![]() ![]() The unavoidable gremlins are just as bad if not worse than the unavoidable pit traps in Wizardry. It's pretty addictive, but the dungeons aren't great. I know the game scales encounters as you level up, so my strategy is to explore dungeons until I get some marks and earn enough gold to outfit my characters, then visit Lord British to level up, get my boat, and then continue toward completion. I figured a Thief would be useful for my play style, since I intend to explore every floor of every dungeon. I am running a Thief, Paladin, Cleric, Wizard party. Unlike Ultima II, you don't feel like your greatest enemy is constantly running out of food-instead, food is something you need to pay attention to, but it's not the single most important mechanic during the early game, like in Ultima II. I am a big fan of the NES version soundtrack, but this is just as good if not better (that dungeon music is so atmospheric). The music (from the fan patch, taken from the Apple II/C64 versions) is godly. It's tiny compared with Ultima II, but what it has is pure quality. This is so much better than Ultima II, it's like a playing something in a completely different series. So I shelved Ultima II years ago, but I always regretted not getting back into the series. but you can easily do so by exploring the dungeons, so it doesn't seem so much like a mindless grind. In Ultima 1, you have to build up gold, etc. But then it hit me-what is the point of forcing myself to play this game? So now I've got the ship and a surefire means of building up gold the next step is to sit there grinding out encounters to get gold, to grind out stat boosts so you can ultimately grind stats so you can beat the game. ![]() It only took maybe a couple hours until I had a Blue Tassel and my own ship, and was able to then explore and gain gold at my leisure (I never got to this point in the PC version even after several retries). I tried the C64 version on actual hardware (even on actual disks), and progression was a lot quicker. I played the PC version and it seemed buggy as hell, with enemies hardly every spawning on the world map, so you end up using like 50 units of food walking around the earth just to fight 2-3 enemies-on top of that, the towns are so "massive" that you need to spend like 10 food units each time you just want to buy groceries. I wanted to play it straight too, so I avoided it, but the game is so dull I couldn't stand it. I remember asking for advice on some board (definitely not this one), and everyone said I should just cheat and go around stealing food etc. That game has aged surprisingly well, and so I was really looking forward to Ultima II. I actually had a blast playing through Ultima I for the first time, and I even played it "straight" by printing off the world maps, taking notes, and mapping dungeons by hand. Something like 12 (!) years ago I decided to play through all the Ultima games I missed (basically, Ultima I-V, excluding NES versions of III and IV). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |