showing 4 games

namepublisher(developer)year arrow_downwarddescription
Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar  Origin (Origin Systems)1985Comes 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]
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Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos  Virgin Interactive (Westwood Studios)1993
[59]***CD-ROM version
[37]***Floppy disk version
[37]***[media=youtube]DKdBs7Pc1JE[/media]***Latest version: 1.23 (as of 1994-04?), 1.02 for CD release

White Label CD release is pre-patched to "1.02D".***[b]Minimum:[/b]
* 386SX / 25 MHz CPU
* 4 MB RAM
* VGA or MCGA GPU
* 5 MB free HD space

For voices: Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster Pro, AdLib Gold, or AdLib Gold Standard.
For music: Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster Pro, AdLib Gold, AdLib Gold, Roland MT-32/LAPC-1 or General MIDI.

The CD-ROM (White Label) version mentions Win3.1, but this is only for compatibility info.***1993 original floppy release
1994 CD-ROM - full speech and additional narrative history of the lands by Patrick Stewart
1996 CD-ROM - "special" white label European release. No idea what's so special about it, even though I have this. Doesn't appear any different from the '94 release, except maybe the box art.***A Legend has been born...Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos is a fantasy, role playing adventure like no other.
"Scotia, the hideous hag wants it all... power... riches...lland...THE WORLD! Can she be stopped? The truth stone must be found before her evil can be defated"
The sheer scale, superb art animation and incredible special effects, will transport you through over thirty unique areas. As one of the seven characters that you can choose from, you will face over fifty intelligent and believable monsters in mortal combat. Fantasy and reality become one, in lands where the only law is survival.
[Box blurb]
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Dungeons & Dragons: Fantasy Empires SSI (Silicon Knights)1993
[59]***
[37]
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Nemesis: The Wizardry Adventure  Virgin Interactive (Sir-tech Software)1996Players control as an seemingly unremarkable peasant who was minding his own business when [spoiler=when someone;close spoiler]the society of Nitherin Mages[/spoiler] sent a fowl beast in an attempted kidnapping. A good wizard completely deck-out for battle just happened to be watching over the peasant while standing in a tiny boat in a nearby water (hmmm), and foiled the kidnapping. The High Council knows of the group responsible but not the reason, nor why they have such a specific target. The unremarkable present is charged to investigate and stop them.

Individual item skill is gained by using said item. Spells can be learned. For battle, commands are selected and the player then clicked on the target. There is a great deal of talking to be done to complete the investigation. There are many puzzle to be solved. All done with the mouse or keyboard shortcuts.

Conceived as a complex real-time adventure game with dialog and combat but with contrastingly simplified interface that is still "more than click-click-click". It does not take place in the same Universe as the main Wizardry series and gameplay has nothing in common with the main Wizardry series (even critics who loved the game gave it poor ratings for calling it "Wizardry").***
[84]***
[65]
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