Amiga Wing Commander is proving trickier to beat than I expected but I’ve reached Venice so I’m nearly there now. In the meanwhile, here’s another article from the PC Zone supplement:-
I’ve added a batch of new scans to the downloads for the console versions of various Origin games, some of which were available elsewhere already but they are on here now as well. The new pdfs are manuals for Ultima 3 (NES & Famicom), Ultima 4 (NES & Famicom), Ultima 6 (NES & Super Famicom), Ultima 7 (Super Famicom), Wing Commander (Mega CD & Sega CD) & Wing Commander Secret Missions (SNES).
In addition to all of those, I’ve been kindly sent a scan of the Lands Of Lore clue book by Matt Larson. This isn’t anything to do with Origin but I love the game so I’ve added that also.
There seems to be a distinct shortage of Ultima demos around. I suppose most of the later games were rushed and not exactly finished on release, so a demo may have been an unnecessary distraction in the circumstances. There was a non-playable Ultima 7 pre-release demo which is hosted here. A video of this was already on Youtube which I’ve embedded below:-
It consists of the intro and an ultimately optimistic claim that the game will be coming in Xmas 1991. It only has adlib music which is a bit of a letdown, and it’s not implemented as well it would be in the actual game. I imagine there would originally have been an installation program which has gone missing. The demo comes with all the music as MIDI files which can be played directly through an MT-32 to much better effect, but if there is a way to set up the demo’s config file to do this I couldn’t find it. The intro is cut down substantially from the one I’m used to but other than that there isn’t a whole lot to say about this so I’ll move on to Ultima 9.
Today saw the long awaited release of the complete Ultima 7 on GOG and I’ve updated my GOG Ultima patcher to support both games. It adds general MIDI patches for both Ultima 7 & Serpent Isle which should offer an improvement over the default Soundblaster.
As ever if there are any other patches I should include or any problems please let me know.
This is a combined review of Ultima and Ultima Underworld from the August 1992 PC Plus:-
