Re: "8 Classic Games You Haven't Played (but should)"

On Fri, 31 Jan 2025 09:11:56 -0500, Mike S. <Mike_S@nowhere.com>
wrote:

On Fri, 31 Jan 2025 09:23:42 +0000, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:
>

I think I well give it a go just to see why it's a game that gets
mentioned so often!

>
Make sure you take Spalls advice and play the updated version with
better graphics and midi sound. The updated graphics tile set looks
very nice.
>
A warning though, the game is very old school. If you don't take
notes, you will need to refer to a guide, likely often.  I mapped out
the entire game and I wrote down every single conversation, and I
still got stuck a few times.
>
If you like Ultima 4 then you should like Ultima 5 even more I think.

Most of the ephemera from my old-school gaming days have long
dissapeared, but I still have my hand-written notes from playing
Ultima 5. Well, technically they are re-writes of the actual notes
since, having finished the game I cleaned them up and turned them into
a little cheat-book that I shared with my friends (and used myself in
later play-throughs).

From what I recall, it actually didn't give that much assistance in
helping you solve the game but it did have a lot of scribbled comments
about who said what, and (somewhat inaccurate) maps of the dungeons.

"Ultima IV" didn't leave that much of an impression on me; it was
'more of the same' except with a slightly different take on the
quest-structure as far as I could tell. (Not having access to an
immense video library, I had no way of knowing how ground-breaking
that quest-structure was). But "Ultima V" was jawdropping in its depth
and detail. Which, looking back at it today, seems almost comical. But
more than any other game in the genre to the time, it had the most
realistic world. It was an amazing fantasy.

"Ultima IV" will always be the 'heart' of the franchise; "Ultima VII"
will always be the height of the series, and "Ultima Underworld" the
most playable... but the game that epitomizes what made the Ultima
franchise so awesome shall forever be "Ultima V" in my eyes.