Category Archives: Books

Ultima Saga – Temper Of Wisdom

Posted on by
Reply


I’ve been away for the last week, but I took Temper Of Wisdom with me and finished it off last night. This was published by 1992 by Time Warner, written by Lynn Abbey and is the sequel to Forge Of Virtue. I bought a cheap sacrificial copy to scan in and the pdf is now in the downloads in reasonable quality. If you would rather own the real thing for not much more than the price of postage, I now have one spare and slightly squashed copy.

Temper Of Wisdom picks up at the end of the last story with the band of adventurers returning to Hawksnest. I’ll keep the major spoilers to this paragraph and quickly summarise the plot. The early stages involve Jordan struggling to regain his sight which he lost at the end of the previous book. The main part of the book deals with events at Hawksnest where an Inquisitor has moved in, turned the place against Balthan and is more or less running the place. He wants Althea for his wife and enthrals her with a form of black magic and turns Lord Hawksnest against his two sons in the process. They escape from Hawksnest only to return to free Althea. Whilst rescuing Althea, they learn that the Inquisitor is in league with the wraith Nosfentor and that he has been given a task to find a Sandalwood box containing notes about the disappearance of Lord British. They then set off after the box, killing the Inquisitor in the process. At the end of the book Jordan and Darrell return to Hawksnest where their father is ready to accept them back, but they are not willing to rest yet and want to help to return Lord British to his throne.

The early story was quite slow moving and the main characters not especially likeable. In these stages the party are a dreary and depressing bunch and about as cheerful as they look on the fairly awful cover of the book. The protagonists did evolve and grow on me during the course of Temper Of Wisdom though and I got far more into events after the first 100 pages or so.

The novel was less Ultima-esque than Forge Of Virtue, with fewer mentions of names and places familiar from the games and little travelling around. The story was better structured and more believable as a result of trying to fit less of these references in and it improved on FOV. I’ve certainly read better fantasy books but I wouldn’t have been sorry to see the series continue from here. It just about got the characters to a stage where I wanted to follow them through some more tales. This was a far better place to leave the series than the end of the first novel at least and I can live with it ending here.

You would have to be a real Ultima fan to want to read the Ultima Saga books in all honesty. Fantasy isn’t exactly my usual area of reading but I can think of plenty of books that are far better in their own right than either of these two. As an Ultima fan, neither of them are as much fun as the Avatar Adventures books, but they aren’t anywhere near as bad as some people had led me to believe either.

According to the author, a new editor was assigned to the project after the initial two book deal. This editor didn’t think that they should be stooping to publishing gaming tie-ins and Temper Of Wisdom was badly distributed meaning that no one bought it and it killed the series. It’s a shame as there are definite signs that the Ultima Saga was headed in the right direction.

Ultima Online The Second Age – Official Guide

Posted on by
Reply

This was published by Prima in 1998. It’s more or a less a rehashing of the first Ultima Online guide and large chunks of it are taken straight from the first book. Since so much is repeated I’ll just mention a few of the new sections.

Ultima Online had clearly evolved in the year since the first guide and there is plenty of new advice in here. A lot of it is to do with player vs. player combat which I gather was a big issue for Ultima Online at the time. It looks like changes were made to the game to make life harder for evil characters and combat this.

There is a large guide on how to create and run a shop in the game, which sounds a little mundane to me but the person writing it clearly enjoyed this aspect of the game. The guide also mentions that most shards now had player created towns and there was also a trend for people to play other races even through the game didn’t support this. This resulted in some shards having towns full of people pretending to be orcs.

There is a story so far section with news of events that have happened on all the shards, such as twin liches attacking shrines.

The second age added a new lost lands area and this guide describes the methods of getting to these lands. There are some new creatures in the bestiary but there is surprisingly little mention of the new areas in the book though and the only map is found on the pullout. All the town maps are gone completely, presumably as they would have evolved to be different on every shard. There are still maps of the dungeons however (including the new ones) at the end of the book.

This book had more to fit into the same number of pages resulting in a few cuts from the first guide. The original was arguably the better of the two because of this but they are extremely similar. It’s definitely aimed at new players and you wouldn’t want to have paid full price for this if you were a UO veteran wanting to learn more about the lost lands as there are a few pages that would be relevant.

Official Guide To Ultima Online

Posted on by
1


When I was looking through the list of books I still have to do after the last post, I realised that half of the ones left are on Ultima Online. I figured I’d better get started on them so I don’t end up overdosing on UO at the end. I should start out by saying that I’ve never actually played UO beyond starting it up and running around a bit to have a look around. MMORPG’s don’t hold a lot of appeal for me and everything I hear about them always puts me off more. When I run out of other things to write about on here I might give it a go, but while I’ve got other options I’ll take them.

That doesn’t make me the ideal person to read through this, although it’s a significant game and an Ultima so I’m still interested to learn more about it even if I don’t want to actually play it. This guide was published in 1997 by Prima. I’ve scanned it in but not done the pullout as it would mean ripping it out of the book.

With this being a guide to an online game, it has to take a different format to all the others I’ve been working my way through. Usually half of each book would be taken up with a walkthrough section, which is entirely missing here but we still get the usual 300+ pages.

Despite this, there is hardly any filler in this guide and I had a good time reading through it. There is masses of storyline to the book, done with snippets of information from various sources. This starts with a mock newspaper dealing with events in Britannia such as a mage called Relvenian who has the idea of enslaving demons as house maids. Through further editions scattered through the book I learn this goes horribly wrong during a demonstration to Lord British resulting in angry demons slaughtering their way through his castle. The mage ends up hiding in the middle of a maze that springs up out of nowhere. I presume these events were linked in with the actual game and this maze appeared at some point.

The early sections of the guide deal with general advice on what sort of character you might want to play and how to go about it. For each of the suggested character types, there is an entertaining interview with an established member of the profession. I’m assuming these are fake characters rather than actual players since they all speak in the same manner. There are more quotes from these characters when the various skills are described later in the book.

There are a few pages on roleplaying which caught my attention as it basically stated that you wouldn’t enjoy the game unless you assumed a personality within the game. This sounds like another reason not to play it as far as I’m concerned but is probably sound advice if you actually enjoy that sort of thing.

Another section I liked was The Pentameron. This is a collection of five stories performed for Lord British’s 36th birthday and are parables along the lines of the virtue stories for Ultima 9 although focussing more on general lessons than virtues in this case.

Aside from all these, there are maps of the towns and dungeons, a bestiary, item lists, combat tips, magic reagent / spell descriptions, and a general view of the economics of the game. The economics are quite complex in the way that the game would automatically adjust prices to compensate for a glut or shortage in supply, and add resources to an area as new players arrived. I was also intrigued by the pack behaviour of animals whereby they would try to form groups but if resources were low, the group would split and seek out a new area. The amount of detail in UO was really impressive for 1997.

This is one of the best Prima guides I’ve looked at. All the little interviews and stories throughout the book made it a good read compared to something like the Privateer 2 guide which had far too many tables of information. My lack of knowledge may have helped since near enough everything in here was new to me. UO still isn’t a game I especially want to play as it just sounds a little too realistic for my liking. It all sounds a little too much like real work and if I’m going to do that I’d rather earn real money. I also know too many people who started on World Of Warcraft only to vanish for months and I’d rather not become one of them. If you have an interest in Ultima this guide is definitely worth a read anyway, even if you share my opinion on MMO’s.

Crusader : No Regret – Official Guide

Posted on by
1


This was published by Prima in 1996 and is now on the downloads page here as a pdf. This book follows an almost identical format to the Crusader No Remorse guide so I won’t go into any detail. The early sections especially are an updated version of the first book with descriptions of all the weapons, items and enemies in the game.

The missions section also follows the same structure being split into map and walkthrough parts. The walkthrough has an introduction giving the plot of the mission and the designers aims with it, before guiding you through the best route at some length.

At the end of the book, there are no interviews this time but there is some concept art for Crusader 2, a game which unfortunately never saw the light of day. It’s amazing just how many projects got cancelled in Origin’s later years and I’d certainly have liked to see another Crusader game myself.

I enjoyed all the background on all the items and enemies at the start of the book but there isn’t too much in the way of extras that wasn’t already in the Crusader No Remorse guide. In general the more modern guides are proving to be less fun than some of the older ones.

I thought I’d have a quick count of what I’ve got left to do, and I make it that I still have 14 books on the list. I’ve already scanned in 9 of these but I won’t upload anything until I’ve had a look through it myself.

While I’m posting, I’ll give a quick mention to the latest version of MUNT which is an MT-32 emulator. This has been in progress for years, but since the start of May it’s reached a stage where the sound produced is almost indistinguishable from the real thing. Origin didn’t often make the best use of it but MT-32 sound is still the only option as far as I’m concerned for many of their games. It’s been built into his latest build of Dosbox by ykhwong which is probably the best way to try this out, or is available as Windows drivers elsewhere.

Thief – Official Strategy Guide

Posted on by
2


I had been planning on just sticking to Origin’s guides but I got the chance to buy this for 60p from Oxfam and wasn’t going to pass it up at that price and I’ve scanned it in as usual.

It was published in 1998 by Prima. The format is fairly standard with the early stages having a little scene setting with some character descriptions, before ploughing into some general tips on the game with weapons, items, etc and then the level guides.

Something that struck me right from the start with this was the size of the text. Combined with the screenshots, there isn’t a whole lot on each page and not much content for the number of pages. Most of the information before the level walkthroughs is the sort of thing you would expect in the game manual in all honesty but it does prep you for the game with no major spoilers.

The level guides are where this book really falls down. To start, there are no detailed maps of the levels beyond those you see in the game with a few annotations. The walkthrough consists solely of text telling you verbally a route through a level. I sure this could help if you are stuck but it doesn’t strike me as the best format. The guide was done before Thief Gold so the extra levels are not included also.

When I was playing Thief, my biggest problem was finding the treasure I was missing at the end of a level. The main thing I would expect from a guide would be lists of where all the treasure in each level is, what it is, how much it was worth etc. The only information is in the text walkthrough with no specifics. I would be reduced to tracing the route through the book, reading every paragraph and hoping that anything I’ve missed gets a mention along the way and that I can find it. I would probably be better off just exploring the level for myself. To add insult to this, the book states on the back and in large letters on the spine that it has the location of all the loot.

Aside from the poor walkthrough, there is no added backstory or expansion on what is in the game. There are no interviews with any of the developers. In brief, there is little to add value to the game and the walkthrough is worse than most faqs you could find on the web. All in all, 60p was about the right price. If you are stuck, this will probably have just about enough information to help you out but I expected something a lot better.