Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar

a.k.a. Ultima 4 / Ultima IV: Avatar no Tankyu

published by Origin in 1985-09-16, developed by Origin Systems, running on MS-DOS
type: role-play
genre: Fantasy
series: Ultima, Ultima: The Age of Enlightenment
setting: Present
perspective: 1st person bird's-eye
player options: single player
languages: eng
3.3/5

Description

Comes on two 5.25' disks. In 1997 the full version of this game was 'made available for free download' at selected sites by Origin. However, it remains proprietary and not defined as "freeware" or "public domain" (these downloads can disappear or the priced raised at any time at Electronic Art's option). Several homebrew upgrades exist for this game that add features such as VGA graphics and Midi sound. The xu4 project allows this game to run on Windows, Linux, Mac OS 8, Mac OS X, and other operating systems. xu4 Also allows extensive modding of the graphics, enemies, items, and certain game logic.

The Ultima series continued to innovate with the release of each game in the series. With the 4th game released for Apple ][ and then ported to IBM-PC, the genre was taken to bran new places. There is no evil big bad enemy to defeat, and the point of the game is not to take advantage of people to get stuff to go defeat the enemy. Rather, the point of the game is for the main character to become a champion of virtue. The goals are literally honesty, humility, honor, spirituality, valor, justice, compassion, sacrifice, courage, truth, and love. Actions, inactions, even words can have less than apparent unhelpful or helpful consequences. Yes, there are still monsters to fight and treasures to find, but this makes up less than 1/8th of the game and the care and purpose in handling these things is more important than the end result.

(Zerothis) - # 2006

Authors / Staff

coding

James Van Artsdalen (port)

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External review - average: 80%

review sourceissuedatescore
Arcades (1-7)fr41988-01n.a.view
Power Playde31988-0280/10080%
view

Contributors (6)

teran01
zerothis
cjlee001
Sanguine
uvlbot-1
Popolon

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Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar in-game screen.
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