Category Archives: Books

The RPG Companion

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This was published in 1995 by BradyGames and was written by Ronald Wartow. The author has the curious distinction of being referred to in all 3 of the major original CRPG series. He was a farmer in New Magincia in Ultima 5, appeared in Might and Magic 3 and a fountain was named after him in Wizardry 4. The book doesn’t have any official links to Origin but it was requested by someone and since I happen to have it, I thought I might as well add it onto the list.

The RPG Companion weighs in at just over 500 pages and appears to be designed to introduce novice players to the concepts of RPG’s. This sounds like a strange notion these days, but old RPG’s were definitely intimidating to anyone who hadn’t played them before and it was something that put me off playing many of them for years myself. I’m not sure a 500 page tome is less intimidating but once opened it’s easy to read and I got through it surprisingly quickly. There isn’t a whole lot of text on each page in all honesty. If it had used a normal font and didn’t have the massive spacing, this could have been 150 pages.

It starts with numerous sections on the RPG basics. It doesn’t apply them to specific games but instead goes through the areas they have in common. This covers things like party creation and how virtual dice rolls work. It usually sticks to AD&D rules and classes in order to keep everything generic which is fair enough since most RPG’s are variants on this theme. If you are new to the genre, it’s all solid advice and includes tips like the age-old but extremely useful exploit of forming sacrificial party members at the start of the game in order to steal all their gold and equipment.

There is a brief section of interviews with developers and expert gamers, including Richard Garriot. This is unusual since it isn’t the expected career retrospective but is asking them for their tips on playing RPG’s. As you might expect there is a lot of contradiction. One of the expert gamers basically just tells you to find exploits in the games to shortcut your way to the end which didn’t strike me as especially helpful advice. The whole thing is something of a throwaway section, that does little more than allow a few familiar names to be put on the back cover. One of the main appeals about RPG’s is that you should be able to play them however you like if they have been designed well.

The last 350 pages of the book are taken up with game walkthroughs for the 26 major RPG games at the time. It sticks to the same huge text size so when I say that when a game as huge as Elder Scrolls Arena is covered in 12 pages total, only 7 of which are actually the walkthrough it should give you an idea how brief these are. They have a page of power tips which give some good general advice, and the walkthrough quickly covers the steps required to win the game. It also mentions if games have bugs that you need to watch out for, which anyone who played Arena for many hours only to find out it wasn’t completable (i.e. me) would have appreciated at the time. The games covered include several Ultima games as well as System Shock.

I didn’t read through all these walkthroughs and I’ve only ever played half of the games. From the games I do know well like World Of Xeen, the advice wasn’t too much better than a task list even for some of the key events. For instance at the end of Might and Magic 4, Lord Xeen can only be damaged by the Xeen Slayer sword and unless you cheat there is only one of them. Only getting one hit in a round doesn’t make things easy when he can annihilate half your party in his first attack. The way around this was to toss the sword between characters by trading in the inventory at the start of each turn so all 6 of them can get a strike in, but this isn’t mentioned. The walkthroughs could clearly help people out but they leave most of it up to you to sort out for yourself. There are no maps or tables of creatures/equipment and all the usual things you might expect. The Quest for Clues series was largely contributed to by amateurs but did a better job with a similar number of pages per game. I did quite like the power tips for some of the games though.

There is a CD included which is a free edition of Interactive Entertainment magazine. I’ve not looked at this as of yet. I gather it’s a multi-media game magazine which given the space limitations of CD’s and the state of video compression at the time doesn’t sound like the best of ideas. It doesn’t matter these days with fast Internet but at the time I liked my magazine discs full of demo’s and possibly game patches, and was happy to keep the reviews on paper. I’m slightly curious but the CD is still sealed in the back cover of the book so I’ll probably leave it there.

All in all, I wasn’t too impressed with the RPG companion. For it’s size, it is lacking in substance and the walkthroughs are fairly poor unless you just want to be told what tasks to perform. If you expect a thorough guide to any of these games, this isn’t the place to look. It has made me curious about some of the other games that are mentioned though and I may try a few of them out in the future.

Wing Commander Prophecy – Official Guide

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This was published by Prima back in 1997. It follows more or less the same structure as all the other WC guides before it so I’ll keep this brief. It’s starts with a history of the Wing Commander universe so far, starting right at the beginning with space colonisation and working its way quickly through most of the games and one of the books. There are then lengthy bio’s of all the pilots covering a lot of the same ground but also giving all sorts of little details I’ve not seen anywhere else. For a Wingnut, these are a nice insight into all the characters if you ever wanted to know their backgrounds.

The tactics sections includes some notes on the differences between Prophecy and it’s predecessors, and how this was a step forward for the series. It’s perhaps a little disparaging to the older games and I might argue that Prophecy was different rather than better. It certainly excelled in the combat sections but it didn’t come close to WC4 for an overall experience as far as I’m concerned. The actual tactics in this section are for the most part the same sort of thing we’ve seen from the other games and most of this is common sense stuff, like attacking bombers first when trying to protect cap ships.

There are then lengthy guides to each ship and weapon in the game, with all the unnecessary detail you could ask for, before getting into the mission descriptions. These let you know how the missions are structured, what will happen on each mission and how best to approach it, along with the FMV’s you can expect to see. On standard difficulty Prophecy wasn’t an especially difficult game, certainly for anyone who has made it through the rest of series before this so this section is largely redundant but you could hardly call it a guide without it. The book predates Prophecy Gold so you don’t get anything on all those extra missions unfortunately. We do get a couple of pages of memo at the end of the book to set the scene for games to come, which more or less spells out what we don’t know about the attacking aliens.

Something I did notice was that in the movie descriptions for the games final mission, the alien Blair sees is referred to as the same Alien overlord that had interrogated him when he was captured. He supposedly sees this alien and attacks it at point blank range in his rage. There wasn’t any mention of an overlord in the game itself though and the book contradicts this description a page or two later.

I’ve never been entirely convinced that the Wing Commander games needed guides but most of them have been fun to read if you wanted to know a bit more about the game and they could potentially help you out if you were struggling on a certain mission. This was along the same lines and had some history and backstory for the fans. I should also mention the concept art by Sid Meir that is peppered throughout the guide. The sketches are basic and along the lines of storyboards but it’s good to see them included.

Just 7 books left to go now, and only 1 that I haven’t already scanned in. I’ll be looking at the RPG Companion next which isn’t an Origin book but someone asked about it, and I happen to have it on hand. It’s the largest book of the lot and I’m still playing Fallout 3 so don’t hold your breath. I have made it to the end of the main plot but I have 2 and a bit DLC’s still to go and a lot of places left to explore. The main plot was something of an anti-climax, I got through it in a couple of hours after basically ignoring it up to that point. Fallout 3 is far more about exploring the world and the side quests.

Ultima Online Age Of Shadows – Official Guide

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This is the final Ultima Online guide book that I’m going to be looking at. There were more of them after this but Origin had ceased to exist by then, so I’ll stop here. This was published in 2003 by Prima and the vast majority of it is simply a copy of the previous guide I looked at for Lord Blackthorn’s Revenge. It even still says Lord Blackthorn’s Revenge at the top of all the pages. It isn’t an exact reprint though since the Lore & Background section has new scenarios and the Todd MacFarlane interview has been removed.

The new scenarios are a strange set of tales. The first story is about some sort of creature waking up, coming to terms with the world only to smell a leader who tells it to dig. The second story is a boy who cried wolf variant about a mad beggar who feigns being attacked each night only to be set upon by giant ants at the end of the tale and scared into sanity. The final tale is presumably about the end of the previous wars from the LBR phase of the game. I have no idea what the purpose of the first two stories was but they might make sense had I played the game.

I also notice that there are a few more virtues implemented into the game at this stage. It’s a fairly simplistic system for these but combining upkeeping virtues along with all your skill levels and everything else sounds like enough to keep most players busy.

The new section is around 50 pages long and covers the new additions to the game in Age Of Shadows. There was yet another land called Malas with it’s own set of towns and dungeons. The new area brought a couple of new character classes with it of necromancers and paladins, combat special moves and some new monsters.

There is a new section on on housing which I was curious about as I’d always wondered how this worked in UO. It explains why houses ended up selling for large amounts of real money on Ebay. There is a 2 page bit of fiction to end the book about with observations on Malas and it’s place in the UO multiverse by a young mage.

The new changes to the game look to be more in keeping with what I might expect from Ultima. I find it hard to believe that the UO2 cyborgs ever came to UO, but I suppose the Ultima multiverse allows you to go in any direction you like. There is a free 2 week trial on the ultimaforever website which could tempt me into trying UO but while there are single player RPG’s like Fallout 3 as an alternative, it probably isn’t going to happen. It’s about time I read the guide for a game I know something about so I’ll have a look at Wing Commander Prophecy next.

Ultima Online Lord Blackthorn's Revenge – Official Guide

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This is the third Ultima Online guide I’ve looked at from Prima and was published in 2002 for the Lord Blackthorn’s Revenge add-on. Third Dawn didn’t get a guide as far as I know.

Rather than rehashing the last guide, most of this is a complete rewrite. It’s obviously covering a lot of the same ground though so it’s quite familiar. The early stages very much take the form of a manual to the game, with loads of presumably useful information but nothing much entertaining. It does tell you more than the previous books by the looks of things, but still refers you to the website for advanced subjects. The latter parts deal with all the monsters and maps of all the locations.

As before, the guide is definitely aimed at newer players and there is nothing spelling out the differences between the versions but a lot of time spent introducing the skill system. As far as gameplay changes go, I gather there were now three nearly identical continents to the game though each with different rules regarding PKing and the like, and the interface appears to have changed substantially with Third Dawn. You could now join factions in the game and be at war with any other factions, allowing for a sanctioned form of PKing which I don’t remember being mentioned in older guides.

Since I’ve not played and don’t have much intention of playing Ultima Online anytime soon, the best parts of the book for me were in the middle sections dealing with the story and background of the UO world to that point and there is also an interview section.

The background info mentions a few familiar names that had made an appearance in UO by this time including Minax, Exodus and the Shadowlords. Lord British is missing/on holiday presumably due to Richard Gariott having left Origin by this time. Blackthorn has apparently been given a cyborg body by Exodus, bringing in the steampunk aspects of the UO2 design after it was cancelled. There are some new races which are also straight from UO2 as are monsters like the Juggernaut.

There are a few short stories about battling Exodus and also characters from Britannia having prophetic dreams about what is to occur on the world, which I presume have been lifted from the UO website at the time. These dreams basically deal with new races that will shortly be invading Britannia. None of this sounds very much like the Ultima I know and UO was evolving well away from its roots.

Having said that, Origin had started implementing a virtue system by this point which had only gone as far as humility. This involved players sacrificing fame in order to build up their virtue levels which offered some rewards such as an instant resurrection once a week.

The included interview is with Todd MacFarlane who was brought into UO2 to design monsters having previously worked on comics among other things. He was more or less responsible for the cyborg-Blackthorn that everyone hated so much in the UO2 previews. His team came up with 40 monsters/characters for UO, some of which apparently ended up becoming more major characters than intended because people liked them so much.

I don’t know much about Ultima Online in general and next to nothing by this stage in its life. I didn’t even know that any of the UO2 creatures ever ended up in the game before reading through this book. As such, I can’t offer a meaningful review but it looks like a decent enough guide, with a few things to pique my interest even though I’m not into UO. It’s scanned in with the rest anyway so you can judge for yourself.

There is one more UO guide for Age Of Shadows left to go before Origin officially closed which I’ll have a quick look at next to finish them off. After that, I can get back to the games I’ve actually played. I’m playing through Fallout 3 at the moment but I think the next guide is going to simply be a rehash of this one so expect it to follow shortly.

Master Ultima

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This was published by SAMS in 1992 and written by Ralph Roberts. They may have done hundreds of them for all I know, but SAMS isn’t a publisher that makes me think of game guides. The name makes me think of all the textbooks that I was forced to buy when I was doing my university degree if anything. Half of my lecturers had written books and if you wanted to pass their courses, you had to go out and buy the things at about £50 a time meaning that I needed to spend a couple of hundred on textbooks at the start of most terms. Not what you need as an impoverished student, already short on beer money.

Thankfully, I’ve got more money to spare these days although this didn’t cost anything like as much. I was going to stick to nothing but official guides but I saw this for about $5 and thought I’d add it into the collection. This book is probably best described as the unofficial book of Ultima, since it covers all the same games and the history of the series up to Ultima 6. It weighs in at a far more hefty 400 pages potentially making it better value, but I can’t imagine that many people would have bought this over Origin’s.

The extra pages give far more room to talk around the topics in hand. The book starts with a history of the series with all the usual stories that I’ve read a hundred times before, then gives some very general tips for beating the games which could apply to most RPG’s.

The game guide sections are going to be the reason why people would have bought this book and these fill the last 300 pages. They are each split into two chapters with the first chapter giving hints and the second being a short novella in the style of Avatar Adventures.

I’ll start with the hints chapters. What is interesting with these is the amount of specifics it goes into, without actually giving a walkthrough, at least for the older games. It covers most aspects of the gameplay but you are left to put them together yourself to a large extent. I quite like this style but some of the omissions are glaring. For instance there is no mention on Ultima 2 of getting stats raised at the Hotel California, the quicksword or even getting the ring after being blessed by Father Antos. In other words, there isn’t enough information to get you through the game which is fairly pitiful when the necessary steps could be summed up in a short paragraph. Ultima 1 on the other hand is covered in full detail, with nothing missed out and offers a superb guide to the game.

The later in the book you go, the nearer the guides go to becoming walkthrough’s with Ultima 6 going through every aspect of the main quest. None of the games have maps included though, which seems like another major omission and certainly leaves you doing a lot of the work yourself. There should be enough here to get you through the games, providing you don’t mind that but Prima’s Ultima Collection Guide was a lot more thorough and covered several more titles.

The second chapters are a literary walkthrough in the mould of Avatar Adventures. If you want a novel of the first 3 Ultima games, this is the nearest thing I’m aware of. They are presented in a slightly irreverent manner with dialog straight from the games, and a different character taking the lead for every adventure. They are quite brief with even Ultima 6 only getting 11 pages and skim over the plot in the later games. I certainly prefer Avatar Adventures but these are fun as long as you aren’t expecting too much.

I usually prefer official guides and I’d certainly go for the Official Book Of Ultima over this. Master Ultima is something of a hit and miss affair and doesn’t make good use of all those extra pages if you ask me, although it does have the odd tidbit that I’ve not seen elsewhere. If you ever wanted novels of Ultima 1-3 this is the only place I know where you will get them, which has to be the main appeal to a collector. As ever, I’ve scanned this in and linked it from the downloads page.

Talking of scans, I managed to download the new Ultima 4 free release from ultimaforever.com, during one of the brief spells where the site was actually working, and notice that they have included scans of all the documentation from the game directly from replacementdocs.com, including my cluebook scans. It’s interesting (although not entirely surprising) to see EA getting copies of their own manuals from what is effectively an abandonware site and this is more or less a stamp of approval for replacementdocs. I can’t say I feel a lot of guilt about scanning all these things in, but it removes any lingering doubts.