Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress
United States
Independently developed; Sierra Online (publisher)
Date Started: 6 March 2010
Date Ended: 6 March 2010Total Hours: 8
Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)
Final Rating: 21
Ranking at Game #413: 141/413 (34%)
Ultima II is the story of a interplanetary thief, prison-breaker, and unrepentant mass murderer who slaughters villagers, fools, and police officers in a quest to help a money-grubbing tyrant rid a world that isn't even his own of a harmless young woman who lives millions of years before he was born.
Ultima II makes me wish I had spent more time on Telengard. I thought the first Ultima was a quaint little lark whose air cars and tie fighters and jestercide were, if occasionally silly, still part of its charm. Ultima II, on the other hand, is a senseless travesty of a game that improves nothing on its predecessor and in fact makes things a great deal worse. How is this only two steps away from the awesome Ultima IV? (Please, please don't tell me that Ultima IV isn't as awesome as I remember.)
Let's start with the basic premise. Mondain has been defeated, the game manual tells us, but he left behind an apprentice: Minax, a powerful enchantress whose vengeance brought, in 2111, a (presumably nuclear) apocalypse across the face of the Earth. Through time doors, fortunately, the inhabitants of that grisly future were able to escape back . . .
Wait. What? Earth? Yep. The game takes place mostly on Earth in five different time periods, each accessible to each other through a series of "time gates." The time zones are "Panagea," or two million years before the present, when all the Earth's continents were fused; the medieval ages, the year 1990, the post-apocalyptic year 2112, and the "Age of Legends," or the beginning of time, where Minax has her castle. The entire world is the game map. After you create your character, you are dumped unceremoniously into a washed-out and barren landscape with no goals and a limited quantity of food. I started exploring, and in far less time than makes any sense, I had hiked from Tierra del Fuego to the tip of Italy, crossing the Bering Land Bridge on the way. Right.
Look, I know it's early in the development of CRPGs. The existence of "experience points" that do absolutely nothing for you doesn't bother me. The limited character development doesn't bother me. The existence of only six spells doesn't bother me. But could the story at least make some modicum of sense? Could the manual not talk up Lord British as a benevolent sovereign and then introduce me to a man who requires that I give him money for hit points? Could the game not involve shuttle missions to Jupiter, which the game manual helpfully indicates is covered with "water and grass"?!
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| Not water and grass. |
Creating a character in Ultima II is a process of building your attributes from a pool of points and then choosing your race, class, and name. The sex, race, and class choices affect your starting attributes and nothing else.
The gameplay is similar to Ultima I. Dungeons and towers are first-person, but outdoors and town areas are top-down. You control your character with keyboard commands--every letter of the alphabet seems to do something, from (A)ttack to (Z)tats. Many of the commands only work in certain circumstances, like (H)yper, (L)aunch, and (N)egate time.
The game manual spends a lot of time describing each monster in lurid detail, but when the monsters attack you in the game world, the game doesn't even bother to tell you what they are. Combat consists of pounding (A)ttack repeatedly until they die. A little disappointing after the complexity of Wizardry.
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| Our hero is attacked by orcs. Or bears. |
Unlike Ultima I, in this game you can talk to all of the characters, and each gives you a couple of words of dialog. Most of them have nothing particularly interesting to say. All the clerics say, "Believe!" and fighters say, "Ugh. Me tough!" The merchants say, "Will you buy my apples?" while the guards say, "Pay your taxes!" Wizards are most annoying: "Hex-e-poo-hex-on-you!" When the game diverts from these stock responses, it's usually to introduce some kind of in-joke.
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| Helpful. Thanks. |
I know many readers are looking forward to post after post on Ultima II, so I hate to disappoint you, but I went ahead and won it in a single day. This is a day in which I also played four hours of Telengard, wrote 12 pages for a report due at work next week, and read three chapters in a book about inferential statistics. Ultima II is not a demanding game, except perhaps on your tolerance for its idiocies.
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| I was unreasonably proud of my boat bridge from France to Greenland. |
Winning the game requires the following:
1. Visiting towns in four of the five eras and speaking to everyone so that you get the few hints that you need from the few people who don't spout nonsense.
2. Acquiring a stock of items: brass buttons and skull keys to fly planes, blue tassels to commandeer ships, trilithiums to engage the hyperspace drives on rockets, and so on. Thieves carry these items, and so you have to kill a lot of thieves.
3. Building up massive amounts of gold so you can buy enough hit points to survive the final encounter, increase your statistics, and buy the weapons and armor you need. This by far is the longest part of the game. Fairly early, you can commandeer a frigate in each time period and you spend most of the game sailing around in your frigate and firing cannon volleys at hapless monsters that literally line up to be gunned down. You are in no danger of death during this process. If the game had consisted solely of the player typing the letter "F" 7,500 times in a Notepad file, it wouldn't be any more boring.
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| This screen shot didn't change for almost two hours. |
4. Bribing the desk clerk at the Hotel California in New San Antonio (and yes, the desk clerk even "welcomes" you) in 1990 to raise your agility, strength, and other statistics so that, among other things, you can wield the Minax-slaying weapon and wear the space armor.
5. Bribing Lord British to get your max hit point total.
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| Tribute?! You arrogant bastard, you brought me here! |
6. Slaying a couple of benighted guards to acquire their keys--the only items you can't get from thieves--so you can break into the prison in New San Antonio and bribe a prisoner to give you the Quicksword "Enilno," which you need to kill Minax. "Enilno" is, of course, "online" backwards. But what I want to know is what did "online" even mean in 1982?
7. Buying some "power armor" which lets you survive in space.
8. Journeying to Moscow in 2112--complete with "Da Red Skwere" and "Da KGB"--to steal first a bi-plane, which requires murdering the owner of the airfield. You then fly the bi-plane to another part of the same town to steal a rocketship to journey to Planet X, upon which there is a castle in which a guy named Father Antos gives you his blessing, allowing you to return to Earth to meet Brother Antos and get from him a ring that protects you from the magic barriers in Minax's castle. I really, really don't blame you if you stopped reading somewhere in there.
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| What significance that Earth's coordinates are 6-6-6? |
9. Going to Minax's castle in the Time of Legends, avoiding her guards, and killing her with the Quicksword. This involves finding her throne room, enduring her magic missile blasts, and hitting her once, at which point she disappears and reappears in another room at the other end of the castle. You then have to journey there and hit her again, only to have her disappear again and return to the first room. Repeat six or seven times.
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| I like to imagine she was speaking German here. |
If all that didn't sound stupid enough, here are some other points:
- Spells only work in dungeons, and since there's absolutely no reason to go in the dungeons (you don't get hit points for it like you do in Ultima I), there's no reason to be a wizard or priest.
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| I only went in here to take this screen shot |
- As with Ultima I, you start the game starving and have to keep buying food. Unlike Ultima I, though, you don't amass gold quickly enough to keep up with your food use. So you basically have to steal it. Fortunately, there's a fish & chips place in what I guess is Namibia where you can steal food all day long and run away as soon as the guards come after you, then re-enter the town and repeat.
- A druid in one town says, "Anol nathrac uth das bessod dien doch dientes." If you're going to pay homage to Excalibur, at least get it right: "An-al nathrach, urth vas bethud, doch-hiel dienve."
- You can travel to each of the nine planets in our solar system (Pluto was still considered a planet in 1982), land your space shuttle, walk around, and encounter orcs and thieves and pirate ships. In fact, most of the planets re-use the same maps as Earth, including its towns and changes you've made to the physical world, such as acquiring frigates and bi-planes. The one and only difference is you can't save on them.
- One of the planets--Uranus or Neptune--has a castle consisting only of jesters who surround you and force you to kill them to escape.
- The game is full of really, really dumb inside jokes and pop-culture references.
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| You're making a pop culture reference to Warren Beatty? Really? |
The thing that made Ultima I the most fun is how you encountered people and places that reoccur in later Ultimas: Montor, Paws, Shamino, the White Dragon's Castle. None of that for Ultima II. As far as I can tell (and I admit I didn't keep a careful log), the only recurring characters are Lord British, Iolo, and Gwenno. The latter two are encased in a grassy area in...I don't know. One of the towns. Remembering how I killed Gwenno for her key in Ultima I and having by now fully internalized my role as a serial killer, I landed a bi-plane in the grassy area and hacked them both to death.
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| One day, I shall return as the Avatar and we will be best friends. Today is not that day. |
Even if you're an Ultima fan--hell, especially if you're an Ultima fan--I encourage you not to play this game. I've played many games with boring gameplay and many games with idiotic plots. It is a rare to find one that combines both.
Here are the end game screen shots so I can prove I really won. I wasn't inspired enough to screen record it.
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| Does anyone know what the ]II[ - P is referring to? |
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Further reading: My posts on the entire Ultima series: Akalabeth (1980), Ultima (1981), Ultima II (1982), Ultima III (1983), Ultima IV (1985), Ultima V (1988), Ultima VI (1990), Ultima VII (1992), Ultima Underworld (1992), and somewhere in there we have the dreadful Ultima: Escape from Mount Drash (1983). For a British copy of the original Ultima, see The Ring of Darkness (1982).
Fantastic blog, man. I was thinking about playing the entire "Ultima" series, but maybe I'll skip this one...
ReplyDeleteAaaw... what a heart breaker. I used to obsess over Ultima ][ in high school, this is really the game that got me completely addicted to CRPG's, and I remember never being able to finish it because Minax would keep teleporting and then forcing me to go through these beams that eventually killed me. Looks like I was missing an important item to survive this.
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to your reviews of U3 ("EVOCARE!") and U4!
I never played this one, but hoped it was a gem. Guess not! As I read, I kept wanting to disagree with your mild rants, disagreements, and humor, but you won me over with the Iolo/Gwen comment...thinking maybe you just hadn't put the game into perspective, given its age and so forth. Naw, this one is probably a dud.
ReplyDeleteLove the blog. What's next?!
I bought this in 1985 after getting Ultima III copied from a friend (bought Ultima III as well to have the maps and everything later). It was terrible. Fortunately, Ultima IV came out not long after and it was mind blowing at the time, 2 disks front and back!!! Enormous!
DeleteA few disorganized comments:
ReplyDelete- (N)egate time was a command you could do if you had some magic powder (I believe). Basically, no monsters (or townspeople and guards, if you were in town) could make any moves for a period of time, although the player could still run around and rob them and attack them.
- Regarding U2, something to keep in mind has much to do with a previous comment I made regarding U1 and its Star Wars mentality. U2 and its time travel were supposedly highly influenced by Time Bandits. It would appear that young Richard Garriott was a bit of a film buff, and tried (in some small way) to reproduce it in a game world.
- Regarding "Enilno", I'm pretty sure that U2 was actually released by Sierra Online, so perhaps it's a reference to that? I'm dredging up some ancient memories here, though, so I could well be wrong.
- Noooooo idea about ]II[-P!
It's a pretty half-assed game, though. I rate it much worse than U1; at least with U1 there's a lot that you can explain away because of when it was made. U2 seems like a cheap cash-in.
I hadn't heard that about "Time Bandits." I didn't see that film; maybe it would flesh out my understanding a little. You're also right about Sierra Online/Enilno. I'm glad there wasn't a sword called Elsi Kcalb in Baldur's Gate.
ReplyDeleteThe basic problem with Ultima II is it doesn't take itself seriously, yet isn't quite fun enough to get away with being campy.
Must agree about Ultima II's boring gameplay; it seems like a big missed opportunity. I know many patches were made that fixed the obnoxious CGA color and annoying bugs (the planets actually DO have different maps, but a bug makes you land back on Earth)... but those are really just turd-polishing. I somehow felt obligated to play the thing to completion anyway... guess I'm an Ultima nerd.
ReplyDeleteIn any event, YOU MUST SEE TIME BANDITS. Directed by Terry Gilliam, it's got midgets, Sean Connery, Ian Holme, and a few of the Monty Python crew in there as well. Trust me, it should make up for the game. :)
Good recommendation. The film is now in my Netflix queue.
ReplyDeleteThis explains why I never played the other Ultima Games...I played this one first. If anything, you were being kind.
ReplyDeleteThe others ARE worth the effort, though, Kevin.
ReplyDeleteUltima ][ is definitely the Dork Age of the series. Subsequent game manuals skim over it very quickly when discussing the history of Britannia; I get the sense that even its creator would like to pretend it never happened.
ReplyDeleteIt is/was also the hardest of the Ultimas to find a functioning copy of. I owned several Ultima collections in which this one just wouldn't start... Finally got it working in the U1-7 compilation.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely the weakest link in the series, although I didn't hate it with the vehemence you seemed to.
So you know, the rationale for it taking place on Earth was that Garriott reckoned one needed a context within which to put time travel. He could, just as easily, have let you travel to a neanderthal filled Sosaria and a high tech, maybe Steampunk, version. But the official logic for Earth was to give a context to the time travel.
This would make more sense if time travel actually played any functional role in the game. Aside from the re-use of the same game maps with different features, there's no particular NEED to have time travel in the game.
ReplyDeleteI might have been a little too critical in my "review" (although that's not what my postings really are), but it reflects how I felt about the game at the time I was playing it.
I never understand the hostility to Ultima II. I played the original version on a PC. I thought it had a great sense of wonder progressing through the different modes of transportation after figuring out how to travel through time and move around the continents(whatever cloth map came with the game did not make that aspect of the game at all clear, IIRC). Figuring out clever ways to get through the cities was fun and even a little bit scary when the guards were after you. Planetary travel didn't quite amount to much of great importance in the adventure, so it was a bit of a letdown, but the achievement of making it that far was amazing. By comparison, Ultima III was a dull slog. Of course, Ultima IV was a quantum leap in the series, but for its time Ultima II was great fun.
ReplyDeleteI liked Ultima II, too. :) It was refreshing to see a fantasy game not take itself too seriously, and was probably the gateway for me to ultimately abandon heroic fantasy as being too unnecessarily dramatic as a genre. ;)
DeleteThat said, compared to Ultima I, I find the Ultima II universe makes a lot more sense. Ultima I had four worlds, they were just islands in an ocean. In Ultima II, there's a sensible connection between the different worlds: they're different time periods. In Ultima III, the world of Sosaria mysteriously loses three continents entirely, but gains an underground area, so I guess there's that.
Anyway, Ultima II was a dumb, fun comedy. I stand by that.
You might find Computer Gaming World's original review of Ultima II amusing (it starts on page 23): http://cgw.vintagegaming.org/galleries/issues/cgw_3.2.pdf
ReplyDeleteGreat find, Andy. I expected to be delighted by the review, but actually I found it rather poorly-written. Sort of a combination of the game manual and a tip sheet. The review of "Zork" is much better, and amusing to look back on nearly 30 years later.
ReplyDeleteI think I'll try to look up the original reviews of all the games I play from now on. I appreciate the idea.
I was not expecting the Lolo/Gwenno crack. That made me laugh harder than anything I've read in a while.
ReplyDeleteI'm feeling stalker-y for all my posts on your old blogs but this is awesome stuff. I'm compelled to let you know how much I appreciate it.
I keep taking breaks from DA2 to come read about where and how it all began.
Re: the CGW review --
ReplyDelete59.95!?!
What?
I had no idea that these games cost SO much. People are complaining now about how the price point has risen to as much and that was almost 30 years ago! o.O
Old comment but I still felt I had to respond. That's the list price, pretty much the only time you'd actually pay that much for games was if you ordered it directly from the publisher's own mail order. Almost all software retailers sold games for much less than the list price. This practice continued well into the 90's, with Origin's catalogs having similarly ridiculous prices for later Ultimas and Wing Commanders and whatever else they published, but if you walked into EB or Babbages and bought the games there, they were usually half the price from the catalogs, more or less.
DeleteHa, not in Australia at the time. I (well, Dad) paid $80 for Ultima IV at the Apple Centre, then the same again for V. I think that's what my best friend paid for the Ultima Trilogy too. There just weren't many other store options at the time.
DeleteCopy protection was also a lot easier to Crack in the 1980s - my father bought an Apple IIe in 1984 rather than a C64 simply because my uncle had one and copied a crap-ton of software for us (including Wizardry, the first three Ultimas, and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves). So one reason publishers charged high list prices might have been awareness that more people were probably going to bootleg the game than buy it.
DeleteYeah, it's pretty crazy. Especially when you consider not just inflation, but how many more people are involved in the making of a game these days. A lot of it has to do with the increased market for CRPGs. There just weren't that many of us buying these games back then, but those of us that did were very dedicated and didn't mind paying a lot of money!
ReplyDeleteIt's just so ironic that people are so upset at premium games debuting at 60 now, ie SC2 DA2, etc. What would this have been adjusted for inflation? 100?
ReplyDelete"What cost $59.95 in 1982 would cost $137.51 in 2011." Thanks, Inflation Calculator! Suddenly Steam seems like an even better deal for PC gaming than it did before. Jeeze, that is even more than I paid for the Amazon limited edition Fallout 3 with the PIP Boy sculpture ... I think I definitely enjoyed that more than I would have enjoyed owning Ultima II back in the day.
DeleteI still have a vivid memory of seeing my mother's jaw drop when the clerk asked $39.95 for "Pool of Radiance."
ReplyDeleteIf I'd paid $60 for Ultima II in 1982, I'd still be angry.
"It is/was also the hardest of the Ultimas to find a functioning copy of. I owned several Ultima collections in which this one just wouldn't start... Finally got it working in the U1-7 compilation."
ReplyDeletewell the original Sierra Online copy i got off ebay (for some just some bucks.) worked nicely, but i tried it just once on my C64, so some do work.
]II[-P is most likely a reference to the fact that Ultima III supported 4 'players' - a 4-character party. The manuals encouraged you to get three friends together and each control a character.
ReplyDeleteYouTuber Majuular stated that "]I[-D ]II[-P" was a working title for the third Ultima game, referring to the fact that is was going to originally be all in 3D and that you would control up to four characters. It sounded like he was pulling that from some possibly-reliable source, but I don't think he gave a specific citation.
DeleteMost sensible explanation I've heard so far, ailurdragon. Thanks. I can't imagine anyone actually playing it like that, though.
ReplyDeleteI played this on a 128k Mac, and loved it at the time. The mac version was speedy, had effective sound- but for the longest period its black and white graphics had me thrwarted as the difference between a town and a piece of forest was the number of black spots the tile had.
ReplyDeleteI never played any of the Ultima games. I remember watching my cousin play one on his NES -- it consisted of him creating a party of fighters, selling all their gear, quitting, and repeating for about 72 consecutive hours (not kidding) before purchasing weapons and going out to win the game.
ReplyDeleteHe told me he'd beaten the game maybe 20 times. I believed him.
That glimpse of the world of Ultima virtually guaranteed I'd never play any of the games. And up till today, I've stuck to my guns. This post makes me feel like I made the right choice.
Well, that's your loss. Ultimas 4-7 are still amazing games.
DeleteI somehow overlooked this comment when it was originally posted about a year and a half ago. I don't think George is thinking of an Ultima game, because I can't think of any in which this strategy would work. In all but one, you don't even create a party.
DeleteOh, no, I didn't overlook it. I replied below (threaded comments weren't available back then).
DeleteActually, this is perfectly possible in the NES version of Ultima 3 - you can make a party of four characters, have three of them sell everything and give their gold to the lead character (164 gold each, I believe), save at the inn, reset the console, go into the character create screen, delete the three characters and make three new characters to replace them. Then repeat.
DeleteThat's really the lamest kind of cheating.
ReplyDeleteThis game is not representative of the Ultima series. Keep reading before you make that decision.
Sorry for the late post, I just wanted to say that I really rather enjoyed Ultima II. Of the first trilogy, I is probably my favorite, though. To be FAIR: I used a walkthrough for II because I'm spoiled and lame at this point. Anyway, just wanted to chip in with my 2 cents.
ReplyDeleteNo problem on late postings; I still read them. I might have just been in a bad mood the day I played Ultima II, but I think the issue is more that I don't like stupid plots, regardless of the gameplay.
ReplyDeleteOh, the plot is absolutely stupid. No argument here. Ha!
ReplyDeleteGot all the Ultimas (the available ones, anyway) on gog.com just recently, and I've been playing through them. Ultima 1 is still a fun little diversion, and remarkably playable for a game 30 years old. Ultima 2 is like have teeth removed via the opposite end of the body, except not quite as enjoyable. 90% of the game involves building up ridiculous amounts of gold, spending it, then building up more gold, then spending it... now all of this might not be so bad if you weren't talking about approximately 5000 gp with every single monster, regardless of difficulty, giving between 1 and 20gp.
ReplyDeleteI hate this game.
Glad to hear a consenting opinion, breenwood! A lot of other people seemed to think I was too harsh on it.
ReplyDeleteDo what I did: get to Minax's world (Panagea) and just sit there in your ship, blasting enemies that constantly respawn. Good thing you never run out of cannonballs!
Ahh, at least some other posters have also recently commented; I don't feel bad about rehashing an old thread. This was one of the seminal games for me, but I realize it is simply because of my youth and how few choices I had available. It's interesting how nostalgia works - I have warm feelings for the game and was quite amused at the time by stealing food, building stats, and moving between the eras and seeing the continents change. Now I think I would see the games many flaws if I played it today. It was fun reading up on it. I won't subject my kids to it when looking to get them into retro CRPGs.
ReplyDeleteJust to sort of keep hope alive (for this blog), I wanted to post. Just beat Ultima 2 today, and I didn't read your post until now. Your post is spot on... the most shocking thing for me is that what is presumably at least half the programming code is useless, i.e., the dungeons. Even the first level of a dungeon has orcs that do 10x to 50x the damage of their counterparts on the overland map. Also, you didn't mention how stats roll over from 99 to 00. That was a HUGE pain once I figured it out.
ReplyDeleteI never played the Ultima games when i was a kid, I don't know why, but the Ultimas were always left on the shelf as I went through bards tale, wasteland, M&M, gold box games, etc. So I was thinking it was that lack of nostalgia that made me find Ultima 1 so terrible, and since this is by all accounts worse I won't be trying it either. But then again I never played the Wizardry series either and I enjoyed Wizardry 1 quite a bit. I'm hopin Ultima gets better at 3 or 4! Also I remember being a kid and games regularly going for 50 bucks then (I'm 32), its pretty amazing that theyre the same price if not cheaper these days.
ReplyDeleteIII and IV improve by light years. I consider the Ultima series really "starting" with III.
DeleteThat's a really good dividing line. 1 was a good game for its time, but had a lot of wackiness, 2 was... well, I'll just say it tried to achieve a lot.
Delete3 was the first real, solid game. It still included some humor, but it wasn't constantly in your face, a back story existed, and you felt like most of the game was at least plausible. It still boiled down to "kill a bunch of bad guys to gain levels so you're strong enough" (especially if you were on a 2nd playthrough), and it had issues (finding a boat was random and sometimes took too long), but it wasn't a constant fight with poor design decisions.
Still, I'd mark the divider at Ultima IV, since that's the first time the series becomes really ABOUT something other than just killing stuff.
Played this bad boy on my Apple ][+ back in the day and absolutely loved it. It's a crapheap, of course, but when there was a sum total of about five games to choose from in the entire genre, it was a lot easier to forgive baffling design decisions and stupid pop culture references. Unfortunately, I still occasionally hear "Hex-e-poo, hex-on-you!" in my head to this day.
ReplyDeleteIf anyone is inspired to give Ultima II a go, perhaps just to gawk at the twisted wreckage, beware of the original Apple ][ version. The game shipped with a bug that keeps the dude at the Hotel California from ever raising your strength. As I recall, you can't survive space travel without a strength of 30+, so this is a very a bad thing indeed.
Later releases fixed this problem (and there's a simple fix you can apply with a hex editor as well), so look for one of these, lest you suffer the same heartbreak as ten-year old me.
Wow. Imagine having one of only five games to choose from, and the one you chose had a bug that made it impossible to win. It makes Skyrim's bugs look tame by comparison.
DeleteGosh, that's a lot of comments. Here's mine.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with your review here, but you haven't mentioned the worst design flaw: You definitively need a blue tassle to get a pirate ship to level up in relatively decent speed; only, you get that bloody tassle (whatever that is) only by chance -- by killing a thief lucky enough to carry it.
Now, in one game, I spent one hour running around through all available time zones, killing everything I could, and never ever getting one Blue Tassle. Hordes of monsters accumulated on distant islands, unable to ever leave, and reducing the number of monsters I could kill (there's a maximum number of monsters on any one map, I'm sure).
So I guess there's a good chance that even on a bug-free version, you can't win this game.
However, in a later game, I got the blue tassle after five minutes. Although I like the wacky humor, I just can't stand it if vital things are just random.
Thanks for your wonderful blog, by the way! I don't always agree with your verdict, but I enjoy reading it immensely.
I do remember that from my play-through. It was infuriating every time I killed a thief and DIDN'T get a tassel.
DeleteExcellent review. Just replayed this off GOG as well. There are a bunch of patches, such as:
ReplyDeletehttp://reconstruction.voyd.net/index.php?event=project&typeKeyword=upgrades
and
http://codex.ultimaaiera.com/wiki/Ultima_II_Upgrade_Patch
that fix the nasty bugs, add more color, allow you to turn off auto-save, and added an ALT-R to "reload" option, so that you can save, run into a town, try something stupid, and reload harmlessly. It helps tons.
A couple things that helped me a lot (that I haven't seen on any walkthroughs), so dumping them here:
1. Go to Le Jester, kill the first person you see (who is a thief), and run. If you can't kill him in one shot, stand above him, so that the first hit makes him run down against the edge of the town. Since he's a thief, he gives all those happy items pretty frequently. I had 10 of every item pretty quickly.
2. If you go to the hotel california guy and (O)ffer him 0 gold, he not only raises a stat, but he raises it directly to 99! Repeat 6 times and poof, insta-super-character.
3. You can steal from Castle Britannia's vault, or the Russian post-apocalypse city's mid-lake area for armor and weapons. You can't get better than chain mail, but you can get a light-sword pretty early and for free.
4. For gold, go to the time of legends to kill things. It helps to have suped-up first, and helps even more to bring your prop plane. Wait in the area near the portals and hold the "P" key to advance time and let enemies stack up, go out and kill about 50 in a row, make about 300-400 gold in about 2 minutes. Lather-rinse-repeat.
U7/8/1/2 down, U3/4/5/6 to go...
I'm not sure this game is worthy enough to develop hacks, but I appreciate your comprehensive list. I'm pretty sure I did #4.
DeleteIt's interesting to observe how these early CRPGs influenced the development of the main JPRG stables, despite the protests from some quarters that the two genre are philosophically chalk and cheese.
ReplyDeleteIf you accept the crude argument that Wizardry was the main inspiration for Shin Megami Tensei, Rogue was the main inspiration for Mystery Dungeon, and Ultima the main inspiration for Final Fantasy, it becomes tempting to speculate that the time travel mechanism of Ultima II was a direct inspiration for Chrono Trigger.
It had a similar template of an overworld that differed in myriad subtle and unsubtle ways as you journeyed from era to era (the list of distinct ages seems very similar between the two games), although the impression I get from your piece is that CT was much more successful in making use of the conceit to provide the player with interesting puzzles and scenarios requiring a bit of the old space-time meddlery and casual manipulation. Though it couldn't quite deliver on the idea all the way through to the game's conclusion, which is a shame.
In fact the entire jRPG genre is largely inspired in wizardry. Final Fantasy had starter and upgrade classes, Dragon Quest and Earthbound(maybe others) had first person battles, and all of them have command input before the start of turns.
DeleteUltima II was the first of the series that I played, and the second CRPG overall (the first being Questron), and I remember actually really enjoying the game. Far from turning me off of the series, I went on to go through and beat each game as they came out. Up until Ultima IX that is, which for me was the final proof that Origin really was dead.
ReplyDeleteI played U2 after U3. It's not as good as that game (which happens to be my favorite game ever, by the way, at least in a subjective sense). But I feel like this review is far too harsh. The plot and combat are weak, but there's a fun 'kitchen sink' quality to the game. So many time zones, planets, etc. -- lots of stuff to explore. It's more fun if you don't really know what you're doing and don't just make a beeline for the end boss. Also, it contains a significant technical improvement over U1 that would carry forward in subsequent Ultimas -- the fact that towns are now multiple screens in size. That makes a big difference to me; the little townlets in U1 (and in Questron) always feel pretty squished.
DeleteI have to agree on your views on both Ultima I and II. The first was way better and Ultima II seems to drop the ball. There's just too much seemingly random stuff added in to the game, the experience isn't coherent enough. In the first Ultima you kinda accept that there's this short space adventure in the middle of the game (Garriott's father was an astronaut so he was obviously interested in space himself too) but Ultima II is just too confused for it's own good.
ReplyDeleteI actually played both of the games a while back for the first time ever. As a Ultima collector I acquired all of the games in their original physical boxes but didn't have the heart to open the still-sealed copy of Ultima II that I managed to get. Luckily there's GOG.com to help. As to the price discussion above I'd say that nowadays you're lucky to find Ultima II under $100 in any condition, let alone in mint or sealed box. By the way both II and III have excellent fan-made patches that make even Ultima II look decent in 16-color EGA.
Sorry for the quite late contribution but I just got introduced to your fantastic blog by an article I read in a gaming magazine. Good stuff, have to keep on reading. I'm planning on starting Ultima III very soon, should be interesting to compare views there too.
Thanks for your thoughts. I agree that the space experience in U1 was somehow less offensive than the sprawling nonsense of U2.
DeleteDid you read it in a Finnish gaming magazine? I've been trying to find a link.
Yes, it was published in the latest number of Finnish gaming magazine Pelit (Games). Unfortunately the only version available online is a digital version of the magazine and it's only available to subscribers. It's written in Finnish only, but it's a very interesting read (2 pages) complete with pictures so I'd imagine that you have a lot more Finnish readers now.
DeletePerhaps you could ask the reporter who wrote the article if he could email it to you?
I wanted to link to it for my readers, so thanks for confirming that's not possible.
DeleteI have seen a big increase from Finland recently. I normally get about 1,200 hits a month from Finland, but I've already exceeded that in the first 15 days of September.
Anyway, welcome! I'm glad you enjoy the blog. Keep commenting.
Brutal review but I seem to recall from interviews that Garriott admitted he basically got in over his head with this one, and it made no sense.
ReplyDeleteYou can get it legally from GOG, bundled with Ultima 1 and 3, but I don't know if there's a ton of compelling reasons to play this one.
The C64 version looks nicer, but that probably makes no difference to the game play at all.
I don't think this game was ever ported to my beloved Amiga, though it did show up on most platforms at the time.
The writer of this blog is a liar. You did not finish this game in 1 day, unless you used hints from the Internet. You also must be a kid because if you played this game when it came out it was mind blowing. You seem to forget (or never knew) the limitations of the day, so simply having any story at all was an accomplishment.
ReplyDeletePlease stop writing about CRPG's.
Thanks.
God . . . I . . . You're right. For more than four years, I've been afraid that someone was going to find out my secret. My whole CRPG blogging career has been a lie.
DeleteI'm going to stop blogging immediately.
I hate myself.
"simply having any story at all was an accomplishment." -- can't... stop... laughing
DeleteYou know, I just re-read the post, and even though he's rude and doesn't bother addressing me by my actual name or title, nor has he read the sidebar or any other posts on the blog, there's a germ of validity in this commenter's overall complaint.
DeleteI still maintain that Ultima II is the worst of the series, but it perhaps didn't deserve a review that was quite this harsh. This was early in my blogging career and I hadn't yet found a consistent tone. I had focused on mostly the positive aspects of the previous games, and I'm sure I had it in my mind that it would be fun, as a matter of contrast, to utterly rip a game apart.
While I didn't lie anywhere in the post, neither did I mention that I'd played the game before, at least twice. I don't know why I would have left out such an important fact, but I did. That meant that I both went into the game knowing basically what I needed to do to win (partly accounting for my quick time) but also that I had a basic template in my mind of what I wanted to say before I'd even started the game.
As for "simply having a story at all," there's a germ of truth there, too. If I look at the pre-1982 list of games, about half of them have decent back stories (e.g., Hellfire Warrior, Ultima, Wizardry) but the others don't (e.g., Fracas, Telengard). If you were a kid at the time, you could have easily been exposed to a series of games in which the story was "you're a warrior; go kill a wizard." Now, personally, I prefer that paucity of storytelling to a story like Ultima II, where nothing makes any sense, but to each his own.
The issue of how things were at the time is a persistent issue in my blog. I TRY to consider that in most games I play, but the entire point of my blog is to play these games from the perspective of a modern player.
In summary, even an obnoxious twit can raise points worth considering.
Anonymous calling you a liar and telling you to stop writing about CRPGs was the hilariousest comment on this blog so far XD
DeleteAnd... well, maybe he does have a valid point that you were too harsh. Personally, I have played U2 years ago and from all Ultimas I know (1 to 4), it is by far the most badly designed. And yeah, the silly "humor" doesn't help at all. So I quite agree. Of course it still was an achievement back in its day, and I had some fun playing, but far less than playing Ultima I, III (or Rogue, for that matter).
I personally love this review for the clear sense of someone being totally disappointed and angry.
Do you actually monitor old posts for comments?
ReplyDeleteI just started playing Ultima 2 and have been stuck on it. Fifth character and the best I can do is slowly die of starvation. I've been trying to avoid hints and spoilers, but I've decided that the game isn't worth it and to at least get an idea what I am missing.
So I need to steal food, be more aggressive about killing people to take their stuff, and even kill guards to get keys? (I have been assuming there's a Thieves Guild like U3.) Wow. I have no idea how I would have found that out based only on the hints in the game or the manual...
Anyway. Onward!
I do indeed.
DeleteAs you've discovered, thievery and murder is the only way to thrive in U2. You have to head to whatever city is in South America (or Africa?) and sells Fish & Chips, go to the far right end of the counter, and just STEAL until the guards take note of you. You should be able to escape to the east without much of a fight. Return to the city and repeat.
Don't try to kill guards until you get a blue tassel and can commandeer a ship. Blasting them with cannons from a safe distance is the only way you'll survive.
Enjoy marauding!
Won! That wasn't nearly as terrible as I was led to believe. Parts of it were even fun. Once you figure out that you need to steal food, that you can get the (second) best weapons, and reasonable armor without paying for it, you can concentrate on exploring the world. I was playing the patched version, so my experience may not have been the same as others'.
DeleteThe beginning of the game up until you manage to get powerful enough to kill your first guard was touch and go, but once you get the first key to steal a ship, to kill more guards, it starts to get easier.
I did have to grind to afford the power armor and get the full set of Oracle hints. But thorough exploration revealed most of the clues of what to do, including getting points at New San Antonio, etc. The Brother/Father Anton clues scattered about were mostly well done and well placed, though I did not get that "Brother Anton" and "Father Anton" were the same person without checking a walkthrough later. Some interesting depth, completely lost through poor dialog.
Although you never need to go to a tower/cave, I found I could never get enough Tri-Lithium to explore all the planets without delving and following the hint to make it to the 16th floor. The dungeon in the North African tower was actually well done, with a multi-level gauntlet up and down to different parts of the same levels to get to a cache of 50+ Tri-Lithiums. I did not map it because I could not keep track of north.
The biggest disappointment was the space portion. Even in the fan-patched version, which restores the broken planet maps (they worked in the floppy disk version for PC, but not the later releases, including gog.com), none of the planets had any clues that you actually need to complete the game. The towns were even more of a joke than usual, save for Planet X. It was a wasted opportunity to reward careful exploration, though the designs of the planets (especially Pluto) were well done.
The joke of the seer sitting next to "ATREE" was a cool "aha!" moment, though I did have to consult a walkthrough (your post, I think) to realize you needed to bribe him. Needing to bribe the clerk in NSA was telegraphed, but not this. And I spoke to everyone in every town and kept careful notes, so I am fairly certain there was no hint of what to do, only who you needed to do it with. I suppose there weren't that many options...
And I never did realize how to get the final sword, but apparently you can kill Minax without it. I found the guy, but did not realize you needed to bribe him until reading the walkthrough.
The final boss level was quite fun with monster-filled sections opening up as you do more damage to Minax and chase her back and forth to her two thrones. I had to burn through all of my "Negate Time" items, with an ever-longer train of enemies nipping at my heels, to hack her down to size. I had only 300 HP at the end, so I cut it pretty close.
I just can't help but feel they rushed through designing the mid-to-end part of the game once they had a cool idea for U3. The early exploration section up until you have a frigate in every time period was easily as fun as U1 and more fun than the limited exploration of U3. While the use of Earth maps is laughable knowing what they did with the rest of the series, on its own it made for an entertaining choice. Giving the player a frame of reference aided exploration, while also adding a tinge to the post-apocalypse world that wouldn't be there otherwise.
(Very) long way to say I didn't hate it. :) But never again.
You offer a good review. When I wrote this, it was early in my blogging career, and I was probably looking for an excuse to trash something. I might have made it sound more unforgivable than it actually is. Either way, as you say, never again.
DeleteDon't worry, I have a blog where I am dissatisfied with my first posts as well. :) I thought of removing them, but there's no eureka moment when I start to get happy, only a realization that yes-- they get better. So I keep them and hope no one gets the brilliant idea to reread from the beginning...
DeleteThis happens to everyone. I actually purged my first blog effort because it was just too horrible. I'm glad this never made it to console in any case.
Delete>The joke of the seer sitting next to "ATREE" was a cool "aha!" moment, though I did have to consult a walkthrough (your post, I think) to realize you needed to bribe him. Needing to bribe the clerk in NSA was telegraphed, but not this. And I spoke to everyone in every town and kept careful notes, so I am fairly certain there was no hint of what to do, only who you needed to do it with. I suppose there weren't that many options...
DeleteIt also isn't mentioned that you need to bribe the swashbuckler in the prison to get his Quicksword, and the exact amount of 500GP. At least I didn't discover that during my recent playthrough and also had to look up a guide.
As someone who grew up on computer games from the 80s and beyond I really feel a connection to your blog and follow it nearly every day. I think the reviews are spot on and the amount of work you sink into this is incredibly impressive.
ReplyDeleteUntil now I've been lurking, but I need to comment on your review about Ultima II. I'm sure it's accurate, and if I played it now I would feel the same way. However, when I was a 10-year who first played it in 1982 I was utterly blown away by the gameplay and graphics. It was my third game I ever owned for my IBM PC after Zork and Wizardry, so my computer gaming experience was limited, but I remember being utterly enthralled with the game world and spent hours and hours playing the game even after I beat it.
I particularly remember the dungeons that I found terrifying for some reason. I use to have to psych myself out to play them, and only then for limited periods and never at night. I use to create whole continents with the pirate ships (there was a bug I exploited) and propped up my book on the keyboard to pass time quickly so I could respawn enemies to fight them over and over and over again.
The only negative experience I ever had was after I convinced my mom to buy the game. When I tore open the box at home I found that one of the floppy disks had been bent and wouldn't load the game. I was devastated and had to mail in the disk for a replacement, which took over a month to receive. That's a lifetime for a 10-year old. The kids these days don't know how good they have it with Steam and the wider internet. We use to live like animals.
I remember always being at the mercy of my C64 disk drives, which were prone to failing frequently and repeatedly. I must have owned 3 between 1985 and 1990, and for each one, I ultimately had to take it to some computer repair guy I found in New Hampshire who did something or other with a "pin" to get it working again; then, inevitably it would fail permanently. I am very grateful for the modern era.
DeleteThanks for your original recollections of the game. That's something I can rarely replicate in the blog.
That's funny - the only part of my C64 that never broke was the disk drives. My dad bought our 64C (the one that was redesigned to look like a C128) in 1986 (the year before I was born), and the 1541II that came with it worked just fine when the mainboard died in '94. Fortunately I had an uncle that didn't want his anymore, so he gave me a first model 64 with a regular 1541 that he'd bought in '83 which worked until I was forced to donate it (because I needed my desk for homework, we also had an NES and SNES, and somehow the small number of boxes that the 64 occupied in storage would take up too much space on the normally empty closet shelf) in '99.
DeleteI lost count of how many joysticks I broke, of course (until I figured out that Genesis controllers worked just fine, although there's supposedly a risk of damage that I never ran into), and I had to rebuild both power supplies when diodes burned out, but those 1541s just kept trucking.
I, too, had a number of early computer gaming experiences on the C64, but I was more in Gnoman's group rather than Chet's.
DeleteMy 1541 was solid as they came. Or, from what I've read here and other places, as solid as they should've come?
The main C64 unit, though? We burned two GPU chips out from overheating. My memory is a little fuzzy on this, but I'm pretty sure we didn't bother trying to get it fixed the second time it went out. By that point, though, it was the early '90's, I was in high school, and the SNES, Genesis, and 3/486 PCs were coming into power.
There are days where I do miss that brown, plastic breadbox though. The emulators somehow just don't do it justice.
Bwahahaha, excellent. Ultima 2 is one of my favorite CRPGs of all time, mostly because it was my first, but also the story made so much sense to me. I realize I'm in the minority on this one, and even among die-hard Ultima-philes this is the black sheep of the franchise. Excellent thoughts. :)
ReplyDeleteYou mention that the other planets "look the same" as places on Earth, that's actually a bug in the PC version. When they replicated the disks long ago they accidentally over-wrote all of the maps on the galaxy disk with the same data from the earth disk. There are patches online to fix this. That said, you didn't miss anything; the other worlds have nothing of import.
ReplyDeleteI played this in the computer lab when I was in junior high school, and was very frustrated at not knowing the controls.
Here's a weird thing... My math teacher told me when he played it he came to a town and found it was in the middle of a festival and he had to smuggle himself out on a ship after getting a blue tassel. Uh... yeah, that SO does not happen in the game at all. I halfway think people just made up more content to fill in the gaps.
Basically, Ultima II feels like it was written by a teenager who was more focused on getting his coding right than actually providing a detailed game and backstory. Which is spot-on accurate from what I've read about Richard Garriot's work on it.
I played the C64 version, and I think I had a fair playing experience. First of all, you need something to do during the long loading times (my flat's never been so clean and tidy...). Then, the colors C64 are natural: instead of black grasslands and purple ocean, you get green grass and blue sea.
ReplyDelete- PLOT: the game got inspired by the movie "Time Bandits". This explains, for example, why Lord British is so annoying: he's inspired to a character in the movie.
Right after the death of Mondain, 1000 years in the past, Minax used the time doors to travel to other ages and worlds. Such worlds include the "Time of Legends" and an alternate Earth. Eventually, Minax manages to open time doors in Sosaria. Instead of invading it straightaway, she lets Sosarians travel in space-time for a while first, just to mess up things a bit. When Minax's attack starts, Lord British asks the Stranger to find the sorceress.
The hero starts traveling; she (I assume the Stranger is female, because the female gender is more powerful than male in this game) needs a magic ring to enter Minax's castle. In order to get the ring, she has to talk to Father Antos; in order to talk to Father Antos, she has to find where he is; unfortunately, Father Antos is one of the people who traveled in time and space. The quicksword is not mandatory to beat the game.
- GOLD: because of the overwhelming need for gold, I elaborated a game strategy that optimizes gold. First: start with Int=20 and Cha=20 to get a 40% discount on everything since the beginning; no need to steal anything then; (2) travel by ship as much as possible, so to save money on food and use cannons, that are one of the strongest weapons in the game; (3) visit the first two floors of any one dungeon, and get good weapons for free; (4) raise HP to 5000 only, because after that Lord British gives you less HP for the same price. And so on...
Here's one reason for going in dungeons: you can get good weapons for free, thus saving some money. The first two floors are sufficient.
About the meaning of ]I[ and ]II[, I supposed the authors originally planned some expansion module of "Ultima ][", so that ]I[ and ]II[ could be read "2.1" and "2.2", as if the ][ brackets open up and get another number superimposed. Maybe they planned to make the nine planets useful. Apparently, they scrapped everything in favor of the party system of "Ultima 3: Exodus".
--- by Abacos
Even as Ultima II was not *good*, it was MY entry into the world of RPG and started my love for Ultima.
ReplyDeleteFinally killing Minax was SUCH a great feat in my view - i never forgot this scene.
So, the game was perceived quite different with younger people and at that time ;-)
BTW, this page is from germany?
But you´re not german, seeing your comments about Minax´s yells :D
I re-enter my text as Name/URL, sorry:
ReplyDeleteEven as Ultima II was not *good*, it was MY entry into the world of RPG and started my love for Ultima.
Finally killing Minax was SUCH a great feat in my view - i never forgot this scene.
So, the game was perceived quite different with younger people and at that time ;-)
BTW, this page is from germany?
But you´re not german, seeing your comments about Minax´s yells :D
Hi, Thomas. Google publishes versions of Blogger on every major country domain. So although I blog on crpgaddict.blogspot.com (U.S.), you'll also find it at crpgaddict.blogspot.de (Germany), crpgaddict.blogspot.fr (France), and so forth.
DeleteI'm glad you enjoyed Ultima II. If I wrote that entry again today, I might not be so harsh.
I loved this game. As a kid (ten?) it had the perfect amount of easy, silly, and wild fun. It seemed like the first go-anywhere do-anything game I ever played. I couldn't get enough. I think it was striving for an open-world answer to the extreme constraint of the Wizardry experience.
ReplyDeleteYour review, while negative, brought back a ton of good memories. Thank you. I've just discovered this blog and have enjoyed reviews of games I haven't played in many years.
I feel a bit silly commenting on an old review (you're not wrong about any of it, honestly. I thought the story was goofy fun, but so much of it was just slaughtering things from a boat for hours on end. Eek. At least Ultima I was QUICK when it came to the ultra repetitive parts!)
ReplyDeleteThere was one other familiar face though from later Ultima games: Dupre is somewhere on Jupiter asking people if they want to buy a duck. He's very easy to miss though.
Oops, I saw that you referenced Dupre in a much later review. That's what I get for commenting on old stuff without reading the newer ones! Sorry!
DeleteI couldn't possibly expect readers to read every review before commenting. Interesting tidbits and trivia belong with the core posting on the game, so thanks for mentioning this here. I think I missed him because I was trying to get through the idiotic space section as quickly as possible.
DeleteIt never occurred to me to steal food in II so I never got anywhere with it. I found the exploration intriguing, even after first playing IV. I've always meant to come back to it - I've finished IV-IX plus the Worlds and Underworlds many times, but I've only dabbled in I and hardly touched II-III.
ReplyDeleteI don't think it's the worst mainline game though. That dubious honour must go to the SNES version of Ultima VII. It's abhorrent.
Also - didn't Antos show up again in IV?
Have you played Ultima V on NES? U7 is going to have its work cut out for it if it thinks it can dethrone that title for worst mainline game.
Delete>But what I want to know is what did "online" even mean in >1982?
ReplyDeleteThis is a very late response, I realize, but I do not see it addressed in the comments.
My understanding that "online" in that era meant that something was connected and working. So, there would be a "printer not online" error message if one tried to print to a printer that was disconnected and/or turned-off.
In the 80's where I lived (CA) online was treated as a contraction of "on the line" and meant "connected to another computer by my modem". A typical usage might be "my phone was busy because I was online with blah BBS"
DeleteIf only i were able to knew that there were a fregate in the Age of Legends (the age with Minax castle), i wouldn't had to spend sooooo much time killing monster for gold in the main era and i think i would have hated the game a bit less.
ReplyDeleteBecause as i finished it, i think the only thing i did was going around the globe to kill everything for a lot of hours....
If only i knew that you could have a fregate in the age of Minax, with all those monster, i would have hated the game a lot less ! Because i couldn't find one so i had to get my gold by killing things at another time which was WAY more time consuming and drove me crazy. Where was it ?
ReplyDeleteAnd for the plot, i don't know, that's my second Ultima game, i always understood it as "the hero from Ultima 1 was someone from Earth and then Minax followed him to destroy Earth" which was kinda meta and cool somehow...
For the rest, what an horrible experience...
There were online games 1982. Of course only a few students played it in university networks and they were called Muds (Multi-User-Dungeons).
ReplyDeleteDecades ago I read a hint guide that covered the first five Ultima games (all that were out at the time), which had an interview with Richard Garriot. The interviewer asked him about all the strange stuff in the first two games, and Garriot said that when he first started out, he considered the game incomplete if there was any space left on the disk. Thus the addition of seemingly useless things, or aspects that clashed, were simply a novice game designer trying to cram as much gameplay into the game as possible whether it made sense or not.
ReplyDeleteI finally brought myself to finish this game, now the only Ultima I didn't play to the end is the third. Well I have to say, what a letdown even compared to 1. That one was rather fun to play and interesting. Sure it also got some strange elements but they came over as more...inoffensive as in this. The grinding for money didn't bother me as much as in here, I may remember incorrectly but I thought it was much shorter than 2.
ReplyDeleteMy strategy for getting the GP's as quick as possible was first also to use a ship and blast away the enemies. BTW, it seems to be a bug that you can take over enemy ships or how do you explain why there are TWO ships after you boarded the attacking one. The guide I consulted also said that playing straight meant to first buy enough HP, armor and weapons to be able to defeat a guard and get a ship from one of the towns, but I thought screw it, I'm sure everyone back then also took this ""exploit"" for a feature and I didn't want to experience the game in some artificial ironman way.
But finally I came up with a better (=quicker) alternative. You go to the village in southern Africa in B.C. times. When you enter you notice one thief short of the village border. Kill him, escape before the guard reaches you, rince, repeat. You will also have the benefit of amassing the thiefs items.
Thanks for the honest review. They say aspiring authors have thousands of worthless words in them before they get to the good stuff. It seems that the same may be true of some game authors. This was an interesting milestone along Richard Garriott's road to "the good stuff." I for one am glad he was able to persevere.
ReplyDeleteBeing myself from Argentina, it is cool to see Tierra del Fuego (literally, Land of Fire) mentioned in this game. It's capital city (Ushuaia) is the southernmost city in the world, so I asume that Tierra del Fuego is the southernmost place of land in the game, right? That would mean that Garriot knew his geography
ReplyDeleteAlas, Tierra del Fuego is not mentioned in the game. I just meant that the game lets you walk to the southern tip of South America.
DeleteI recently bought this off of GOG as part of the entire series package. I played IV as a youth, and owned VII and VIII although I was never able to get them to work well thanks to the weirdness of their code and MS-DOS hacks needed to get them to work. I had decided that I was going to just play through them all, in order, without hints, so I could capture the entire saga. I made it all the way through Ultima before hitting this one.
ReplyDeleteI personally think your review is spot on. While the game is not technically unwinnable, the amount of logical leaps you have to make in order to figure out what to do or how to do what you need to do are ridiculous. Ultima had some of this (for example, if you want the key you have to kill the jester, which while maybe not moral, you can at least figure out, but sometimes, the jester doesn’t have the “right” key, so somehow you have to figure out that you should just repeat until you get the right key to rescue the princess…), but Ultima II is chock full of this stuff. Looking back at your review, and what you have to do to actually win, I feel like is very contingent upon someone carefully parsing every line in the manual and then figuring out what that means in the game world.
My prior experience with Ultima IV led me to believe that I should be “good” (which tends to be my general gaming alignment anyway), so I avoided stealing and killing and went around all the various earths talking to everyone who wasn’t behind a locked door until I knew to go to Planet X at 9-9-9, and that there was an old man in San Antonio that had a clue, and I should offer gold to the clerk at the Hotel.
I knew from Ultima I that I needed a reflect suit or better to enter space, but I wasn’t strong enough to wear one. I offered gold to the clerk, heard “Alakazam”, but had no idea what that meant, so I wandered around again, trying to open doors, seeing if anyone new was around, et cetera. I tried again with the clerk, got another “Alakazam” and then gave up.
That is beside the fact that while there is an oblique hint about sailors and blue tassels, the player has to figure out the easiest way to accumulate gold is on a frigate, and if you never figure that out, the likelihood is that you wander the world for eternity just trying to accumulate enough gold to eat.
It IS interesting from the standpoint of what it offered for the time, but I think between the game mechanics and the leaps of logic necessary to complete it, it’s hardly playable.
Edit: I should say I was good until I got frustrated because clearly I needed some things that were behind closed doors and I couldn’t get there. I tried stealing keys from the guards which apparently is impossible and then I went on a killing spree and killed a bunch of guards and other innocent bystanders. I stole the plane and didn’t really know what to do with it and ended up flying through a gate by accident which made me realize the possibilities. Still, I think this is just a poorly made game… if you already know what to do, you can brute force your way through, if you don’t, just realize you are consigning yourself to hours upon hours of boredom and frustration.
Deletewhen i played this for the first time, i'm not sure i really /was/ thinking about any of these games in terms of the sheer progress richard garriott had made in his strides as a developer, but now, playing them back to back, it's easy to see his growth from "making toys" [u0-u2] to "making games."
ReplyDeletewhile u2 is VERY underbaked [the space section is just a lot of empty nothing] and mostly irreverent, there's one actually very awesome facet to this game that i /really/ miss in modern games:
in u2, the game world is /part of the puzzle/ of the game, and it would be a /fantastic/ puzzle, if the world map even mattered the slightest, but it largely doesn't and that makes this "puzzle" a moot point.
what do i mean by that? i mean that the time gates that tie everything together do so in a way where you have to learn which goes where and that's actually really awesome.
u3 and u4 do this, too, but their scope is rather smaller, which makes the puzzle a little less interesting [but also: it's just a repeat of the u2 puzzle, which is a pity.]
otherwise, i felt much like crpg addict did. lots of this was sort of nonsense and i wish that richard had sat on it for a while longer to iron out the nonsense bits, but also just to add some actual /gameplay/ to it.
the seeds of an actually interesting story are here, though [with the time travel and such] and a little more time and thought and care may have salvaged u2.
For some reason, I cannot comment via my Google account.
ReplyDeleteUltima ][ actually got me hooked onto CRPGs, and not just for the stylized Roman numeral two! I thought it was much better than Ultima, in that you could actually see the monsters coming and you had to direct your attacks. In Ultima, before I learned it was just written in basic — so I could break and set my hp to whatever I want — I would wedge paper into the “a” and repeat key on my apple ][ plus for am hour, while mobs would just spontaneously appear. Ultima ][ had me tracking running and strategically placing them. I remember it being quite tense when a balron or daemon appeared. Plus there was always the issue of the one unkillable guard in each city.
Perhaps your dissatisfaction is due to a forty-year old figuring out all the clues, decades later when the tropes are trite, while a teenager at the time actually had to keep notes and figure the clues out.
BTW, the time travel was that Minax used the time doors to influence history and bring about Armageddon. (I think she realized the one who killed her mentor/lover came from earth, so she destroyed the earth in retaliation)
It's nice to see I'm not the only one who thought U2 was the black sheep of the series. I got the Ultima Trilogy for the C64, Dad and I played through them in order, and even at age 10 I could see there was something...*off* about U2. We did beat it, but still. I really liked role-playing and imagining being my character, and U2's constant avalanche of cheap wackiness made that impossible.
ReplyDeleteThe jokes weren't even funny. Even by 10-year-old standards.
You said something in the comments about any attempt at a story being better than no story, or the generic "you are a warrior, kill the evil wizard." I'm not sure I agree. In more recent years, I've quit games because the story was so grindingly bad that I couldn't enjoy the game beyond the most shallow, surface level. I couldn't *respect* it. A generic non-story would have been better; I at least could have projected my own story onto that.
Yeah, that's not a bad point. A generic story doesn't completely kill your immersion like a stupid one does.
DeleteAs silly as it is, I think the setting on Earth is one of the best things about this game. It may not sit well with the stories of the other games, but it acts as a very effective shorthand for worldbuilding, which allows the devs to pack a world with 5 interconnected time periods onto a little floppy disk without using space on establishing a fantasy world with its own history and politics. It makes navigation with the time doors easier too, given the player's familiarity with the layout of the Earth.
ReplyDeleteOn the whole I think a few individual elements were greatly improved in U2 (better town/NPC design with less redundant content being the main upgrade) but the reliance on grinding for heaps of money, the much more tedious and player-hostile character development (Hotel California vs. the signposts from U1), and the cryptic steps in the quest involving bribing specific NPCs with specific amounts of money, all outweigh the positives.
When I reviewed this, I complained a lot about the large amount of grinding and the low spawn rates of monsters. I found out afterward that the grind would have been much lighter if I had roleplayed a less heroic protagonist. I saw a speedrun from this year's RPG Limit Break (a charity speedrunning marathon) where they went to a town with a thief at the entrance and just slaughtered the same guy over and over, leaving and re-entering the town repeatedly. Then, after paying for some stats at the hotel, they went straight to Uranus and killed all the jesters a dozen or so times. Not exactly a paragon of virtue.
The speedrun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Vc_JuU1Krs
I need to add this to my list to go back and play again and write a more serious blog post about it. Your video is again quite good, and it does a good job balancing the pros and cons.
DeleteAnd you make a good point, here and in the video, why setting it on Earth makes sense. There's no impact to time travel if it's set in an unfamiliar world.
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