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showing 8 games

name	publisher(developer)	year	description
Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress	Sierra On-Line;Origin (Origin)	1982	The second in The Age of Darkness Trilogy. Published on 3 5.25" disks. Part of the SierraVenture series.
Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness	Origin	1987	MSRP: $39.95 As the story goes, the wizard Mondain was intent on world domination. Over 1,000 years ago, he created the gem of immortality and granted him invincibility. Mondain is evil. The gem of immortality is evil. These are indisputable facts because it says to in the playbook. However, you won't be seeing Mondain doing anything evil in the present world and time. The player controls a stranger from another world (Earth) come to the land Sosaria to save it and its people from Mondain. The fact that Mondain is immortal and invincibility makes this a difficult task. So the stranger will travel back in time to kill Mondain before he creates his gem. A remake of the first game in the The Age of Darkness trilogy from the Ultima series of games. Origin rewrote the original Ultima in assembly language and updated the graphics. Some minor changes to place and people names were also made. The game did not have the "Age of Darkness" title, it was just plain "Ultima I". But a book was includes with the title "The First Age of Darkness". In the box for this version was the 5.25" disk and copy of the game on a 3.5" disk, The First Age of Darkness book, player reference card, four cardboard maps, and a cloth bag of coins, 1 gold, 3 silver, 1 copper (not the real minerals). This version was published by Origin themselves. [Zerothis]
Ultima VI: The False Prophet	Origin Systems	1990	[124]* [90]* [87]* [62]* [33]* [103]* [83]* [17]* [49]**Originally planned for the the Apple ][GS; but never to be realized. Due to the declining market share of the Apple ][ and poor sales of the ][GS, this game was moved to the older but more numerous Apple ][ platform (though no longer a relevant market force, their were still many, many Apple ][s in active use). That version turned out to be technically impractical and was also canceled. The project was started from scratch for a IBM-PC (MS-DOS) release. It was decided that character portraits could not be done on the 8-bit Apple II. In reality, they could have been done in the Apple II's double hi-res mode, but they would have been limited to 16 colors (32 simulated colors). The music and mouse interface were factors also. Again, the 8-bit apple could have done these also. All these things were built into the Apple ][GS hardware and/or system software The 8-bit Apple could actually do cassette quality digitized music and there was an Apple II mouse. Both of these would have required more software, more memory and a lot more storage space. Unless the customer wanted to be swapping disks or shell out a fortune for an Apple II hard drive (extremely rare and expensive at the time). So these features would have been missing from the 8-bit version. Origin successfully dealt with all of these limitations when they ported Ultima VI to the Commodore 64; then again when they ported another Commodore 64 version. But, the market share for the Apple II began a rapid decline on top of all these issues. The 16-bit version (IIgs) was abandon first then the 8-bit version was scrapped and the IBM-PC version was started from scratch. Note, the IBM-PC version had CGA, EGA, and Tandy graphics options which were all limited to 16 on screen colors. 4 colors for CGA on a non-composite monitor. It also had a greyscale Hercules graphics option. Of course most people played in 256 color VGA mode, but the other graphics options show that an Apple versions could have been done.* [22]* [1]* [52]* [37]***Comes with four 3.5' disks and seven 5.25' disks. Published by GT Interactive in 1992 in smaller box and without a cloth map. Cheryl Chen developed a computer language for the game's dialog called UCS ([b]U[/b]ltima VI [b]C[/b]onversation [b]S[/b]yste. Previous Ultima games had a software limits to how much text could be spoken by an NPC. Versions of Ultima IV utilizing UCS have no such limit. When the guy is channel surfing during the intro there's a man on TV holding a book that gets struck by lightning and turns to dust. The phone number on the screen is (512) 328-0282. People could call the number to buy the Official Book of Ultima by Shay Adams. This was a hint book, collection of Ultima lore, history and behind the scenes info. The Zebra-Centaur poster seen in the intro is based on a sketch by long time Ultima and Wing Commander artist Keith Berdak. A Nagel painting was first choice of the Ultima team and early unreleased version of the game had this instead. Origin was unable to secure the rights to use the copyrighted work, but it can nevertheless been seen on the back of the Ultima packaging in one of the screenshots. Fans sometimes blame censorship when different images are used in various ads and versions of the game. But in this case, the blame rests on another "C word". A full color version of Keith Berdak's Zebra-Centaur can be seen on his Facebook page (along with many NSFWs) Tools were extracted from development of this game so that Origin could, in theory, reuse them to rapidly and for less cost, produce other games. An early attempt to create a full game engine and SDK that would later become a standard practice. Savage Empire and Martian Dreams were fruits of this effort. Mythos: Caribbean Pirates and Legends from Greece, was planed to use these tools as well. But, SE and MD did not sell as well as had been hoped. Plus, the time and expense of developing these games was not much improved over TFP. Reuse of the Ultima 6 tools was abandon. This was not Origin's first try at game engines and would not be their last. An attempt was made with Ultima IV and would be attempted again with Ultima VII. [Zerothis]
Ultima VII: The Black Gate	Origin	1992	Review for the French version of the game. [22]* [22]French version [37] [37]Came with six 3.5' disks. The original release included a demo of Ultima Underworld on a 5.25' disk. U7 was rerealsed both by Origin and Electronic Arts in many packages that included the sequels/add-ins for U7 (Forge of Virtue, Serpent Isle, The Silver Seed) Tags: The 7th canonical game in the Ultima series and the first game in Ultima's Age of Armageddon. The player and party can use crossbows and bows. Ingredients can be mixed to bake bread and other things. Cheese is available as food. A variety of items can be crafted into other items. There are pumpkin fields in the game, from which pumpkins can be harvested. Flight of the Bumblebee is played at one point, Rule Britannia is overplayed. There are several prisoners in the game and its this plays into the plot more than once. An addictive medicine in the game is abused by characters and can be abused by the player's character and party, with consequences. Unicorns are mentioned in in-game books and by characters[spoiler=and;and]one can be found by the player also.[/spoiler] Origin once again attempted to create a game engine as they had done before with Ultima IV and Ultima VI. Arthurian Legends was the game they would attempt to create using the U7 Engine. AL was not completed and the source code of the Ultima VII games was later lost. A game engine called Exult allows the game to run on a wide variety of platforms [Zerothis]**Still one of the best RPG's ever made IMO. The Forge of Virtue was a small expansion released with some packages. Ever wondered how to get this baby to run on Windows? Check here: [url=http://exult.sourceforge.net]exult.sourceforge.net[/url] [cjlee001]
Wolfenstein 3D	Apogee;Activision;GT Interactive (id Software)	1992	[media=youtube]x8o0a5ntxfc[/media]*A fun run-and-gun FPS (one of the pioneers of the genre) with a simple goal in mind: kill nazis. It has not aged well (its palette is very harsh to the sight, and its control feels clunky), but still its minoic level design (filled with secrets) and its variety of levels (from the ubermensch/zombie army of mission 2 to the secret nightmare of mission 4) make it a nice title. Its simpleness is its best virtue; nonetheless this game was made to be hard. 7 of 10, would kill mystic führers again.Maybe it was the fact that people got to blow away Nazis. Maybe it was the sheer challenge of it all. For whatever reason, Wolfenstein 3D and Spear of Destiny, pioneered the first-person shooter genre and brought its legendary creators, id Software, worldwide notoriety and numerous awards. In fact, The Computer Gaming World Hall of Fame recognized Wolfenstein 3D as helping to shape the overall direction of the computer gaming industry. [Steam Store] [52]They also released a mission pack titles "The Nocturnal Missions" with three more episodes. Later releases of Wolfenstein 3D would include these mission pack episodes and thus had six episodes instead of only the three original episodes.Third game in the Wolfenstein series. 1st version published by Apogee. Republished later by Activision Publishing and again by GT Interactive. [Zerothis]*The first really addictive First-person shooter!
Anvil of Dawn	New World Computing (DreamForge Intertainment)	1995	[b]Minimum[/b] * DOS 5.0 or greater * 486/33 CPU * 4 MB RAM * 5 MB free HD space * 2X CD-ROM drive * Mouse [b]Recommended:[/b] * 486/66 CPU * 30 MB free HD space*The game's unusual in the manner that although you select one of the five heroes to play as in the beginning, you get to meet the other four in your travels. The choice of hero mostly affects the voice-overs (and dialog with it) and appearance, attributes are freely customizable if you so desire.*The game was apparently re-released in 2007/01 with Windows XP support. Unable to verify this currently, though.
Daggerfall	Bethesda Softworks	1996	The various demo various support sound hardware that the final version does not.* [84][b]Minimum:[/b] DOS 6.0 * 66 MHz 486DX2 CPU * 8 MB RAM * 50 MB HD space * mouse [b]Recommended:[/b] * 450 MB HD space [b]Soundcards:[/b] Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster 16, AWE 32 Pro Audio Spectrum * Ensoniq Soundscape * Gravis Ultrasound*2009-07-09 made temporarily available for free, on the 15th anniversary of the Elder Scrolls series.Latest version: 1.07.213 (as of ?)*The control system for Daggerfall was surprisingly advanced for its time (in DOS game, anyway), I think. You could easily have mouse look in and practically use similar-ish control mechanism to what's in modern games (e.g. in Dark Messiah) to control which way or how you swung your weapons. The only difference was that instead of swinging in the direction you moved, it swung in the direction you dragged the mouse, which in effect prevented you from turning around with the mouse as long as you had the attack button pressed. The controls were also quite customizable, since you could easily configure them to resemble something similar to that time's control system. The game was also quite unique that you could scale any* straight wall almost indefinitely, defying any laws of sensibility by dragging yourself across to heights that made no sense. Lack of this ability was one of the most disappointing factors in the sequels, I think (though I have to really blame the blatantly lighter mood of the other games for _really_ disappointing me.. honestly, the story description of both Morrowind and Oblivion is much darker, yet I feel like I'm playing in some kind of [[link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletubbies Teletubby]] land).**The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall is the second chapter in the highly acclaimed Elder Scrolls role-playing series. Its predecessor, TES: Arena, won over twenty Best Role Playing Game of the Year awards and set a new level for computer role plating. TES: Daggerfall is the most ambitious CRPG ever created and surpasses the high standard set in Arena. Daggerfall offers you an opportunity to adventure in total freedom within a world where your destiny is of your own making and consequence evolves from your decisions. A world of love and darkness, magic and sorcery. Whether you choose to follow a quest or to venture out alone, you will interact with thousands of people as you travel across an expansive land in a time of fantasy and imagination. The largest world ever created for a computer role-playing game. Adventure through thousands of cities, villages, dungeons, graveyards, ruins, castles, shrines and farms. * Interact with thousands of characters, both in dialogue and action. * Involve yourself in a complex world of constantly evolving political intrigue. * Own property and ships, participate in the politics of guilds and other organisations and trade goods and services. * Customise your character or even create a unique character class. * Participate in numerous large-scale, complex quests or venture off on your own. * A multiple path story, with several different endings. You decide how the game is played and won. [Box blurb]***Daggerfall is the sequel to Arena. The world is HUGE, with litterally thousands of NPC's, hundreds of towns and dungeons, and a nearly infinate number of choices that can be made. You can spend time on side quests, or attempt your main goal of saving Daggerfall from the spirit of it's dead king.
Dragon Engine	Litmus Dragon	2000	This entry is for the unnamed sample game included with Dragon Engine. Dragon Engine an RPG maker specialized to create games in the style of Ultima 3-5. The game can take advantage of the advanced hardware of late model DOS systems.

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