I managed all of about 20 mins last night on Ultima 3. There’s not much new to say, I’ve got half my party up to level 2 now and quite a bit more gold. I’ve nothing on tonight so I’ll get a decent session in then. Instead I’ll talk a bit more about the new stuff in Ultima 3 that I didn’t mention yesterday. First off you now have a party of four instead of a single adventurer – this certainly adds more variety to the gameplay, there’s a huge number of spells, weapons and armor and all in all it feels closer to a modern role-playing game because of it. 

The monsters travel in parties too, which has led to the addition of the combat screen, which was with us till Ultima 6. This means that every battle you swap to a screen where you can move all your characters around individually, attack or cast spells in turns. This makes the combat a bit more interesting, the downside is the battles take longer which is going to slow me down quite a bit. Only the character that makes the kill, gains experience. My wizard should be ok with his mittar spell getting quite a few kills, but I’m going to struggle to level up my cleric at the moment.

All the modern technology has finally disappeared, so we also have a proper fantasy environment for the first time since Akalabeth – I’m not far into it yet but the game already feels a cut above all the others. It seems like this game has actually been planned and designed rather than throwing together a load of elements ad hoc as in the first couple of games. Even though I’m just trying to level up, I’m enjoying it more than the first 2 games so far.

I’m only a few days in but I’ve decided I’m changing my Ultima mission into an all encompassing Origin mission where I blog my way through every game Origin has ever published. I think I own every one of them except for Caverns of Callisto, which I guess I’ll just have to download unless I find a copy. I’m as much a fan of Origin as I am of Ultima so it seems like the perfect thing for me to blog. I am wondering just how long is this going to take? If it took a year to play through all the Ultimas, how long would it take to play through every Origin game? Only one way to find out…

Even if its going to take me ages, I’m still looking forward to playing all those games. Overall I think it will just be more fun than sticking to Ultima, as I won’t be stuck with the same genre of game the whole way through. There are loads of them I’ve never played, which will be all new to me. More to the point, its never been done. With the non-ultima’s, I’ll try to be more thorough and include screenshots. I’ve not bothered so far, since there are loads of screenshots already on the other two blogs + I tend never to look at them when reading the blogs myself. Hopefully, when I’ve got a few games in, my writing style might even be coherent instead of the ramblings I’ve managed so far, but I wouldn’t count on it.