ULTIMA THULE

Too bad the game is either a thoroughly unfair or exploitive work of clumsiness, the growing pains of developing an RPG as a cultural force. Although the overworld is peppered with many randomly-generated dungeons and towns, in reality they are all the same and bear very little distinction, so you can stick to just one dungeon to grind and a couple of cities to shop from. Often you will have fetch quests that are vital to completing the game, but that they send you to uninteresting landmarks makes much of it feel so unrewarding and pointless. Overworld encounters are also annoying as mosquitos, as the same set of enemies will continually come at you just to die in three hits.

And there's the irksome transition to a space fighting sim ala "Star Raiders" which makes no sense for the game's fantasy setting. Fortunately the Ultimas that would come after would try to fix these bothersome issues.

The bare skeleton of an RPG, in which if one more thing was removed it would collapse into a pile of bones. A few pixels to make a little sword and shield man is all you have for your hero, who moves one tile per turn at a time across the map, Interiors of towns and castles that look like a pong setup, and no "talking to everyone," only merchant pixels to buy shit and king pixels to tell you shit to do. Dungeons that are the barest white lines to make four walls in black space as you fight beasties rendered in the stick-figure drawings of a ten year old boy. And then you go into space for some reason.

Games like these are why there should be a "watched a let's play on YouTube of it and thought, okay, cool, I pretty much got it" option on this websight

By the time I had discovered that Ultima existed, I think I had all of the sprite based Final Fantasy games under my belt already, so I understand and appreciate its historical importance. The problem here, just like with so many of these early progenitors of entire genres, is that the ideas which would go on to be refined over years and decades are still raw, unpolished and severely restricted by the computing power of the time. Couple that with an extremely sophomoric attempt at world building that amounts to basically a teenager throwing EVERYTHING he thought was cool into a single universe and you get a mess of a world.

Ultima really pushes and occasionally breaks the limits of how much an infectious and rowdy energy can offset a core sense of tedium that otherwise defines an experience. The map feels pretty big, the dungeons limitless in scope, the objectives grand in scale, but it’s expressed in a way that makes the game kind of LESS fun to play the deeper you get into it?

Early on there’s a real sense of danger as things like HP and Food management are real active concerns, and overworld enemies or an unlucky dungeon encounter can end you in an instant. Even towns offer some hostility, with thieving NPCs and guards who can wreck your shit easily for the first half of the game if you toe out of line. Very quickly though this switch just flips and you’re an unstoppable juggernaut with infinite resources and mondo huge stats just trampling on dragon turtles and black knights with every heavy footstep, and it really doesn’t matter much because you still have to kill those guys and you still have to make your rounds across the entire map and you still have to do that extremely long extremely repetitive extremely finnicky extremely BORING space shuttle section.

That’s the flip side of Ultima, though, isn’t it, and it’s a hard one to explain. I dunno if it’s the first game to blend sci-fi and fantasy so explicitly (my knowledge of pre-NES-era gaming is sorely limited) but it’s certainly an early one, and a stylish one. First a hovercar equipped with lasers to blow up those pesky pirate ships that swarm the bay between early continents, eventually a laser gun that serves as the best weapon for most of the game, then a space ship, then a time machine, this shit is just out there, shamelessly. Shameless is the only word for it really. Ultima is a pet project by one very young dweeb in 1981 and it shows, a borderline random mishmash of references, direct quotes, copyright infringement (you’ve got tie fighters and mind flayers I mean uh sorry mind “whippers” present and accounted for), British mythology but like puddle deep aesthetic versions of that stuff, the aforementioned sci-fi shit – everything a teenaged Richard Garriot was into and could cram into this thing, he did, and that youthful energy comes through every corner of the game.

It’s not graceful and it’s not particularly fun in aggregate, but there’s meat on this bone for sure. There’s a modicum of mechanical depth and even a minor amount of room for creative expression of play in the way you apply spells and stats, rudimentary as it is. It’s hard to imagine a more exciting start to something as storied as Ultima will become.

Beaten: May 15
Time to finish: 5ish hours? Just guessing
Platform: Mac (via DOSBOX)

It's really cool to play this some 40 years later and still have a good time with it. It's mostly just kinda dry grinding, but idk something about the simplicity really worked for me. Plus it's extremely cool to cross reference the manual's maps with the game world as you go thru it

~ Juegos que Hay que Jugar Antes de Morir ~
Parte 2 — Los 80: Caída y Resurgir

Juego 27: Ultima I (1981)

No sé si soy idiota o realmente esto es injugable a día de hoy. No sé qué hacer, y aunque supiera que hacer no sabría cómo hacerlo. No tengo fuerzas para jugar a un juego que requiere que esté leyendo continuamente un manual de 20 páginas con 200 comandos.