Category Archives: Books

Ultima Collection – Prima's Official Guide

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This was published in 1998 and is available as a pdf on the downloads page. It’s a guide to every single game in the Ultima Collection which is a lot of ground to cover. This means that it has the only printed solution to Akalabeth that I’ve ever seen, although it doesn’t cover many pages for such a simple game. There are also guides to Ultima 1 and 2 which never got their own at the time + the walkthroughs that came with Forge Of Virtue and The Silver Seed.

For the rest of the games, most of the content is straight out of the original cluebooks. There are a few differences in how they have been arranged, and I notice that the ASCII maps from Ultima 3 have now been replaced with symbols instead which makes them easier to understand. There are also extra sections with gameplay tips and full walkthroughs which were conspicuously absent for the older games original cluebooks. These are brief no-nonsense affairs to get you through the game as quickly as possible.

The book came with a tear out colour map in the middle pages, which I’ve put at the end of the pdf. It’s far too large for my scanner so I’ve badly (and I do mean badly) joined a few scans together. This has recreations of the maps that came with the game, with added notes to tell you where everything is.

What isn’t in this book is any interviews or history which is a pity but understandable given just how much had to be crammed in when covering this many games.

Official Guide To Crusader No Remorse

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This was published by Origin in 1995. This is the second to last of the guide books that is already scanned in. I don’t actually know who did the scans but the pdf found it’s way to me via Mirir.

Crusader has to be one my favourite Origin franchises, even if it did only span the two games so I was always going to be interested in reading this. It starts off with an irreverent guide to all aspects of the games with general tactics, difficulty levels and item prices to get you up to speed with the basics. It then goes into enemy and weapon guides. There tends to be a page per item/enemy with a picture and a whole backstory for each. You really don’t need to know most of this stuff but I always enjoy any extra scene setting I can get on a game I like as much as Crusader.

There are not one but two map sections after this, both of which have images of the maps directly from the game. The first (with larger map images) is a full map of every level complete with points of interest. The second is something of a walkthrough, showing the quickest/easiest route with notes at some locations. Crusader is the sort of game where it is quite easy to end up walking around looking for the next thing to do. Between them, these 2 sections should get you through any area you are struggling with although I’ve little doubt it would still be possible to get stuck.

The map sections take up most of the book but there is still room for about another 35 pages of extras. These start with a little artwork section, which is a nice idea but would have been much better in colour. Next is a complete history of the World Economic Consortium and the resistance. The game itself came across as fairly camp with the over-the-top acting and ridiculous costumes but the backstory is a lot more dark and actually quite plausible.

After this there is the team notes section which consists of two short interviews, one with Tony Zurovec – Project Lead, and the other with Beverley Garland – Art Director. These give some insight into the game’s development and are well worth reading. Crusader turns out to be yet another game that was inspired by Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple. It’s a game I’ve never played and I’m beginning to think I should. As far as the storyline goes, Zurovec apparently had a fairly bleak view about the state of the government at the time and a future where the world was enslaved by a corporation reflected his outlook of the way things could be headed.

He also mentions plans for the sequel, including enhanced branching FMV’s and a multi-player mode where you could possibly have bought a robot and had your friend play it in a co-op mode. Either of these sound like great ideas to me but they didn’t actually make it into No Regret.

Right at the end of the book is a single page of Did You Knows? The best fact in here is that Level 9 of the game was based on the Origin offices.

Origin’s later guides when they moved to the larger format always had a lot of content and this is no different. There should definitely be something of interest in here for any Silencer aficionados.

Quest For Clues Scans

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I finished scanning in the remaining Quest For Clues books and added them to the downloads yesterday. I don’t expect there will be a huge interest in these but I thought I might as well get them done. That’s all the books that I’ve read for the blog so far scanned. With that out of the way, I’ll get back to reading my way through everything else.

4 More PDF's

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I’ve added another set of pdf’s to the downloads. They are Forge Of Virtue, and Quest For Clues 1-3. I struggled with Forge of Virtue so the quality isn’t brilliant, I may skip scanning the rest of the novels. The print is so close to the spine on them that the only way to get a decent scan would be to sacrifice copies for the greater good. I should get the last 3 Quest For Clues books scanned in the next week.

Wing Commander Privateer – Playtester's Guide

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This was published in 1993 by Origin and has once again been scanned by Mirir and is available as a pdf in the downloads. Thanks to those scans, this is another I read through on my phone while I was away this week. It was put together primarily by Beth Loubet who worked on dialog for Ultima 7 and Serpent Isle but this was as far as I know the only book she did for Origin.

As a playtester’s guide, this isn’t the sort of book which is going to offer much in the way of extra story detail and instead concentrates on the mechanics of the game with some general playing tips thrown in. Over half the book is filled up with maps of every single system in the game, and tables of data saying what encounters you are likely to have at each nav point. It’s curious that all the random encounters you have in the game more or less come down to a set of four options for what you will meet for every nav point in the game. Each of these options is listed here with their probabilities. You could potentially plan routes with this information but I can’t see it being especially useful.

After this section, we get into the bit that will really help players out with general hints on playing the game. There are weapon specs, suggested loadouts, trading routes, commodity price guides, etc… These would be particularly helpful for anyone starting out in the game as I do remember it being extremely unforgiving until I’d earned enough money to get a decent ship. Everything that you need to know to make the game easier is covered in here.

The next section goes through each of the plot missions, with descriptions and hints on how to approach them. Finally there are a couple of pages with bio’s of the playtesters.

Many of the hints and tips in the book are attributed to a specific playtester and thrown into the book as quotes. Some of these tips can be useful although they can also contradict each other depending on that persons style of play. Privateer is not the sort of game that forces you to play in a particular manner so it’s good to see different approaches covered like this. There wasn’t anything in this book that grabbed my attention though and it’s only really of interest if you want a helping hand through the game.