This is a review of Ultima 4 on the Amiga from Games Machine magazine in Decemeber 1988. It’s very brief and spends as much time on the back story as anything else. The game gets a high score of 86% but is slightly criticised for being too faithful to the original and not really taking advantage of the Amiga hardware.
I’ve acquired a copy of UW 1 + 2 from GOG, thanks to the generosity of Loaf, and have added both games onto the patcher. Apart from the various patches, I added in a toggle for sound devices. I’ve also included a couple more Ultima 4 patches. The U4 form is looking a little crowded so hopefully that’s all of them.
I’d just about got that ready when GOG surprised me with more Ultima games in the form of the second trilogy. This time I’ve bought them myself and although there aren’t as many patches available for these, what there is I’ve added into the patcher. GOG aren’t supporting character transfer at the moment which isn’t any fun, so I’ve included an option to mount your savegame directory for the previous game to allow the in-game character transfer to work correctly.
There are a few things to note:-
I’ve not spent long on it, but I cobbled together a simple GOG Ultima game patcher on Saturday afternoon. The idea was to offer an easier alternative to install all the various patches for Ultima 1-4 for anyone who has bought them off GOG. It’s very basic and just copies the patch files, runs any installers inside DOSBox and alters the GOG DOSBox config automatically. There isn’t much point in using it if you know your way around DOS/DOSBox, but it might help a few people out. It needs some serious tidying up and I definitely want to add in links to the project sites and the like but it basically works for now. It’s in the Miscellaneous section in the downloads for anyone who wants it.
I’ll probably add the other games as they are released + the Underworlds, although it does mean buying them all again so I’m tempted to wait until a sale. After buying Ultima 1-3 on GOG that makes it 6 copies of Ultima 1 I own and 5 copies of 2 & 3 in one form or another. Surely I must have paid for these games enough times by now. $6 is not a lot of money though, so I’ll probably stump up the cash for the others.
While I’m posting, one of my favourite channels on Youtube, blacklily8, just added a mini-review of Ultima 4:-
Matt is a guy who is very much into old RPG’s and adventure games, and seems to have very similar tastes to myself. Despite that he’s not played any of the Ultima’s so this is more or less his first experience of the series.
It’s interesting to see what someone new to Ultima, but not to ancient RPG’s makes of it. It’s easy to forget just how awkward the interface is and how much there is to learn when you have been playing these games for years. There is a thread on GOG where several people couldn’t even figure out how to get past the menu screen at the start and thought the game was broken.
I’m back from holiday and have a little catching up to do. First off, here is the missing Ultima 4 completion certificate which has been provided once again by Natreg, having presumably being hosted originally on Jocksitter Dragon’s website.
I took about 4 hours last night to finish up Ultima 4. I wasn’t intending to play that long but if I get that near the end of a game I just have to finish it. Getting the remaining stones wasn’t a big problem and I just made my way via Hytholth to the three altar rooms, used the stones on the altars and got the three part key.
Something I had forgotten was that I still needed the skull of mondain and the candle of love to get into the abyss. The skull was easy enough, getting the candle means going to Cove. To get there I had to sail through the whirlpool that moves around the oceans in the same manner as getting to Ambrosia in Ultima 3. The problem here was finding it, you realise how big the world is when you are sailing around trying to find a randomly moving tile. I got there eventually at any rate got the candle and set sail for the abyss.
To get to the Stygian abyss, you have to sail through a swarm of pirate ships. This is a bit tricky as they have a habit of blasting out my ship but I made it in the end. Once through, I stand in the middle of a volcanoe, use the bell, book, candle and skull and enter the abyss.
I said yesterday that the dungeons in this game were easy. The Stygian abyss pretty much makes up for this with an excess of predesigned rooms many of which contain little tricks. Often these rooms link together and you can go round in circles until you find the way to open secret passages. At the end of each level is an altar, where I have to use the appropriate stone to create a ladder down to the next level.
One of the worst rooms was full of reapers, who put my party to sleep all the time. Getting through here is more a test of patience than anything. Another room right at the end has me facing a mirror image of my own party, but this turns out to be one of the easiest in the abyss. Battling through the abyss is fairly epic in general and took some serious time. I finally made it down to the last altar, entered the room with the codex using the three part key and started the endgame. This is pretty much a quiz on the virtues. Having played this far its easy enough, the final question perhaps being the only tricky bit. The visions from the virtues give you the answer if you noted them down but the answer is guessable as infinity anyway. Once done I get to see the codex and am sent back to earth to serve as an example to all.
Its a satisfying ending to a really epic game. I’m surprised at how long its taken to play through, but I’ve enjoyed pretty much all of it with the exception of hunting down that whirlpool. The idea of not having a bad guy to kill at the end was pretty revolutionary, in terms of gameplay there wasn’t that much new from Ultima 3 apart from conversation and dungeon rooms. All in all, I’d say the game was big enough but I seem to recall Ultima 5 being much larger still.
Next: Ogre
