Ultima II Analytical Playthrough: Part 1 kzread.info/dash/bejne/oZaimsGfp9Pfiag.html

@edgarburlyman738

11 ай бұрын

I'm a highly intelligent and very very hungry person IRL, I'm basically your character in this.

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

@@edgarburlyman738 please save us from this age of darkness

@comradestannis

11 ай бұрын

Subscribed!

I once sat down to create a gentle parody of the time loop plot from Final Fantasy. Years later, I found all the key pieces of my parody in a summary of Ultima, one of FF's acknowledged influences.

It's absurd how ambitious this was. Although maybe its most interesting contribution to RPGs, beyond the tile-based map, is using mobility upgrades as a major way of gating player progress. Even having overlapping vehicles, so that the horse and ship will eventually just be replaced outright by the aircar. That's genuinely smart design, especially for the time.

@comradestannis

11 ай бұрын

Wonder if I should play this game, just for the novelty...

Ultima may included Sci-fi stuff likely because D&D did as well. You could find crashed starships and energy weapons in some modules back in the day, most famously in the Barrier Peaks one but they showed up several places including in the Mystara setting. Barrier Peaks didn't hit retail until 1980, but was around earlier as a convention/tournament module.

@mkfort

11 ай бұрын

Yes, and much of the fiction which inspired D&D (Appendix N) had a much looser mix of science and fantasy. A few examples would be Dying Earth (Vance), The High Crusade (Anderson), and the John Carter stories (Burroughs). There are many other examples but the genres were much less strictly defined when everything was pulp fiction.

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

Very true. Add into that the fact that Garriott's father was an astronaut and his boss at the computer store he was working at had been NASA and you get a picture of his influences. And he also just really liked Star Wars. Ultima II, on the other hand, was largely influenced by Time Bandits - or specifically, the time gate map from Time Bandits. He chose On-Line Systems to publish Ultima II because they were the only ones who would let him put a cloth map in the game. More on that when I release the Ultima 2 breakdown.

@nostromo9743

11 ай бұрын

I think its called Gonzo Fantasy

@jrherita

11 ай бұрын

Ok weirdly I feel a little stressed seeing those frigates :). I have a feeling they were painful in Ultimas 2-3 which I played as a very young kid.. (I did end up beating 2, and I’m pretty sure I beat 3).

@thomasffrench3639

8 ай бұрын

@@MichaelCoorlimwhat’s with Terry Gilliam movies and RPGs?

Was playing through the ultima series. Got all the way to 3 where I spent every coin I had on food, and then starved to death before I encountered a monster. Good times.

I cant believe I never knew there was a starfighter game in Ultima 1. Especially given the time, I'm surprised they could spare the space for the extra code needed.

@comradestannis

11 ай бұрын

This KZreadr makes this game look genuinely amazing.

U1 was so weird to play through. I found the 1-3 box at a used book store as a teenager and played through it in the 90s after having played U6.

@AUniqueHandleName444

11 ай бұрын

I got a 3-box set in the early 2000s, it had everything from ultima I to ultima 8 -- which never worked. lol

Fascinating how much of this game's DNA you can find in both the first Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy games!

@bryanx0317

11 ай бұрын

Yea most people consider Dragon Quest to be the first RPG but they are forgetting to add the "J" at the beginning. Ultima was around before both of the games you mention.

@Welverin

11 ай бұрын

@@bryanx0317Dragon Quest was directly inspired by Wizardry and Ultima (and indirectly if not directly D&D). Final Fantasy was inspired by all of those in one way or another.

@XAWZ

11 ай бұрын

DQ and FF don't require a detailed explanation and walkthrough just to understand the basic mechanics of the game. I tried to play Ultima 1 years ago without a walkthrough. When I finally gave up and read how the mechanics work I gave up in disgust. The first Final Fantasy is one of if not my single favorite game. I like Dragon Warrior also. Enix & Squaresoft took the concept of "Dungeons & Dragons but on a computer" and made it actually good. I can't understand why western developers had such terrible takes with the concept. Might & Magic is similarly convoluted garbage. I spent my meager childhood earnings on Might & Magic for the C64 back when I was a kid. If only I'd had the internet back then to warn me away. I spent countless hours grinding a party in that game and never figured out what exactly I was supposed to do. I got some fun out of fighting random monsters and leveling my characters but I wished it had been made more accessible. At least Wizardry is somewhat straightforward. But, unfortunately it's stupid hard.

@alleygh0st

11 ай бұрын

@@XAWZ roaming around aimlessly is more true to life.

@thomasffrench3639

8 ай бұрын

⁠@@XAWZwell yeah, most games expected you to read a manual due to technological limitations and Ultima had a keyboard and Final Fantasy had 4 buttons and a D-Pad. And the first Final Fantasy isn’t even that good.

I got into _Ultima_ via Spoony's retrospective a few years back, and I must say I'm enamoured with it. Granted, I've little intention of playing the first three games, but watching videos like this and studying the overall story of the series, I'd actually quite like to see the _Ultima_ retold and remade from the ground up. I just really like how this domino effect kicks off after the player defeats Mondain and creates a string of problems that you, yourself, caused. There's so much potential there.

It doesn’t really hold up as a game, but it’s a fascinating artifact, and I’d have played the hell out of it at the time if I’d had it back then!

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

It seemed arcane and magical when I first encountered it in the library computer room back in the mid-late 80s.

@joeneighbor

11 ай бұрын

Have to look at it in the 1980's time frame as games where rolling out. All pioneering days really. A lot of copycats, a "so so" efforts, and then something comes out that blows everyone away. Here just ~40 years later and how much the technology has grown...

@JustMe99999

11 ай бұрын

I started with Ultima 2 as a kid... it was magical.

@joeneighbor

11 ай бұрын

@@JustMe99999 Had #3 on the Commodore64 but didn't finish it due to some life events. Been meaning to use DosBox or some emulator and go back to play to the end.

I really started the series with Ultima III but it's always a real pleasure to see the roots of the saga.

Ultima ][ is one of my all time favorite RPGs. Ultima 3 was a whole different beast, and Ultima IV was a masterpiece. All in all the entire Ultima franchise was amazing. Ultima Online was my first mmo I played before Everquest was a thing. Also Ultima underworld 1 and 2 were fantastic.

This was the game that hooked me as a teenager and I played every version including Ultima Online

I came to the franchise at V, and never bothered to go back and experience the first trilogy. Now I'm kind of glad. I'm looking forward to the rest of this series!

You don't need fancy graphics to have a fun game.

@JonHuhnMedical

11 ай бұрын

Agreed! You only need just enough to spark your imagination!

@BananaReidy

11 ай бұрын

Ikr!

@supercompooper

11 ай бұрын

These are awesome graphics !!!

@GarryAndrews_

11 ай бұрын

Ultimate Online will always have a spot in my heart

@eclat4641

11 ай бұрын

Yup

the fact that this game has space gameplay blows my mind

Would be cool to see a video of some of the later Ultima games that you enjoy.

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

I'm planning to cover them all in order. Who knows if I'll get through the whole series?

@mushroomsteve

11 ай бұрын

The KZread channel Alex Diener has a complete playthrough of Ultima V. It is quite relaxing and enjoyable to watch. Other channels have great speed runs of U4 and U5. Interesting to see someone complete the game in under 30 minutes, for games that took me months to complete with several hours per day of grinding.

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

@@mushroomsteve Oh, I cut out all the grinding. It took me hours to complete.

Great video, Michael. Glad I found your channel. As a child, I had a friend with Ultima 3, and while we would periodically load it up for a quick random adventure, it was far too overwhelming to truly digest in sparse one or two-hour chunks. I feel that I never saw more than 5% of that game. I sometimes wish I had better appreciated these landmark games as a kid. It's enjoyable to watch your video and observe the highlights of such a game without having to invest the dozens of hours necessary to play it myself. The format you chose was excellent. You cover the basics, controls, key plot points, praise and criticism of design decisions, and much more in just 20 minutes. Often, reviewers only show the first few acts or levels of a game, so the "condensed full playthrough" you've gone with is appreciated. If you do the same for the later games in the series, I'd definitely enjoy watching those as well.

@MichaelCoorlim

Жыл бұрын

Thanks for the kind words. I do plan on covering the others in the series, though I can't say when I'll get around to them. Ultima III was, I think, the first one I actually finished.

@michaelkimsal788

11 ай бұрын

FWIW, I agree about Ultima 3, and by Ultima 4... we got in to massive long-play character-development games, and U4 was the last one I even tried. Just... overwhelming (and... slow on 8 bit machines). Ultima 3 was even sort of slow on the commodore I had. BUT... Ultima ][ (2) was such a sweet spot. It was relatively speedy, and a decent combination of action and exploration.

@lilacaggression8956

11 ай бұрын

Like Ultima I, Ultima III was 95% grinding. You're mostly just grinding for gold to raise your stats.

These sorts of crossovers seem to have been common then. Reminds me of the contemporary D&D module Expedition to the Barrier Peaks.

Never seen Ultima in action. That shifting X prompt is hypnotic my IRL horse can moonwalk too

Speaking of space travel; I remember when I bought Richard Garriot's Tabula Rasa MMORPG. And instead of supporting the game he took everyone's money and fucked off into space on a Russian rocket ship.

@Garrette63

11 ай бұрын

The space flight was supposed to be a publicity stunt to help boost the game. NCsoft released a fake resignation letter while Garriott was in quarantine after returning. He won a lawsuit against them for 24 million dollars.

My friend showed me Ultima 3 and I was sold. Still playing at age 56.

I was today old when I learned Ultima 1 had a space component to it. Wow!

I never realized before watching this just HOW much the first Phantasy Star was basically just an updated copy of Ultima I. It's the same out of place mish-mash of sci-fi and fantasy. Laser guns, space ships, robots, even the Star Wars hovercraft and light sabers (actually called "light saber"). At the end when you fight the evil wizard king, you need a gem to PROTECT yourself from him rather than destroying one to make him vulnerable.

@MichaelCoorlim

10 ай бұрын

When I get around to covering Phantasy Star I'll definitely touch on those similarities. :D

Please make more videos like this one and the last one you did on Mission Asteroid. They were both enjoyable to watch.

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

Will do!

I put 100s of hours into Ultima II! Still have the map it came with. I think I filled the entire ocean using the flotilla glitch!

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

I'll be covering Ultima II next!

@mattwarbuckle

11 ай бұрын

@@MichaelCoorlim Super psyched! What a weird game!!

The bird sounds in the background make it more Ultima-ey. This game is better than I remember it.

@MichaelCoorlim

10 ай бұрын

Totally on purpose.

I had the honor of sharing a few emails (back and forth) with RG (Lord B). Myself, I most enjoyed U4 & U5 the most. Especially U5. My award-winning series of books offers a few minor homages to Ultima, Might & Magic, and even Doom (yup). 🐲✨🐲✨🐲✨

My first Ultima was Ultima III, on my friend's Apple II and then my own Commodore 64. I pretty much love all of them except II, VIII, and IX. I think V is still my favorite.

Thanks for the video. It was very illuminating. I was just searching for this information, but other videos didn't go into the detail you do, or spent too much time talking about the game's impact on RPGs as a whole. I knew about the shuttle in the game, but I never really learned how it worked before. Good work!

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

Thanks!

Really was phenomenal when it came out. I remember it in 1981 well. Great that you pointed out the rockets. It was really a surprise hitting that point in the game. And then never to see it again in the Ultima series (as far as I recall). I always wondered why. Was fortunate to talk to Richard Garriott at the first few E3 shows back in the 90's as he was setting up his Origin booth et al.

I remember playing Ultima I back in the day on my Atari 800XL. I played it enough to beat the game. I also remember the issue with constantly having to eat. It was annoying to have to focus on that. So glad when it was removed from other games.

I didn't really get into Ultima until Ultima IV, and I think V + VI were probably my favorite. VII was good too. Some day I hope to see a remake of these games with modern graphics and UI.

Ultima was light years beyond anything that exist today. ultima and doom are the corner stone of all good games today.

When this was originally released, I played it on an Apple II+ along with Wizardry. Both were pretty cool at the time and hit games. I never completed either game because I'm not a grinder, and with Wizardry they had F'ing riddles that would prevent forward progress until you answered the riddle. This was at a time 15 years before the internet, and only a rare few had modems to connect to BBS, thus to get ansnwer\help meant knowing someone personally.

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

I've never been great at those grid-based dungeon crawlers. Too easy to get lost while mapping, especially without a compass.

That combination of science fiction and fantasy reminds of the very best rare game on the Commodore 64: "Legacy of the Ancients."

Ultima 3 (C64) was my first one, and it's always interesting to see how far the game had already come since Alkalabeth/U1. I'm still not 100% sure if level-ups not improving my character in U3 was a copyright protection (I've heard it was), or a bug, or an intended design (like you're saying it was in U1). I only know monsters in the overworld continuously got stronger, and it made things basically impossible after a certain number of turns. (And the world state didn't even fully reset with a new party in U3; you'd have tons of treasure chests and monsters roaming around -- maybe the same ones that killed your last party! While that was cool (and a bit Nethack-like) it also guaranteed kid-me would never finish the game.)

I was 2 when this came out, and I'm a middle-aged man now. I don't think I need to tell you how long ago 1981 was.

Love programming in Basic. It's programming for game designers, you aren't made to mess around with constructing intricate machinery but can go straight to constructing the game.

@HallyVee

11 ай бұрын

Nowadays even with pre-built engines it's hundreds of hours of fiddling with incompatible libraries :(

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

I've found godot works well with the way my brain functions, but I try to stay practiced in Unity for the sake of group projects with unity developers.

im a little buzzed but you just broke my brain. I remember ultima from when I was a kid. I remember this space game. (the map) but holy crap I did not know they were the same game.

Thanks for suffering through this for us. Always wanted to know how it played and worked without having to heavily invest into this. Especially with the valuable context you provided. I'm quite sure this one video has saved the time of thousands of other people too. You're a legend.

Wow this hero is OP. He can just tear through multiple Balrogs like nothing. Gandalf would be impressed.

A turn in the over world is about a day or so. That’s directly from the inspiration material. There was a much more simulationist vibe in earlier RPGs. Now we consider those “survival” elements and whenever someone combines the two, casual gamers gripe and gripe. The tech stuff is also from the source material. AD&D had all this stuff. Checking in taverns for rumors was also standard in D&D. Adventurers were usually nobodies who were seeking their fortunes, not “great big heroes.” So you’d often start a game without knowing more than general world info and would have to find quests. Long-term campaigns were rarer and instead characters would often have series of isolated adventures with downtime between them - think Bilbo from the Hobbit and then Lord of the Rings. Calling 20 keybinds “complicated” is kind of weird for a PC gamer. Especially when looking at old RPGs which didn’t have the sort of options for intuitive UI elements. Ask someone playing modern flight sims how many key ones they have!

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

Yeah you definitely see a lot of influence from Garriott's home DnD campaign. The one thing that sticks out to me as strange is his approach to HP in the first two games, as a parallel and separate system to Exp. Makes me wonder what kind of house rules his table was rocking.

Please keep these going

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

On it!

so Richard Garriott is a knob but i don't see the Ultima series getting enough coverage when talking about early influential RPG's. Thanks for doing that!

To be fair - I like less hand holding in games. Like learning about quests from rumors, without having a questmarker jump up immediatly and the path in front of me being highlightet...

I remember watching my dad playing Ultima IV back in the 80s. I was more into action games on the C64 (Alley Kat, Paperboy), though I did really enjoy Questron. I never realised how much it borrowed from this series, and then Might & Magic VI did exactly the same but in first person. My first Ultima was VIII and a completely different beast to this, but still good in its own way so long as you had 8MB RAM to play it. Took me twenty years to find out how the Welsh name Iolo was pronounced properly - 'Yollo'.

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

Oh yeah, Questron actually used the Ultima engine, I believe. Haven't thought about that game in ages.

I kind of like the food-based movement mechanic. Every so often I think of making my own game, though I want to make a tactical RPG. Now that I'm thinking about it, I wonder if Ultima may have influenced the entire FF franchise somewhat because they did mix sci-fi and fantasy a lot. One of my favorite characters in FFT was Worker 16, or 8 or 4 or whatever free slot I had I would intentionally rename him since he was classified as a monster.

@krisreddish3066

11 ай бұрын

It was like the first commercially successful computer RPG. So basically all CRPGs were in some way influenced by it. Wizardry at least in later games had sci fi in it too. They came out too close to inspire each other. So pick your choice. :P Them old games are the harbingers of CRPG. Much alike strangely, and at about the same time but Wizardry: The Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord was hard as crap when I first played it as a kid in the early 80s on a C64.I remember Ultima being a bit easier.

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

Yeah, Ultima and Wizardry together were huge influences on the evolution of jrpgs, with Wizardry being far more popular. Dragon Quest in particular, and most other jrpgs drew inspiration from Dragon Quest.

I was busy trying to master Telengard during the time of Ultima I-III... And by the time I circled back to Ultima, the Bard's Tale II was out. Ultima 4 was great, though. Kinda like how Resident Evil 4 was great.

The history of game development scope was so weird. You had the early to mid 80s, when most games were made by a single author. Mid 80s to early 90s, games were the efforts of small teams. Around the early to late 90s, it went up to moderate sized teams. Starting around 2000, it began the start of the AAA titles we know today, with massive credit lists and millions in budgets. But then somewhere around the late 00s to early 10s, digital distribution once again gave rise to the single author titles again. You had a space of 30 years where scope, marketing, and distribution made single author efforts obsolete, but now they're more viable than ever before, and today's authors have much more powerful and convenient tools to work with.

@MichaelCoorlim

10 ай бұрын

As a solo game dev this is definitely something I think about quite a bit.

I've been playing akalabeth and I have to say, this game looks really fancy.

The arm coming out from the lake to add the sword on the title screen feels very Monty Python-ish.

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

There are definitely Monty Python influences in the later games.

@alleygh0st

11 ай бұрын

It's Arthurian lore. "Lady of the Lake"

This is insanely nostalgic

what a calm video, I wish you the very best and good luck on the tubing journey of you and the tube 💫

Wow. I played Ultima III back in the day... had no idea that ultima I had a space shuttle. I tried making my own game inspired by ultima III, around 1986 or so, in Turbo Pascal, but also with spaceships, I called it "Bigshots in Space". I think I was in the same area as Richard Garriot, iirc, he grew up in Nassau Bay, near the Johnson Space Center, and I went to Clear Creek HS, nearby. The copy of Ultima III I had was allegedly some bootleg obtained through a chain of people that extended to someone who knew Richard Garriot, supposedly.

i remember having a lot of trouble with the space ace part, when i first played the game

My first rpg ever on the good old C64. Still a favorite game even if there is almost nothing to this title.

@boogieknee3781

10 ай бұрын

I still write games in basic on my old commodore64. They are way slower than the modern stuff,but it keeps your brain active as you learn to work within a very limited machine.

Happy to have just found your channel. Subbed!

Really good and calm vid.

Good stuff. When I was a kid I sunk thousands of hours into the Ultima games on Atari. Ultima 2 (?) had some kind of killer bug where it couldn't be finished.

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

Ultima 2 had a few rough bugs, yeah. Lots of unfinished areas - most of the planets you can visit serve no purpose. Sierra pushed to get Garriott to release before he could implement everything he'd wanted.

@juansolo1617

11 ай бұрын

@@MichaelCoorlim Yeah, that's it... it had something to do with space. That's all I can remember. Now I feel old.

really nice vid that sums up the game just right

My first encounter with a game of this sort was something called "The Valley" on a green-screen Commodore PET that my school had. Tile-based movement, fighting monsters, and maps that were somewhat randomized each playthrough. Simple stuff by today's standards, but I'd only played Atari cartridges up to that point so it seemed insanely deep compared to what I was used to. I was thinking it must've been around the same time as Ultima 1, but Wikipedia says "The Valley" was released in 1982 - the year after Ultima 1 - so Garriott has it beat :)

This was an excellent rundown of this game, hit all the game mechanics, really well explained. I’d love to see the same sort of review of my first Ultima game, which was Ultima II. The time travel mechanics in that were so inscrutable to this 8 year old, it wasn’t until much later I got a book with a bunch of game walkthroughs that I was able to get through it!

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

I just finished an Ultima II playthrough, so I should be able to have a video up early next week.

I was curious, so I looked up Richard Garriott's age when this came out in 1981. He was born in 1961, so he would've been 20 when it was released. Kinda makes sense that the game is so odd, since it was created by someone between 18 and 20 years-old and there were no game-design courses back then.

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

No game design courses, and very few prior existing computer RPGs to take inspiration from. He and the guys who made Wizardry created a lot of the tropes we take for granted.

Achievement Unlocked : Hidden gem channel discovered. 🏆

When I was a kid I was always told food mechanics were clunky annoying and obsolete, I was so happy to see survival games discard that

I played that game as a child. Not being a native English speaker, I didn't read most of the story as I had to translate every second word with a dictionary. I got really far in that game but couldn't finish it as I had no idea what the objectives of the game were. I managed to get to space but had no idea what I must do there. Also I had no idea that you need to get 4 crystals by killing special monsters in the dungeons to activate a time machine. At some point I was pretty much OP, had the best equipment, crazy amounts of food and coins and hit points and just didn't know what to do next.

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

Even though the game does not have much text, you must have been very persistent to play it that way.

@xcoder1122

11 ай бұрын

@@MichaelCoorlim I didn't have many games for my PC as a child. I had MS Flight Simulator, Epyx Summer Games, Ultima and another RPG named Phantasie (the last one was incredibly tough). I bought all those games from my saved pocket money (of which I didn't have that much), so not playing them was not an option either. And I only had access to that PC, we never had a video game console or C64. Ultima was already an older game at the time I bought it but it was famous (I knew the name) and I was happy to get it for a lower price from the the rummage table. It was my first RPG ever. Later, when I had English in school, I also had many Sierra adventures that were still quite difficult for my limited English skills, so I still had to use a dictionary to look up many words, although I was able to read some simple English sentences by then or type simple instructions. I think that was a good way to learn the language and even though English was not my strongest subject at school, my grades were always okay.

I started with 4. I got it from PC magazine at the time. It was a lot of gun but tough. Thanks for making this video. I enjoyed watching!

Amazing review, really informative! Sci-Fantasy is imho, very underrated but can really open up your typical fantasy home game setting. Hard Suit by Runehammer is my favorite TTRPG setting that captures the Ultima I feel.

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

I'll have to check Hard Suit out.

I came in with Ultima III on the NES, by which time all the sf stuff had been stripped out, so I had no idea about most of this!

I appreciate this video, man.

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

I appreciate the feedback.

I like vague graphics, feels like they leave more room for imagination. Personally I always felt multiplayer was the ONLY ELEMENT missing from classic rpgs to make them perfect, which is why I am currently trying to do so myself.

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

Good luck!

Thanks for the video. I was always curious about the first game!

I really enjoyed the video, thanks for making it :D I wanted to get familiar with the Ultima series, but the early games look a bit overwhelming, your video was just what I needed!

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

It starts getting more playable around Ultima IV.

@NE0SURA

11 ай бұрын

@@MichaelCoorlim I'm going to give that one a try, thanks!

I believe one difference between versions was that the towns were all identical in the original release.

@sladewilson9741

11 ай бұрын

And the castles, and the princess would give you 3k each for rescuing her. Personal recollections...

I really liked the NES version, it’s what got me into Ultima

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

NES Ultima Exodus was the first one in the series that I finished.

Hard to judge this one because it was such a new concept. I will say that I'd recommend starting at part III as long as you know to be prepared for the food system and that one being geared towards spellcasters.

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

Just wrapping up a video on 3. It really is the culmination of "Richard Garriott learns to make a game."

UO was my first mmo and first game in the ultima series still got a soft spot for them

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

UO was *huge* for the time!

I remember playing the original Ultima I (but I played this remake too eventually). However, I don't think the remake is exactly like the original. My brothers and I had a far more difficult time with the original not just because of the slowness but certain parts felt more brutal. I remember Mondain took forever to kill and most of our attacks kept missing but it was easier when we re-played the remake (In the remake, the main problem was trying to chase him as a bat but easier to kill. For the original, it was easier to corner him in bat form but was hellishly difficult to land hits.)

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

There are also, I believe, differences in the PC port.

Thank you for a brief peek into this game so I don't have to attempt to play it!

Early CRPGs sure have a lot of mindless grind. I played this back in the day on the Atari 800. Having started with Ultima III, it seemed rather primitive by comparison, but at least it doesn't feature the tedious and repetitive party-based combat. It merely has tedious one-on-one combat. Playing the MS-DOS version on a modern computer is much smoother since it isn't necessary to switch out floppy disks and the game will run a lot faster. I always found it funny that the first three Ultima games had a bizarre mix of high fantasy and a few random science fiction elements. Furthermore, even though the player is supposedly the good guy, murder hobo activities are necessary in order to succeed. My favorite is in Ultima III, which has a town that is full of squishy clerics and no guards. It is a great place to acquire gold and level up in the early game, but beware of trapped chests dropped by the slain clerics. Towns reset upon exit and re-entry, so the same clerics can be clobbered over and over again. Ultima IV eliminated this as an effective strategy, which came as a shock to me. Fortunately, I eventually figured out that stealing things and murdering NPCs wouldn't work in Ultima IV, and the game was much more satisfying for it.

Very good review. Far better than Spoony's. You should do the rest of the series.

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

I was going to jump around to different series, but since everybody's so enthusiastic I'll keep on analyzing the Ultima series for now.

Truth be told it was a fairly good RPG for the time considering the competition.

Gosh this sounds awful. It actually makes me appreciate Ultima IV even more now. That was my first Ultima game and probably my first computer RPG (I had already played pen and paper role playing games having started DnD with friends at age 11 with Palace of the Silver Princess). Just listening to this made me realise how leaps and strides Ultima IV was a progression from this original starting point. I am so glad I didn't start with this one. Id probably never have fallen in love with computer games and may in fact have been so turned off by the game mechanics I would have become a total luddite and shunned technology altogether. I really dodge a bullet on this one. Edit: You got a sub just for being able to finish this.

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

The first three games are really "Richard Garriot Learns from his Mistakes" step by step. Ultima III is a complete game, but it wasn't until IV that he makes something great.

@Mandrake42

11 ай бұрын

​@@MichaelCoorlim "Richard Garriot Learns from his Mistakes". What a great way to put it. I hadn't realised he was only 19 when he made the original Ultima game til I saw your vid on it. It explains a lot.

Thanks for this, acutal historical vaule here.

The first real 'Isekai' experience!!

Great video! Needs more subscribers!

I started playing Utima 1 on my Commadore Mini. Not easy. Getting lost in the dungeons is unnerving.

im at the maxing level grind for final fight

This was like a Dragon Quest prototype.

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

Absolutely! The Dragon Quest team set out specifically to combine elements from Ultima, Wizardry, and their earlier Portopia Serial Murder Case when creating the game. They used the tilemaps from Ultima and the battle system and stats from Wizardry, with menus inspired by Portopia. And then every jrpg inspired by Dragon Quest carried on those influences.

This was a very cool video - earned a subscribe from me

Interesting to learn about games like this, my retro game knowledge mostly only covers console releases But I do have a question, is there any point in visiting other stars? I'm assuming there's no other planets, but is there other space stations or something?

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

There are other space stations if you need to refuel, but that's really it.

Comparing the original release of Ultima to the Ultima 1 re-release kzread.info/dash/bejne/rH1p29KPhc7Fp84.html You can see how it still uses the Apple II DOS all caps font, and one of the graphics modes of Apple BASIC had four lines of text on the bottom of the screen. They're still using Apple BASIC for game logic, but with assembly to do the tiles. It doesn't scroll anywhere near as fast as the re-release. Also compare the rate of re-drawing the first person dungeons in Ultima vs Ultima 1. This is about as far as you can go with BASIC, teenage Richard Garriott is trying to carve marble with a butter knife.

Never really got into Ultima prior to Ultima 3. By then most of the bad mechanics were gone, and by Ultima 5 the series had reached it's peak (IMO). We had other games like Wizardry (the first one) that were a bit more limited in scope (essentially just a dungeon crawl) but did what they did far better than the early Ultima games.

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

In my opinion where Wizardry failed was that they didn't innovate. Garriott was trying to improve and and new elements to Ultima with every release, whereas Woodhead and Greenberg essentially didn't innovate for the first five games or so - and the fact that you HAD to import characters from Wizardry 1 to get into the series meant diminishing returns with each new release.

@AccessAccess

11 ай бұрын

@@MichaelCoorlim Yeah Wizardry 1 was the peak. Between the editors we had like WizEdit which let you make your own dungeons, items, and scenarios, and everything else. So we got a lot of mileage out of the first one especially with the improved interface available on the Mac. I never played most of the later wizardry games like 2 through 5 but I am told they were often just difficult and frustrating to play.

this would be fantastic on the ARDUBOY :)

Good video

Subscribed!

Nice video! I had a copy of the original BASIC version but can't locate it now - did you locate the source code in your recent Internet travels?

@MichaelCoorlim

10 ай бұрын

Unfortunately not. Sounds fascinating, though.

For someone who knows how to beat the game, you don’t seem to actually like. As a kid, I played the shit out if this game, and I totally loved it. But I never came close to beating it. The C64 has Ultima 1 through 6, the graphics got much much better over time, but Ultima I always remains my favorite due to the nostalgia factor.

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

I like it fine, but to approach it analytically I have to be honest with myself about its flaws. Perhaps a good way to put it is that I appreciate it for what it is, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend playing it unless you have a very specific interest in gaming history.

The very beginning, where you say "Michael Coorlim here" sounds like the same melody as the Seinfeld bass line

@MichaelCoorlim

11 ай бұрын

I'm going to pretend that was intentional.