C/D: Ultima

I still have it on disk somewhere, I remember trying to install it a few months back but my PC spewed it out with error messages.

I don't remember any hot-air balloons though.

this might explain something.

http://www.consoleclassix.com/info_img/Ultima_III_Exodus_NES_ScreenShot2.jpg

i can't find an up-close pic of the character models

http://rampantgames.com/blog/uploaded_images/U7murder-735125.jpg

totally the game i spent the most time playing without actually accomplishing anything

i mean, i had the game-killing bug where the murders wouldn't happen, which was kind of a pain, but i also sort of didn't care?

i had ultima iv on the master system as a kid also and that i played until the contacts wore through on the cartridge and all the tile graphics went fudgy

don't think i even made it into the dungeons

Which was the 3D one, Ultima Underworld wasn't it? I could never get into it, really.

Yeah, there were two Underworlds, both 3D. I think I bored everyone to death about Ultima Underworld II on the '93 games thread but I was totally immersed in that game-universe for so long; replayed it much more recently seeing as how I still thought of it often and it still held my attention

and it makes me a bit sad that it has basically been forgotten while people trumpet Doom as the amazing start of all things 3D and FPS, when UWII came out first and had (technically and in my opinion visually) better 3D

OK so who cares about "technically", playing Doom you don't really notice that everything is still only on a 2d map and you can't actually go under the bridge-like platforms, but in UWII there are sections with bridges and tunnels and hidden passages and it's like, "oh hell yeah, I was up there earlier looking at this and wondering where it went, and now here I am"

(I know this sounds a pretty unexciting gameplay mechanic now but either the novel 3Dness of it made it seem fresh at the time or UW2 just hits a nice balance with the distance between glimpsing and reaching)

never really got into these but LOVED the look of them for some reasons

LOVED the nes version of these w/the shepherd class but it had the most frustrating dungeons

Loved Ultima VI to death

I tried to explain the plot of Ultima IV to some people the other day and they didn't believe me

Never really did anything with V or VI. But never actually played them until after VII. I think I must have had some kind of collection.

I played the absolute shit out of both parts of VII. For some reason I was hypnotized by the fact that you could change your armor and weapons and it would be reflected on the inventory screen. That was pretty new at the time, and I was like 12-13 and was easily impressed.

God Pagan was such crap tho. It wasnt a bad idea trying to change up the perspective, but everything else about it sucked. Bad platforming parts, crappy magic system, no npc bros to hang out with..

I have huge huge love for this series but it basically boils down to playing the SHIT out of Black Gate, Serpent Isle, and UW1, then trying (and failing) to get into the rest (though I think I got reasonably far in V). Black Gate and UW1 nail the fun of open-ended exploration and stumbling into weird side things that actually have nothing to do with the main plot, and/or the main plot is SO ginormous and attenuated that you sort of get into all this side stuff without REALIZING it's part of the main plot because you're doing it out of order. VII actually plays pretty quickly if you DO know what to do and go in order, tracking down Elizabeth & Abraham and the generators, but that's a lot less fun than just blundering into Vesper and trying to solve their Gargoyle racism problem, or poking around in minor dungeons of no consequence to the bigger game. The flying carpet completely breaks the game in this sense, but I'm okay by the completely absurd power upgrades you get from the add-on quest.

Serpent Isle is a LOT more linear but there's still great oddball stuff along the way, and the technical upgrades (esp. paperdolling in the inventory) are very satisfying. The add-on quest is cooler too; although bitchingly hard in places it's totally worth it for the magic ring of infinite reagents. Unfortunately the last act of the game (after the Banes get released) is really underdeveloped - you now have the whole planet to wander around but there's only a few places where there's much left to DO. OTOH, you get a lot more bellowing voice acting from the Great Earth Serpent which is sweet... and I kinda like the party membership in this game, much smaller cast of characters and a nice shift from the "classic team" to the "team of misfit fill-ins" later on. I particularly love the Frankenstein guy who explodes for good if he ever gets killed - hilarious! Whereas Black Gate is one of those games where there are just too damned MANY characters - it's fun to customize your team but by the time you even find Tseramed or whoever, it's like, I've already got these maxed-out dudes I've been trucking with since the beginning of the game, no thanks.

OK, gonna stop now before this turns into "I just played Serpent Isle for over an hour..."

wtf, there is a 51-part youtube walkthrough/rifftrax for this game?!

kind of tempted to watch it

here is the attract sequence of the sms version. so beautiful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vDK2Uxi9QM&feature=related

ugh, the walkthrough video features the guy actually reading every line of dialogue out loud

less tempted to watch it now

the SMS synth sounds really awesome in that intro clip.

I wish he had like an index that would help me locate clips where the Great Earth Serpent yells advice at you. SEEK THE HORN!

oh wait, it's 53 parts and he's MAYBE a third of the way through the game. his black gate series runs to 159 ten-minute videos. Jesus God!

http://www.letsplayarchive.com/

screenshot versions available also. also: he's done 4, 5, and 6 as well

Different person I think, but the screenshot version is way more fun really. Nice.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/01/26/youre-not-going-to-like-this-ultimas-back/#more-24563

IV on the master system pretty much started my love of rpg games. And, it was on the master system.

RPS is a wonderful website too.

so yeah i spent like two hours reading through the ultima vii playthrough

I got Ultima V when I was 14 and it was too much for me w/o walkthroughs. I just didn't have the patience to figure out wtf was going on, esp. when I could just play Sopwith or Thexder. But I loved the packaging, with a coin! a cloth map! I should look at a walkthrough to see how much I would have had to figure out, or how many hours a full playthrough would have taken.

just tried to get my U7 disk to install, but as usual it just can't handle the non-dos setup. doesn't even run via dosbox.

so watched the walkthrough instead, too much magic carpet flying though.

i tried U6, tho amiga version was disk swappingly garbage. struggled to really get to grips with it. might try again this weekend.

the first few seem much more approachable.

You cd try this for running U7:

http://exult.sourceforge.net/

Dunno if it works with the disks or not

cheers, i'll give that a go.

my memories of u7 involved a lot of chatting, a theatre show, some guy with a horse and cart offering me a job, another castle and a long conversation, caves and underground battles. and generally lots of opening draws/chests/cupboards and stealing stuff. and sleeping in random beds.

oh and some eerie dark laugh that kicked in when i activated certain events.

did you bake any bread? i remember neglecting saving the world because i could take a job as a baker's apprentice

God did I love U7/U7.5.

I spent too much time on V before getting the hint book, which helped. I can remember lots of nights during 1989 listening to the local Top 40 radio and climbing around the underground dungeons, which added to the epic mystique of the game. It like my guys were on this LOTR-style quest which took years, and occasionally involving using cannons to blast castle guards.

And Nakar's LetsPlay summaries are awesome, including the Doctor Who jokes.

http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/bigboxshots/0/587740_3210_front.jpg

Also, I got into Ultima from the NES game, which had great design for each class, much moreso than the PC game had from years earlier:

http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/3638/ult3.png

You could sleep with a prostitute in VI. Sort of overshadowed the rest of the game for me.

http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/SerpentIsle/Update%2033/17-SI_27_11.png

Oh man, I went into the basement to dig thru my game box for 'Arcanum' and lookee what i found:

http://www.coverbrowser.com/image/dos-games/403-1.jpg

I always really loved the look of that white-on-blue-marble

If you didn't find it, Arcanum just popped up on GOG last week.

Nope, found it. This game is awesome, but I'm going to get bored with U7 first

Also, check out who's got a twitter feed now:

http://twitter.com/RichardGarriott

Apparently dude was on CNBC today to comment on the new Obama NASA budget.

RPGs in the youtube era have an easier time of it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytqwf8z2yjs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XBz-i7ljmQ

http://www.80sgaming.org/ultima-parody/

http://hacki.bootstrike.com/english/nitpicks_u4.htm

http://www.bootstrike.com/Ultima/Online/uegg.html

this is some next level nerditry, good find

Ultima IV Part 2 is a parody of the Ultima series. It takes place in the gap of time between Ultima IV and Ultima V. It answers some of the unresolved questions from the series:

How were the dungeons sealed?
Why did Lake Generosity dry up?
How was Blackthorn able to take over?
Why did the Shadowlords really come to Britannia?
How was the Codex raised out of the Abyss?

But why stop there? The game also pokes fun at the entire Ultima series:

What really happened to Mondain, Minax, and Exodus?
Why did the Stranger/Avatar stop going into space?
Where did the Guardian really come from?
Why did Lord British's castle have an entrance to Hythloth?
Why is Humility really one of the eight virtues?
Just how crazy of a set of virtues will Britannians follow?
Who cares? (Okay, it doesn't answer that.)

^ found poem

http://www.bootstrike.com/Ultima7bg/cool2.html

^-- contains the classic "Ultima VII on Drugs" bits

This thread is steering dangerously close to unearthing Ultima VII fanfiction I wrote in the mid-90s.

I loved these games growing up. Nobody else around me knew about them, except for one kid who told me he saw a "weird looking satanist game" for sale at the computer store because of the artwork. Oh, and my old best friend who ended up coming out to me a few days after highschool graduation: when we first met in grade school we bonded over our love of Ultima VI.

So I think the consensus is "classic," huh? Except for Pagan, which was kinda fun in a stupid shitty way but absolutely unacceptable as an Ultima...and Ascension, which is still some kind of all-time record clusterfuck of game development. It was my Christmas game that year and I spent a month or so trying hard to find things to like in it. (The exploration of the landscape was, I thought, quite enjoyable in a Tomb Raider way - there was never anything to do but boy, it was somehow satisfying & fun to swim up into pointless grottos and find ways to clamber up to the tops of cliffs with nothing on them.)

I haven't really played U9 much at all. It came out during the Dark Years, since i didn't have a decent upgraded computer until 2003. Since then, i occasionally install it, but don't do much with it.

Also, I was playing the game earlier, and was disappointed that it would take years before you finally got the dynamic seen in Bethesda games or stuff like Divine Divinity, where you could steal anything not nailed down and sell it back.

I'm replaying Ultima VI through DOSBox. I got this game when I was 8 or so and had no idea what an RPG was, how experience building/leveling up worked, and especially the plot of this game. With the help of some walkthroughs, last night I got farther than I had in years of playing it on my x386. That is to say, I have liberated two shrines and leveled up every party member once. It's a lot of fun. Whenever I get bored of going through the walkthrough, I go to Cyclops Cave to gain experience and lots of gold. Good times!

Things are a bit confusing tho, I think most walkthroughs are missing things, so I've been having to follow a few at once. For example in Moonglow to get to the catacombs you are supposed to get a key from someone that opens the crypt. Well, the key only works once you are in the catacombs, and the door to the entrance is locked. I figured it used to same key, and when it didn't, I wasted lots of time running around, trying to find out why. I never did find that key and ended up just having to pick the lock.

I like this game's sense of humor. At one point my party was bravely walking through the countryside, killing cats left and right while "Hail! Britannia" triumphantly played in the background. And one of the songs is a really clever medieval MIDI take on "Stairway to Heaven".

I'm replaying Ultima VI through DOSBox. I got this game when I was 8 or so and had no idea what an RPG was, how experience building/leveling up worked, and especially the plot of this game.

Yeah totally - I got in through U7 when I was, I dunno, 9 or 10, and totally ignored a lot of that stuff (with predictable results). Got ahold of 1-6 on that awesome "Ultima Collection" CD for like fifteen bucks, but never really did get anywhere with any of them. Maybe too many games at once. When I reach retirement age I hope to spend long days in a cabin by a lake playing through these things properly.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_s4yaF0W2Dis/SOLp-qBX0qI/AAAAAAAAIFw/ra5b7JTL3KY/s400/ultima-6-pc-game-dos-dosbox-1.JPG

Dig the zebra centaur poster.

Tbh I don't know if i can handle anything below VGA...

ultima vi is a tremendous game, i played it to death

re: mondain, minax and exodus IIRC you could go find them in u6, they are on a tiny little hidden island in a tiny little temple house, serving out "house arrest" for eternity. i never figured out how to interact with them though because i only found their place by using some sort of super-cheat that let me run around on water like land and through mountains but which broke the playability so you could no longer interact with NPCs

if you want to start a player's club i would be down to do that, i also have a dosbox copy

pro-tip: don't use the spell you learn from the wisps

it has been something more than 20 years since i was an avid player but IIRC to get to the catacombs in moonglow there was actually a secret entrance somewhere else in town you could use? maybe i'm confusing things.

when i first got the same i seriously spent weeks and weeks just walking from town to town, meeting and talking to random people and camping out and fighting snakes and headless and trolls and learning the differences between the towns and learning about the shrines and virtues, it was so freaking rad

U6 was originally the only one I ever beat, and I bought the hintbook too. I called origin and got a signed congratulatory thing from Lord British and some gargoyle king written in garg.

I wish I knew where it was.

haha i got that too!! i tossed it though.

u6 doesn't get much props but this game and star control 2 dominated my life for awhile and were really mind-blowing in terms of creating an immersive sandbox world to explore, especially after my experiences up to that point with RPGs (stuff like bard's tale, which was fun but was also like walking through a paper-thin hollywood set)

i liked all of the ultima installments previous to u6 ("phantom fighter: the food stinks!") and i remember playing u1 at the age of like five on a neighbor's apple ii computer but something about the stick-figure graphics always turned me off

I think the one I played the most besides U7 was actually U5 for some reason - 6 bugged me from the word go for no reason that I can articulate. I think because it looked much more like U7 I wanted it to play much more like U7. Mainly the part of the screen that actually shows the screen is so TINY, I always felt lost and cramped at the same time. But it's been a while.

i totally hear you on the cramped part, i hated sometimes having to kill guards or civilians because they were blocking my party in a passageway or something

and then you'd like have to go into workshops that were like 6 x 6 maps squares wide and had like 20 pieces of furniture and 3 NPCs in them

i played a bunch of U7 recently, great game but you really have to give yourself to it. i'm sure i've lost my place by now.

(as with a book not a ranking)

the only one of these i've beaten is perversely the first one. played through the sudden inexplicable space combat section and everything.

Yeah i had to kill a peasant that was blocking the entrance to some cave. I said it was ok cos I think he was mortally injured or something.

What's the deal w all the signs being written in friggin' runic symbols? How do i translate those?

there is a rune translation thing in the back of the guide that was in the retail box, you'll need to find a jpeg of it

re: cramped scenery, what i hated most were the mountains ... this is what approaching a mountain range is like

http://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l/500983-ultima-vi-the-false-prophet-fm-towns-screenshot-snowy-mountains.png

http://cdn.wikimg.net/strategywiki/images/0/04/Ultima_Druidic_Runes.png

i believe it is just a straight cipher from english

very subtle copy-protection scheme - put some info in the retail box that is not part of a checkpoint but which makes the game very frustrating (not impossible) to play w/o it

you can also find a gargish runic translation sheet BUT i think it was supposed to be part of the game to decode it yourself - it is pretty easy to do once you get to it

my biggest disappointment was that i could never get the worlds of ultima: savage empire and worlds of ultima: martian dreams to install correctly, there were always bugs in the install that would make the game crash a little while into it

Yeaj but i've seen like screenshots of ppl reading signs and it saying "Blue Bottle Tavern" or whatever rather than "/\/\/\Y/\". There's got to be an in-game decoder.

Am i just being lazy here?

i think some signs are in english and some are in runic

also yeah, you're being lazy

ultima games are ultimately puzzle games, not actually the level-up RPGs

that was gonna say something like "the level-up rpgs they pretend to be"

i actually think they're more like sierra games

yeah sierra games makes a lot of sense, one of the nes ultima games (the only one?) and hero's quest took large portion of a year for me and my best friend to beat

i dont think i ever really 'got' the ultima class system

i always seemed to be assigned as a bard, no matter how i answered the gypsy questions.

I love that bit, with the glass full of psychedelic swirling pixels.

Yeah the puzzle aspect I can see. I'll probably play through U7/7.5 after this. Are there any good old school PC RPGs mostly about leveling up that aren't 3D fps dungeon crawlers?

fallout.

betrayal at krondor is an fps dungeon crawler in navigation but a top-down turn-based one in combat. great plot in the first third, some not bad gimmicks thereafter, including a bit where your previously fairly unconstrained party is confined for a while to a big scary poorly-mapped forest in the center of the gameworld that you'd better hope you visited earlier and left some secure but accessible packets of rations in, back when you could just buy those at inns. also some of the treasure chests are locked with RIDDLES.

wait a second, i seem to be tripping. mondain, minax and exodus are found somewhere other than that island, the island i'm thinking of is the one that has sutek in it. i think that's where the void cube is. i think for some reason i never tried talking to mondain, minax and exodus, i think i'll play again and try that.

i thought there were no classes in ultima 6?

guys did you know about this

http://codex.ultimaaiera.com/wiki/Ultima_Manga

http://codex.ultimaaiera.com/images/f/ff/Hamarimichi_ultima_gif.gif

I will definitely check out Betrayal! I remember that one looking really really cool. How about any good JRPGs made exclusively for DOS?

I installed Ultima VI last night at around 10pm and at first was wondering if it was going to be worth the effort. I got into it and eventually realized it was close to 4 in the morning. So yeah, that one, classic!

Argggg i keep dropping moonstones and they make blue portals and I'm having a hell of a time trying to dig them up. It doesn't seem to be working...

I buried a moonstone to create a moongate. How do I get it back?

Dig it up when the moons are both in the phase represented by the stone.

Thanks, internet!

Ultima VII is genuinely my favourite game of all time. I never achieved anything though and then my dad sold our computer with the disk still in the drive :(
Bought the Ultima Collection when it came out but even with that program that slowed it down for modern processors it still ran at hyper-speed

I started playing Martian Dreams again a coupla years back. I'm surprised the steampunk crowd doesn't venerate that game more. You get to meet Tesla and Freud on Mars! ....and Warren Spector.

I remember reading about Ultima comics in Nintendo Power in 1989 or so, and always wanted to see what they were. Didn't they have anime as well?

I got into the series due to the NES game, which still has awesome character designs.

i've got the megadrive (or is it snes?) version because i can't get my original Pc version to work (or VII). It doesn't seem to be the same, the village at the start seems smaller for starters.

FCI / Pony Canyon published the SNES version of Ultima VII, simply titled Ultima: The Black Gate, which was created by a small team inside Origin Systems.
This version was largely different from original since the PC version of the game was a then-huge twenty megabytes, yet this translation could use only one megabyte of memory for all of the game data and program. The maps and many usable items and plotlines had to be redesigned from scratch, and the game program had to be rewritten entirely in assembly language.

Screw that, basically

If I have mentioned it elsewhere, read's Nakar's Let's Play of U4 - U7, including Martian Dreams. They're fucking hilarious and get increasingly unhinged as the serious progresses and the main character grows far more sociopathic. Dude put a lot of effort into writing these, and I love 'em.

http://lparchive.org/author/Nakar#results

Start here:

http://lparchive.org/Ultima-4-5-and-6/

Lord British is working on an "Ultimate RPG" now:

http://www.portalarium.com/index.php/ultimate-rpg

Note the serpent design

oh yeah, Ultima VII is probably my least favourite game of all time. After the trauma of losing my copy of VII it was quite the kick in the teeth

Ultima VIII that should read

Read more in this treatise from Richard Garriott

LOL not likely

i thought ultima vii and viii were way too dark, i thought the tone of ultima vi was one of the best things about it - it managed to be serious and colorful at the same time

also i remember the graphics looked astounding in previews and whatnot but even when i visited my friends who had like 133 MHz computers with an incredible 8 MEGS of memory they were super-glitchy and choppy and made you keep falling off cliffs and stuff

it ended up looking like bad stop-motion

I had the promo poster for VII up on my bedroom wall. I got it from the first issue of Computer Gaming World I ever purchased

http://www.notableultima.com/collectibles/pics/Art_U7Poster.png

It was 1991 and I was 15 years old. It looked really cool next to my Jim Lee X-Men posters and advert for Wing Commander and Savage Empire.

Note: I would not discover punk rock for another 3-4 years. Shocking, innit.

cgw was like crack to me at that age

kingfish i am guessing you are ... 37

no 36

Ultima VII is genuinely my favourite game of all time. I never achieved anything though and then my dad sold our computer with the disk still in the drive :(
Bought the Ultima Collection when it came out but even with that program that slowed it down for modern processors it still ran at hyper-speed

― Number None, Thursday, April 5, 2012 6:24 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

FWIW, there is a program out there called "Exult" which will run U7 and SI in a Windows environment, getting around the game's internal memory management devices. They added some other features too, I think.

8 was terrible, 9 was actually marginally better insofar as, so long as the game didn't crash (which it would) you could at least have fun ignoring the badly-plotted, flimsy quest, and just exploring the world.

yeah, i keep meaning to get Exeult. It'll probably end up swallowing my life though

I turn 36 in August, yup

don't think there's a way to play u6 on lion is there? it broke dosbox iirc

good god i was trying to remember what the first ultima i played was and judging by screenshots it was uh ultima 3

so
painfully
old

also

Check it out, dude! i can make my 486 go from 25 all the way to 50 MHZ! Look how fast Crusader: No Remorse runs now!
― kingfish superman ice cream (kingfish 2.0), Friday, October 14, 2005 2:58 AM (6 years ago)

holy fuck i cant even begin to guess how much time i devoted to crusader no remorse and this is the first time i have thought of it in uh forever

Also: fun fact that I might be completely misremembering and might be completely false: Crusader led to the look and feel of Fallout. Isometric sprites blasting each other n shit.

I started playing U7.2 again sophomore year of college, using a walkthru I printed out from my dot-matrix that was several dozen pages still connected. I'm not proud.

FREE GWENNO! FREE HER FROM THE ICE!

Ok i am not having any luck digging up my dropped moonstones. If anyone has hints please let me know.

hint: stop dropping moonstones

Stop droppin' moon stones around.

Ok i finally got those moonstones back. I also leveled myself up to 7 and can now cast the Kill spell and other stuff. Now I'm on the pirate map bit. At this point I started remembering things from 20 years ago I thought I had completely forgotten. I remember getting the map, laying it out on the ground and stuff. I remember going in and talking to the Gargoyle and getting the lense and stuff. Apparently I may have even beaten the game and completely forgot it. Hmmm...

I read the Let's Play of Ultima 7. Looks awesome! I remember seeing the Guardian at Babbages or whatever but I don't think I ever got that cos I didn't finish VI. But yeah it looks way cool and I may have to play that next...

7 is awesome IMO, but I think it would probably drive a more old-school RPG kind of person nuts - - there's virtually no conscious control of combat or levelling up. In my experience you just kind of gradually have less people dying from each encounter and eventually become an unstoppable super-being. I don't know how 6 compares in this regard, but I know the later ones were really looked down on by some of the fans of the older turn-based ones.

But setting that aside - I think I probably talked about 7 upthread actually but it really is tons of fun, lots of little side quests, every town has some kind of problem to solve, and there are just oodles of caves and hermit huts and weird things in the woods that have no bearing on the quest but are just kind of there for you to stumble on. Some of them are vaguely set up by lines of dialogue, but a lot of times it just feels like the programmers packing in neat stuff for the sake of being neat.

Keep a walkthrough near at hand but not too near at hand...every so often you will get STUCK because something is not nearly as transparent as the designers intended it. But it's a game that really doesn't want to be hurtled through from beginning to end. Serpent Isle is wayyyyy more linear and arguably tighter (for its first 2/3, after which it goes totally to hell).

Yeah thanks for that. I like stories and all but I think I'm realizing here my favorite thing to do is just hack and slash, grind up levels, score gold, then run into more and more powerful enemies where I have to do it all over again. I'm kinda upset that you can't get past a Level 8 in Ultima VI.

you know i realize now looking back on my comments upthread that i was somehow conflating u7 and u8. it was u8 that sucked, i have no memory of u7.

god u8 was so horrible

AB, maybe consider doubling back and playing V? Way more old-school visually but a solid level-up kind of game with a cool plot to keep it moving, IIRC.

Surprised some fan out there hasn't, liked, hacked U4 and U5 into the U6 engine.

i would play that

i'm excited to play worlds of ultima after this

Ultima transpositions happen here and there. They did a mod where you could do U4 on the first NWN game

U7 is twenty years old this week: here's some goodies

http://aiera.ultimacodex.com/2012/04/ultima-7s-20th-anniversary/

nice!

i was thinking about u7 earlier, about how in a bakers you could make flour and water into dough and bake it, and how the baker would, and how this was a big step in realism somehow, and all i could think was, where did the flour come from

there was a flour mill in the game somewhere

http://codex.ultimaaiera.com/wiki/Flour_Mill

Willy, a baker in Britain, will pay the Avatar four gold for every sack of flour purchased wholesale from the flour mill, although such ventures are far from profitable, given that Willy pays but a third of the flour's original cost.[2]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMQGyEm1p8Y&feature=related

For those that loved U7, try Divine Divinity. You can get it on GOG.com

Eek, I was intrigued but then I checked it out on Wiki and scrolled down and the first screenshot was captioned While exploring a dimly-lit sewer system... and I got worried.

The latter one has starting issues, but they deliberately chose design decisions from U7. I also enjoy games where I can steal anything/everything and sell it.

took a $20 hard drive back to pdx computer thrift store FREEGEEK because i'd gotten IDE instead of SATA and then changed my plans for the system i was building anyway, and i got $20 in store credit which i spent partly on a copy of U7+its expansion(s) i found underneath prima's official strategy guide for warcraft 2 the tides of darkness. the box contained three million floppies and

TWO

CLOTH

MAPS

MOTHERFUCKERS

a dream achieved

What, maps for U7 and U7.5? Not bad. Free Geek is great for that. They have a map for U4(I think) on the wall of the shop.

yeah i asked how much they wanted for it once and they said $100. the U7 and SI maps are really more linen than cloth but anything is better than paper or alternately nothing.

i wish fallout 3 had come with a monochromatic green map printed on a transparent overlay, like for a projector. would have been cheap + 100% mimetic.

http://spoonyexperiment.com/2013/11/21/britannia-burns-richard-garriott-interview-part-1/

Pretty cool 3 part interview w Lord British. He digs out his Ultima notebooks and shows of hand-drawn tileset designs and stuff.

Lord British backs Ultima tribute game (with cloth maps)
https://twitter.com/RichardGarriott/status/665348569340121089