showing 2 games
| name | publisher(developer) | year arrow_downward | description | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar | Origin | 1985 | [52]*** [48]***Comes on two 5.25" disks. The Ultima series continued to innovate with the release of each game in the series. With this 4th game, 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. The [i]Ultima IV Construction Set[/i], [b]not official[/b], was available not long after the game's release. While the title would suggest it is a legitimate level editor, the package is in fact an illegal bootleg of Ultima IV. It even includes digital versions of all materials of the game. This overly complete violation of copyright does also include a level editor. [Zerothis] | labelimagesubject |
| Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny | Origin | 1987 | [media=youtube]bO6Jappcl30[/media]*** [49]*** [52]***Comes on four 5.25" disks (8 sides). Can optionally use one or two Mockingboard cards to produce up to 8 channels of stereo sound. Use of sound hardware requires 128K RAM. Otherwise the game has a minimum requirement of 64K RAM. Game box and materials claim "Apple II" compatibility but as it requires 64K RAM this seems to rule out the original Apple II with it's 48K limit. An Apple II plus could be upgraded to meet the RAM requirement and seems a reasonable minimum system. However, there are Slot 0 cards that will upgrade an original Apple II allowing for compatibility of games that must access more RAM and/or ROM functions that were not otherwise possible in the original Apple II. These option would cost many thousands of dollars. Since the game was designed for the possibility of 2 Mockingboards, perhaps Origin intended this extravagance for original Apple II owners. But this option would be obscure since some such cards for the original Apple II were created long before the IIe and IIc existed while ones created after where intended for (compatible with) the II plus or IIe. Such cards were in fact intended for adding Integer BASIC, Pascal, or other languages with the RAM and ROM upgrades merely being a requirement for these rather than being intended to be used by finished software. Compatible sound hardware includes: Mockingboard A Mockingboard C Mockingboard Sound I Mockingboard Sound II Mockingboard Sound/Speech I Phasor Passport MIDI The title screen includes and ACTIVATE MUSIC option and all hardware options can be configured there. The user must specify what hardware is present and which slots contain which hardware. The user is warned not to create a configuration with more than 12 voices. Phasor support is discussed further in the game's manual. A single Phasor can supply the same features as 2 Mockingboards plus additional voices for a total of 12 (But the game only uses 8). Passport MIDI provides different sound and music than Mockingboard(s). Mockingboards and Passport MIDI can be used simultaneously and the different sounds are complimentary; that is, 1 or even 2 Mockingboards + MIDI (8 voices + MIDI) are intended configurations by the developers. The player must manually configure the 14 instrument selections. While this could be considered a bit tedious by modern standards, it has the advantages being universally compatible with virtually any MIDI device and allowing the player to select instruments other than suggested by developers such as electric guitar and violin. Trivia: Officially, this was the last Ultima for which Richard Garriott contributed a major portion of code. He would act in design and management roles on all published original Ultima games after this one. He actually coded the [game=#41000]PC version of Akalabeth[/game] in assembly in 1998 (for the Ultima Collection package). But, this was not an original Ultima game as it was based on the [game=#38011]Apple 2 version of Akalabeth[/game]. This would also be the last Ultima game published for the Apple and designed for the Apple then ported or converted to other systems. All following Ultimas began as IBM-PC products and did not have Apple versions. However, Ultima V was not planned to be the last Apple II Ultima but was planned at one time to be the last 8-bit Apple II Ultima. See the descriptions of the [game=#40988]Apple II[/game] and [game=#166776]the Apple IIgs[/game] versions. [Zerothis] | labelimagesubject |
