of armour or weapons so none of them were interested in any of the better items I’d found. Gold is strangely difficult to come across as monsters don’t drop any either meaning that the only source is the stock piles in dungeons as far as I can see. It would probably be quite easy to get into a position where you had spent all the gold in the world with this system.

A side effect of the above problem is the lack of inventory space which is a fair enough constraint except it’s only possible to discard and not drop items in a cache somewhere. I didn’t try it but I presume it would be all too easy to make the game unwinnable in this way.

Now I was well armed, I headed for another dungeon to start collecting shards. The first of these went without a hitch and I killed off the appropriate Shadowlord at Empath Abbey.This scene was more than a little anticlimactic on the NES but headed for Deceit to fetch shard #2.

This is where it all went strangely wrong. I followed my map taking a route which went down to floor 2 then back up to floor 1 in a separate area and then followed this to where there should be a ladder back down (the rightmost brown square on the screenshot above) and there was no ladder! I searched the whole level looking for an alternative unsuccessfully. I then watched the appropriate bit of the playthrough on Youtube to see what they had done and the ladder was there exactly where I’d been looking.

I’m entirely out of ideas at this point – no ladder means the game is uncompletable so this attempt to play the game has come to a grinding halt without any other suggestions. If anyone has run into this before and/or knows what I can do to fix it please let me know. I’m suspecting there must have been a bug in some versions of the cartridge at this point but maybe a certain conversation will make it appear?

It would have been nice to finish having got so far but I’m not going to miss playing the rest of the game too much in all honesty. I dare say I could speed through it considerably quicker if I were to ever try again on emulation now that I know the ropes. but I’m not too anxious to do that either right now. I don’t think this port is as awful as I’d heard but it doesn’t have much to recommend it. Every criticism I’ve got seems to be down to a lack of space and power on the NES. If this porting to U6 had been done on the SNES it could easily have ended up being the definitive version of the game so it’s a real missed opportunity in my eyes. We do have Lazarus however which I still have to play for myself and will surely get around to one of these days.

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.

I’ll start this post by talking a little about the interface in Ultima 5 which so far hasn’t received much of a mention. Each character has 3 inventory slots – one for armour and another for each hand. Other than equipping them, I’ve no control at all over the other party characters who follow along behind me (most of time) and fight automatically. In the case of the avatar I can use whatever items I have in either hand at any time with the A button whether it’s a sword for combat, a tent, a spellbook, etc – every action works this way.

The start button brings up the inventory shown above which allows me to select which items I’m carrying. It would be a whole lot easier if I could use items directly from here rather than having to equip them every time. E.g. Every time I want to use the tent to recover/save the game I have to first equip it and then swap back to my shield again after. This is relatively quick at least and I can live with it. It’s obviously a huge simplification from the way the real Ultima 6 engine worked and the inventory shown is a shared one so I can’t use my party as pack mules.

The B button is kind of an ‘interact with world’ button to talk to anyone or pick items up. Finally the select button allows me to see individual stats. I notice in here that my party members don’t level up and will be as they are for the whole game it appears.

In general, the control scheme works OK. The difficulty lies with the unresponsive nature of the game which can take a while to pick up that a button has been pressed at all. I’ve found happens less on real hardware than on emulation but it’s far from speedy. There are strange quirks also like characters blinking in and out of existence when I have a cursor up sometimes, presumably breaching a sprite/memory limit.

A big plus for me is the Ultima 6 type combat where I only have to worry about the Avatar and the rest of the party look after themselves. It means I can spend a lot less time fighting monsters and more time exploring. As far as I can tell, the monsters on the map are all preplaced and will respawn the moment the moment the appropriate tile is on the screen which can be a pain if you walk back to an area you cleared 5 seconds ago. There doesn’t appear to be any penalty for sleeping in the tent after every battle so I’ve not struggled too much on this front yet.

To get back to the playthrough, my main aim was to find a boat and start completing shrine quests. I headed South from Britain via Paws, Trinsic and eventually Serpent’s Hold which is connected by bridges to the main land mass in this version. The towns were more populated than Britain had been with maybe 5 or 6 people in each – not exactly a bustling metropolis but the core of the conversation gameplay mechanic is still there. It’s massively oversimplified on the NES with everyone throwing clues at you and little else and subsequently massively easier than it was on PC. I’m not sure how much sense I’d make of all this if I didn’t already know the plot either.

I buy a skiff for the bargain price of 100 gp in Serpent’s Hold and set sail. The skiff can go anywhere in this version with the limitation that the world here has edges removing some of the shortcuts. This is a pity as those shortcuts would be useful with a game that runs at this speed. The skiff does have the advantage of being carryable through moongates which may offer a shortcut for all these shrine quests.

When I get to the Isle Of The Avatar, I originally thought I must be in the wrong place as I was face with a building and a locked door. I had to pick the lock to get in, then use a skull key (bought in Serpent’s Hold) to get through another and then found the codex in the next room. It’s about this time that I realise that none of these items I’ve just used wear out so when I bought a pile of lockpicks expecting to need them all and more later in the game, I may as well have bought the one. Similarly I bought a load of food at one point but it doesn’t seem to serve any purpose – I might gain some health for eating it but I can use my tent at any time for that anyway. Aspects of the game like this do make if appear to be somewhat incomplete. On those lines, there are poison fields everywhere except they look practically the same as the normal ground making it all too easy to get poisoned by mistake. There is no animation for arrows either so we get a sort of travelling sparkle effect in combat all the time which looks quite strange.

After completing my first shrine quest I head for Yew. This seemed like my best bet as I’m trying to join the resistance and was told in Britain to ask at the Arms Of Justice. I learn the password here as well as the mantra of Justice and am planning on tackling that shrine quest next.

I’ve had a good bit of time with this game now. It certainly improved with the sound off and is considerably better than I was expecting. The Ultima 6 engine produced my favourite games in the series and the idea of Ultima 5 being ported to it holds a lot of appeal. I wish it had been done on a more powerful system as the NES clearly wasn’t up to the job but it’s not so far off that there isn’t still some fun to be had exploring the world and towns. I expect my patience is going to be tested severely going back and forth on all these shrine quests next – I’ll be lining up a stack of podcasts to get me through it.