This is another review of Ultima 6, this time from the July 1990 PC Plus. I actually remember reading this at the time and wanting to buy the game. Unfortunately, I only had an 8088 PC with CGA which ruled it out and I didn’t play my first Ultima until Underworld came out 2 years later.
This is a review of Omega from the February 1990 PC Plus magazine. The reviewer was positive about the game in general but must have been something of a pacifist as he didn’t like the warmongering concept.
While I’m on Omega, I’ve uploaded a scan of the lengthy Cybertank Engineer’s Handbook from the game. I scanned this for replacementdocs years back but couldn’t do a decent job without a book scanner. By the time they had compressed it down, it was more or less illegible. The new scan is much improved and in the downloads for anyone who wants it.
I should also mention the sell off of Origin bits and pieces that Rhea Shelly (ex Origin QA) is having as posted on wcnews.com. There isn’t anything on there I wouldn’t want in all honesty, although I’ll be confining my bids to a select few items to give myself a slim chance of actually winning something. I was hoping to see Caverns Of Callisto among all those early games but no such luck.
This is a review of Ultima Underworld 2 from Issue 1 of PC Zone (April 1993). It’s irreverent even by PC Zone standards and includes a playthrough of the Scintilus Academy + a run down on the “soap opera” in Lord British’s castle.
I was rooting around in the parents loft a week or two back trying to retrieve some of my stuff which has somehow never managed to migrate over to my house since moving out years back. I entirely failed to find what I was looking for but I did find a box with about 50-60kg of old computing magazines which I’d assumed had been thrown out 10-15 years ago.
The vast majority of these were old PC Plus magazines, which was on the whole a serious publication but did devote a few pages to games reviews and it was one of my few sources for them for a while. I don’t expect there will be many relevant to the blog but I did come across this short Martian Dreams review in the October 1991 issue.
It complains that the game not being on CD-ROM was holding it back, which seems bizarre to say the least. Suffice to say, it didn’t persuade me to buy the game at the time and it was years before I got to play it and found out what I’d been missing out on.
This is the final review I’ll be uploading from PC Leisure magazine, Bad Blood from the Autumn 1990 issue. The reviewer loved the intro but was less keen on the game. I notice from the review that as often happened, us Brits got done out of the extras that came with the USA release.
