Category Archives: Books

Ultima 5 Cluebook

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This was published in 1988 by Origin. I seem to remember there being two versions with only the first edition having the colour front cover. Once again this is available to download from http://www.replacementdocs.com. It is about twice the size of the Ultima 4 cluebook, although the same could be said of the game so this is no surprise.

The book starts with the familiar towns and locations section which takes up two thirds of the pages. It’s back to overhead views for the maps which this time using the actual graphics from the game. This is more useful for finding your way around, if less atmospheric. This guide also adds the co-ordinates of the town + the shop prices. After this section, there are some new parts offering the sort of detail that was missing in the U4 cluebook. This includes a list of all the unique items and roughly where to find them.

The dungeon maps are next, followed by an extremely useful map of the underworld complete with highlighted locations of interest. This really would save a lot of trial and error searching around the most dangerous part of the game. Finding the three shards without this will take a lot more effort.

The book ends with a brief passage on how Lord Shalineth (the supposed author of this book) attained some of the knowledge within from a mysterious child who appeared in his keep one morning.

Paths Of Destiny addresses the problems I had with the U4 guide and contains the extra bit of information that could help you to get through the game. It does this while still maintaining the pretense of being a guidebook prepared to help the Avatar and has a little more (although not much) background detail to boot. There wasn’t a whole lot of extra content for the Ultima fans here though.

Ultima 4 Cluebook

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I’ve got a bit of time on my hands today but no access to my collection since I’m not at home, so I thought I’d go through a few of the Ultima cluebooks I scanned in several years back. All of these are downloadable from http://www.replacementdocs.com. I won’t go into too much detail since they are available for anyone to read themselves, and will just do a few short(ish) posts. I’ll start off with the Ultima 4 cluebook which was published in 1986 by Origin.

Something I have noticed is that the newer these books get, the larger they get. Ultima 4 being one of the oldest is therefore particularly short. It’s a similar format to the Ultima 3 one with the obvious difference being that the ASCII maps of the towns are now replaced with an isometric drawing instead. This definitely helps to give the book the impression of being a guide to Britannia which is how it is presented.

The book is spilt into town and dungeon sections. Starting with the towns, along with the drawing there is a little text that goes along with each. This usually mentions a few people you need to talk to but doesn’t contain anything in the way of backstory. Since you always need to talk to more or less everyone in Ultima games, this isn’t especially helpful.

It’s a similar structure with the dungeons, although the text here is more useful telling you where to find altar rooms and the coloured stones. Rather than drawings, the maps here are more conventional overhead views of each level of a dungeon. If you want help beating the game, this is the truly useful bit and will save a lot of mapping.

The book ends with a single page about using the shrines. Even more so than Ultima 3, I think it’s striking just how much is left out of this cluebook. It mentions needing the bell, book and candle but gives you no idea where to get them. It doesn’t even say how to achieve the fundamental requirements of your quest or what actions affect your virtues. This is definitely no walkthrough and even with this guide you will still have to play the game properly finding clues for yourself if you are going to finish it. I quite like this aspect of it and how the book never comes out of character as such but if I’m honest there probably should have been more content here. This book is helpful but doesn’t hand the answers to you on a plate and you certainly wouldn’t see a game guide like this by the early 90’s.

The Ultima Saga – The Forge Of Virtue

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I’ve been away for a few days so I threw in the two Ultima saga novels and managed to read one of them in the meanwhile. I have read both of these before but it was a long time back and they can’t have made much of an impression as I remembered very little about them. This first in the series was written by Lynn Abbey, and published in 1991 by Popular Library.

It’s story is set shortly before the start of Ultima 5. The Avatar hasn’t yet been summoned to Brittannia but Lord British has gone missing and Blackthorn has taken over in his place. The story follows a few young adventurers (described on the back cover) who at least in this novel, are on the outskirts of the main events. Some of the Avatar’s companions make appearances but they are usually brief with only Shamino appearing for more than a page or two.

Althea, Drum and Jordan all set out in secret to attempt to locate Althea’s brother Balthan after Blackthorn makes outlaws of all the magician’s holding the words of power used to seal/open the 8 dungeons. Balthan is the assistant of Felespar and has been with him in Britain for some time putting him at serious risk. Before he left he gave Althea a magical “homunculus” to show his image which now shows a dark line which is acting as a compass pointing in his direction. This leads the 3 (picking up Jordan’s younger brother Darrel aka Squirt on the way), via Britain, to the Avatar’s temple in Cove where they learn Balthan stepped into the flame and never came out. They all follow Balthan into the flame, through the void and a moongate to a spot near Wrong and discover Balthan trapped inside a negate time spell, apparently awaiting the Avatar himself. Before Blackthorn succumbed to the Shadowlords, they appear to have been coming to him while he slept trying to persuade him to steal the word of power from Felespar, and the negate time spell was his way of avoiding sleep. Balthan is rescued but one of his protective spells leaves Jordan blind. He doesn’t actually regain his sight by the end of the book although we do learn that due to the nature of the spell that caused it, he can still see things in his memory after the fact by closing his eyes. Although, the main quest as such is completed, the book doesn’t have anything resembling an ending and it was clearly intended as part of a series right from the start.

There was potentially a lot more depth to the Ultima universe than the Wing Commander one to be basing a novel on, due to the different nature of the two series. Forge Of Virtue was for the most part quite faithful with all sorts of details from the games cropping up. The Britannia shown here  still has a strong class system despite Lord British’s attempts with only the “Peers” being able to attempt to follow the Avatar’s quest, as something of a rite of passage. The magical system is frequently mentioned with the same verbs and reagents as the games and of course some of the locations from Britannia are in here although there isn’t all that much ground covered during the course of the book. At the speed these guys move we would have needed another 10 books to cover every major location in Britannia. I’m sure there are elements that weren’t faithful to the games as well. The only thing that really struck me was one of the Peers having a slave which can’t be virtuous but this was only mentioned in one sentence.

The story is a fairly typical fantasy arrangement with some young characters running away from their home to go on a journey/quest. It is as much about Britannia and the effect that Blackthorn and the Shadowlords are having on it as anything else. I did enjoy the way the novel picked its way through some familiar events and places, expanding on them. I can’t imagine that anyone unfamiliar with Ultima would have made much of a lot of this though. The plot itself wasn’t especially strong either with surprisingly few significant events in the books 300 pages.

I think I’ve only ever seen harsh reviews of this series. If it didn’t have the Ultima connection, I’d probably have hated it. With the Ultima connection, I quite liked it but I would say it’s a slow start and I hope things pick up a little in the next one.

Wing Commander 3 – Official Guide

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This was published in 1995 by Origin via Brady Publishing. This is in the larger format that Origin moved onto around this time and it’s a sizeable book with just over 250 pages . It originally included a CD with some behind the scenes features, which unfortunately wasn’t included with my second-hand copy. I’m assuming that the “making of” video on the CD would be the same as the one on the limited edition Wing Commander 3 but from the back cover it looks to have other features that weren’t on that disc. With all the extra content compared to the last couple of clue books I’ve looked at, the original price reflects this and this guide originally sold for a hefty $24.95.

The book is split in 3 sections, each written by a different author. The first 50 pages are about strategy and tactics. This goes into the stats for all your wingmen, ship specs, general combat tactics and all the mechanics of the game. It even has a list of responses that your wingmen give you in combat. I never actually realised that if they have low morale, all their responses are different. Everything you could ever need to know about how the game works is in here. It’s quite dry stuff but there is a lot of information and it does give you a good feel for all the things going on behind the scenes that aren’t immediately apparent.

The second section is about 110 pages and details every mission in the game with tactics and the like. There isn’t much additional info here, other than a few boxes of text with news feeds and one with the transcript of the Hobbes explanation cutscene. I presume the news feeds are from the other scenes that got cut. This is the section of the book to get you through missions you might be struggling with, but there isn’t much here otherwise and I skimmed over it.

The final part is an 80 page making of section. This contains interviews with what must be most of the people involved in making the game. These interviews cover every aspect of the game and include programmers, artists, actors, scriptwriters, producers, packaging/documentation designers, etc.. With so many people included most only get to answer a few questions but you still get a very good idea for what was involved making WC3. Apparently this was one of the few Origin projects than ran more or less on schedule, which is a surprise given the scope of it. It does mention that Strike Commander was basically created just to develop the technology for WC3. Having this in place no doubt helped enormously as I remember all too well just how many delays Strike Commander suffered. Possibly the most interesting fact in the interviews is that Mark Hamill was originally cast as Maniac and was only swapped to Blair when Tom Wilson was signed up. It’s hard to imagine how that would have turned out.

The whole making-of section justifies the price of book on its own. It’s heavily pushing the “interactive movie” theme and what effect this had on people’s work compared to their usual work in the film industry. This is no surprise as there was a lot of excitement at the time about interactive movie’s being the next big thing. It didn’t exactly happen the way people expected but I think you can see some of the same mechanics in play in a modern game like Mass Effect, with the dialog choices and cinematic presentation. It may not be FMV any more but it amounts to the same sort of thing with modern graphics. There is plenty of praise for Chris Roberts directing skills from the people interviewed. I have noticed this sort of thing in every making-of that you ever see with a dvd but he obviously did a good job for a first time director. I did think about scanning in the making of section although I’m put off by the sheer size of it so I’ll hold off unless asked.

This book was everything an official guide should be with masses of detailed information on playing the game and lots of extra behind the scenes information. It’s definitely worth the few $ it costs to pick it up second-hand although you might want to be more careful that I was and make sure it has the CD.

Shadowcaster Cluebook

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This was published in 1993 by Origin. It’s author was Melissa Mead who co-authored the Noctropolis clue book and it was edited by David Ladyman who did the same for Noctropolis. With the same people involved, I’d expect this book to be along familiar lines and it’s certainly has a similar structure.

It starts off with descriptions of the 6 shapes you can take during the game and gives a backstory for each as told by Kurt’s grandfather. These stories tell how each race learned to shapeshift and are probably the best part of the book.

It then gets straight into the level maps which take up the majority of the pages. These are printed copies of the automap from the game, with significant areas marked.  They are accompanied by the story of Veste’s passage through them all conquering each land in turn, and also a central story of him building his temple to guard against future threats. This gives the background info to each level which you certainly didn’t get in the game but doesn’t include the levels that were added to the CD version. There is also a list and picture of every creature on each level, complete with the creatures stats.

Whereas I enjoyed all the background info for Noctropolis, I can’t say the same here. It’s certainly not cheerful stuff as Veste butchers his way through one world after another. Above all, I don’t like the writing style and it makes it quite difficult to read. There is certainly a lot more plot in the book than the game but I don’t feel like I learned anything I actually wanted to know and a lot of it comes across as nonsense, to be frank.

After the maps, there is a list of all items and their properties, a list of event triggers, a couple of pages of general game hints, and finally a full stage by stage walkthrough complete with mini maps so that you don’t have to flick backwards and forwards.

I’ve not gone through many of these clue books yet but I think (and hope) this is going to be one of the worst of them. It will get you through the game but otherwise is best avoided.