I’ve got more scans from Games Machine magazine today. First up is Times Of Lore on the Commodore 64. It gets a middling sort of review. I’ve never played this version but I can imagine the C64 struggling to run the game so it was probably better suited to the PC.
I’d give it around the same score myself having said that. It’s not a bad game as such but the most significant thing about it was the influence it had on the interface for future Ultima games.
This is another magazine scan from the World Of Spectrum archives. You might be seeing a few of these over the coming weeks. This time it’s a short review of Ultima 5 on PC from Games Machine magazine in November 1988. It gets a glowing review with a score of 91% but I don’t get the feeling that the reviewer spent too long with the game.
I stumbled across this review of Ultima 3 on the C64 in the World Of Spectrum archives this morning. There isn’t anything especially interesting in the review although it does mention that it was the first part of US Gold’s “All American Adventures” series over here in the UK. This series included games from a diverse range of developers such as Ulysses and the Golden Fleece from Sierra or Screenplays Warriors of Ras. For anyone who thinks games are expensive these days, it also say that Ultima 3 originally sold for £50 on Apple or IBM in the UK.
My favourite part isn’t the review but that Ultima 3 was the featured game in this issue meaning that it got its own original cover art.
This was a series that ran in PC Zone for several years. You would think that a few Origin games would have got a mention but the nearest they got was this article on System Shock 2:-
I’m sure there will be a few I’ve missed along the way but this is the last relevant article I could find scanning through all my old magazines.
This one is from March 2001 and is a run through of the most influential PC games of all time with 2 Origin games in the short list:-