As a whole the FM Towns is the best version I’ve played with Ultima I & II being a big improvement, admittedly with some reservations. I’ve enjoyed my time playing through the Ultima trilogy again for the first time since week 1 of this blog, although it certainly brought it home just how much farming is required in these early Ultimas. The bad translation doesn’t give completing the trilogy quite the air of achievement I would have hoped for with lines like “Doesn’t it look like the spine of a snake, does it?” but it’s still the best ending I’ve seen on any version so far. The big finale cutscene is in English this time, although only barely. At least in this English version the text doesn’t make it too clear what this is but it soon fades and I run away under instruction from the Timelord. One addition which I’d not seen before is a quick end cutscene where a passage opens up behind Exodus through which I run through and see a floating orb of some description. From these tiles I’m not sure I’d make the connection without the text telling me in the bottom corner when I insert a card. When I get that far, Exodus doesn’t look all that much like a computer. These died in a single hit without fail so it’s just a question of bunching the party and attacking constantly. I did run into more invisible floor monsters than in the other versions with my first encounter being in the top left of the map. This part of the game was much, much easier than on the NES. My spellcasters certainly came close to death but I would easily have been able to finish with just the two characters if it had been required. I’d maxed out the hit points of my two front line fighters at this stage but my spell casters were relatively weak. I wasn’t so sure my party was going to be up to the final battle. The snake lets me pass after yelling “Evocare” and I head into the castle. The Timelord makes more of a speech in this version but the order of the cards hadn’t changed.Īfter that I healed up and headed for Exodus. The trip to the timelord went similarly smoothly apart from some fun and games trying to go through the right moongate. I only ever made use of early in the game but I don’t remember this even being a possibility on the PC. Also, it is possible to run from combat in this version by backing out of the combat map. After a tough start the combat in this game didn’t keep pace with the progression of my characters making the game easier and easier the further I got into it. On my travels I met some subtantially tougher creatures in the lower dungeons but my party had no trouble with these at this stage. I used my cleric and wizard to quickly get me up and down levels and had all four in around 15 minutes. When you know where to go and have a fully equipped party, gathering the four marks takes no time at all. Once that was out of the way, I just needed to get the four marks and make sure the Time Lord hadn’t changed the order of the cards in this version. Most of that was spent filling up with gold and journeying back to Ambrosia. It took about another 90 minutes to finish Ultima 3. I’m not about to recommend listening to any version but the adventurous listener looking for the full high-fidelity experience will find the Ultima mix CD available to download in all it’s glory at The Rabbit’s Lair. The best I can say about the music is that it is very 80’s complete with synthesisers and the obligatory guitar solo. The sound only came out in mono so it needs a connection sorting out somewhere but you can download the results below:. I dug out my long disused record player to see if I could play this and it still worked much to my surprise. Both of these also featured on an Ultima Mix CD which had another 9 tracks from the game but without vocals. As for the music, Knife Of The Eye played in Ultima 3 when Lord British levels up your character and Magnet Of The Heart when exploring his castle. I have to say it was worth tracking down a copy of this just for the photoshopped cover art. This is an EP published by Canyon in 1987 featuring a couple of tracks from the NES version of the game These have been rearranged to the point of being barely recognisable and have added vocals sung by Noriko Hidaka who I gather went on to become reasonably famous on Japanese TV. I’m continuing the Japanese Ultima 3 theme with one of the more unlikely pieces of merchandise to find its way into my hands.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |