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showing 17 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.
Joust	Atari	1983	In the medieval age, knights were proving their skills and bravery by playing the game called JOUST. In the future well beyond our knowledge, the knights of hyperspace are playing their version of JOUST. They saddle up the space ostrich, and fight with aliens. You must adjust yourself to this unknown environment called hyperspace. You are not fighting for fame or glory, you are fighting for your own life. Knock the aliens off before they get to you. It is not an easy task, but somebody must do it. Can you be the survivor of this space fight? Good Luck! Believe me you will need it.***[media=youtube]xmii7P-9pIc[/media]
Ultima III: Exodus	Origin	1984
Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar	Origin (Origin Systems)	1985	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]
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 V: Warriors of Destiny	Origin	1988	[49]* [83]* [17]* [4]* [22]* [1]* [52]
Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show	Tynesoft	1989
Circus Games	Tynesoft	1989
Hillsfar	SSI (Westwood Studios)	1989
Joust VGA	author	1990
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]
Dragon Strike	SSI (Westwood Studios)	1990
Golden Axe	Sega	1991	The unpatched game will indeed run in Hercules graphics mode but will not run on a Hercules card. The game checks for a CGA card when loading and goes crazy when it doesn't find it. A patch will fix it.* [52]* [37]*The game leaves an unused black band on the screen's right edge, this is likely an artifact of very basic platform conversion.For 1-2 players simultaneously (cooperative or versus).Supports EGA, 4 color CGA/MCGA/Tandy, Hercules, 16 color Tandy and VGA GPUs.*This has nearly picture-perfect graphics that are nearly on a par with those of the Genesis, but suffers from some slowdowns at times. Its sound is also limited to blips and chirps from the PC speaker and so music is not an option. The year is either 1990 or 1991 as records vary. [b]Trivia[/b] from Mame.dk Golden Axe page 'The kanji [Japanese character] on the title screen actually reads 'Senpu', meaning 'Fighting Axe'. This is an example of 'gikun', where Japanese artists use the phonetic value of a character to determine the game's name, and not the meaning of the character itself.' [Garrett]
The Neverending Story II: The Arcade Game	Merit Studios (Linel)	1991
Wrath of the Demon	ReadySoft	1991
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]
Heirs to Skull Crag	SSI (MicroMagic;SSI)	1993	Heirs to Skull Crag is the game, exclusively available in no other package game, real game, actual game, existing game, playable game, completable that comes the the Unlimited Adventures game creator which is in every other videogam database with tools to create AD&D based adventures, or even other types of adventures based on the Gold Box Engine. The executable is "FRUA.EXE" and the letters stand for "Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures". But UA is by no means limited to the Forgotten Realms setting. Materials from other settings are included and players are free to create their own or download UGC from the aforementioned site.

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