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Ultima IV

filfre.net

151 pointskryptiskt73 comments

I loved Ultima IV. I think I still have the original cloth map and ankh somewhere. I believe it came with 5 1/4" floppys for the C64.

You have to remember that at the time, that there were really 3 game media back then. A) board games like DnD, B) the 8-bit Nintendo/Gameboy and C) the PC.

The Nintendo was cool and fast paced and was great to play with your friends, but the PC had all the adventure games. Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Bard's Tale II, Zork, etc.

PC Adventure games were all MUCH more involved that today's stuff. All the DnD games had decoder wheels and 500 page journals. You were expected to play it slow, read the journal entries, and immerse youself in the game. The closest thing I can think of today that comes close is Skyrim.

Most PC games today are built for kids with ADHD that aren't going to sit down long enough to use a decoder wheel. Heck, how many people actually read the quest text in world of warcraft?

Ultima IV actually had pretty good graphics for the time. The UI layout was really great. Most of the other games of the time were based on the old "wolfenstein maze" view of a game. Having an top down map was quite innovative.

There was a lot of 'searching' in Ultima IV. You had to find party members, you had to find secret doors. You had to find hidden items.

You had to run around do /say job, /say name, /say health, /say quest.. to every npc in the game to see if they'd tell you something.

Anyway loved the game, but it was built for a different time.

I'm going through all the Ultimas now. (Currently on U5 but I've been busy for a few weeks.) The sense of world-building is the series is fascinating. With a minimal amount of space a wide world was developed and it feels to persist a lot more than in any modern game, where a bunch of spaz happens and then the game is over.

I'm not sure if having to write down notes in a notebook is something beneficial to game play, or just a limitation we had to live with. In a modern game you don't have to remember shit. If Joe tells you to ask Bob, you get a Quest Item reminding you to see Bob, and Bob has an exclamation point over his head to remind you to go to him.

(About the article: it bugs me when people alphabetize the virtues instead of the proper order of HCVJSHSH. ;> )

Where did you get your copies of the games?

Ultima 4+5+6 is on gog.com for $6:

http://www.gog.com/game/ultima_456

Windows and OSX, how about that?

edit: Just 4 by itself is free!

http://www.gog.com/game/ultima_4

GOG periodically has sales for the entire Ultima milieu in one big bunch.

> I'm going through all the Ultimas now.

Same here! I've loved the series since I was younger.

GOG.com is the best place to get them online, and even though I own physical copies I've purchased most of them from there.

One caveat: for the earlier Ultimas, I highly recommend going through the pain of installing fan-made patches that add the Apple II music to many of the DOS versions, upgrade the graphics to VGA, fix bugs, and so on:

http://ultimacodex.com/2012/04/patches-updates-for-the-gog-c...

With the MIDI patches, I'm able to play music for the early Ultimas through my Roland MT-32. :-)

You should also take a look at the xu4 project (open source game engine using the original resources: http://xu4.sourceforge.net) and LairWare's Mac-only version of Ultima III (http://www.lairware.com/ultima3/).

Responding to the article in particular, as much as Ultima VIII is reviled for its gameplay, I do enjoy the idea of turning the idea of virtue on its head: how do you continue as the Avatar (meaning, the literal embodiment of virtue) in a world where you have to do bad things for good reasons?

Yes, not only space, but also limited hardware. U5 was the last Ultima that still ran on 64kb of memory -- of course with several floppy discs to swap (a second floppy drive was a big advantage for that game) -- I think, there where 6 or 8 of them, but you had to swap mainly two (overworld and town disc).

It was the genius of that time, that a game of that size could fit into such limited hardware (64kB RAM, no HDD, only Floppy drives with 180kB size limit, <1MHz clock with unbelievable slow 8bit processor (I guess, today they sell such stuff as a smartcard "SOC" -- but of course with out the Floppy drive -- even the processors on SD-Cards are faster today, I guess) [Specs from the C64 version, but there existed versions at least also for Apple II with similar specs (It could even be, that it ran on Apple II with only 48kB) -- and (later?) of course for IBM PC].

U4 was technically similar to U5 (also several discs to swap and a big world on limited RAM), U5 did just drove the concept to the technical (and swapping-endurance-) limits. I think, they doubled the disc number (and so the content, I think 4->8 discs), improved the combat system (I liked the U5 combat system the most from all Ultimas I know) and made a new story, that showed the other side of "righteous" living.

Even, when I never found the time, to finish U5, for me it is still the best of all time.

To be a bit of a pedant, there was a C64 port of Ultima 6, the only version of the game that ran on 8-bit hardware. [0] But it's essentially unplayable due to the technical limitations, as you've outlined. To quote one Youtube comment: "You would take two steps and data would load from the disk. Talk to someone, more loading. Walk a bit more, more loading. Dragged too much."

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcMljmsPkGM

Ok, my information was, that U6 was released on IBM PC and the developers did not support older (8bit) HW any more.

Was this an official port?

I tried to play U6 much later, but I hated the new controls, as much I remember.

There were no (authorized) 8-bit ports of Ultima VI at all, unless EA licensed the name to an outside developer as a platform license of some kind. We got as far as building the U6 world editor on our Apples, but it's not a good sign when your content looks lame and outdated at the start of a long game project. The performance gap between PCs and the 8-bit platforms was just too great. 20 MHz 386 systems with 256-color graphics were shipping by that point, and that meant that no art assets could have been shared between a contemporary PC title and an 8-bit version of the same title. Any attempt at creating an Ultima VI on an Apple or C64 would have resulted in a very different game.

Nobody was happy about leaving the Apple II behind, but we got over it in a hurry.

EDIT: Holy cow, I looked at the YouTube link and somebody actually did greenlight a C64 port, it looks like. Utter insanity, I can't believe that happened!

Yeah, they basically ginned up a half-finished alpha, realized it was impossible to complete, and then fucking shipped it anyway. Not a pleasant birthday present for a twelve-year-old boy who had idolized Richard Garriott up 'til then.

Sorry to hear that, seriously. About all I can guess is that they were so desperate for cash that they were making some really bad judgment calls. This would have been just prior to the EA buyout, I imagine. (I'd left by then.)

The C64 port of Ultima V almost drove the guy who did it into a rubber room, and he was an extremely sharp guy. I just can't believe anybody thought it was a good idea to put U6 on an 8-bit computer in 1990, or to ship the result to paying customers. If it weren't for that video, I would have said chipsy was smoking crack.

It was an official release, but it was a piece of shit. It was ugly, buggy as hell, missing major gameplay features, and had no sound whatsoever. Not only was it constantly grinding the floppy drive, but it came on four double-sided disks, and--just for example--the conversations were on a different disk than the towns, so every time you tried to talk to someone, you had to switch disks, wait 30 seconds, and then reverse the process when done.

Sometimes, you would drop an item and it would turn into a wall square, permanently. Sometimes a stack of items--ammo, potions--would stop decrementing when you removed one but keep incrementing when you added one, which sounds great except that U6 had encumbrance, so you wound up unable to carry anything but 60 pounds of potions. If, say, you fired a bow at an enemy four squares to the northeast, instead of animating an arrow flying at them, it would animate a bow taking four steps north, then four steps east. Ground hazards (bear traps and lava) proced every time you moved the cursor, so you could kill anything in one round by tossing a bear trap under them, wiggling the joystick for a while, and then ending your turn so the game would notice they were dead. Sometimes the game wouldn't actually notice when a PC was supposed to be dead--the whole party could splash around happily in lava as their HP went further and further negative.

I had been a huge Ultima fanboy up 'til then, but that was the last one I ever played. Twelve-year-old me felt seriously betrayed. They should never have shipped the C64 version.

Speaking of memory issues, I could've sworn that the Apple version of U5 required a 128KB //e. I just went and checked the box on my shelf, and you're right, it only required 64KB. It's a memory issue -- with my memory -- because I probably wrote about 50% of the code in question. :-P It's cool to see that people are still enjoying it, though!

I would read a blog post about your experiences.

It would be about as exciting as any other programmer's blog, I'm afraid. This guy's other blog entries on Ultima and the history of 8-bit RPGs in general are outstanding -- see http://www.filfre.net/tag/garriott/ for a lot of fun background details. I'd recommend reading his stuff instead. :)

One correction I'd offer: Richard never received a letter accusing him of being a "Satanic Perverter of America's Youth," at least not in so many words. That particular sobriquet was mine, after he made the mistake of letting his car windows get a bit too dirty. It was hilarious at the time... but I 'fessed up pretty quickly because he was either genuinely mortified, or doing a great job of acting like it.

Have you heard of or tried Ultima V: Lazarus?

It's a fantastic total conversion of Ultima V using the Dungeon Siege engine. It requires that you have Dungeon Siege or Legends of Aranna installed (won't work with Dungeon Siege 2). The (almost) complete Ultima V with extra sidequests and the option of becoming an evil Avatar. It's one of the best game mods I've ever played. I believe Richard Garriott himself gave Team Lazarus a big huzzah.

some things from the original U5 couldn't be implemented in the DS engine. The blink spell had to be cut, for example.

http://u5lazarus.com/

Not yet; I'm not finished tearing Ultima 5 to pieces and decoding every single thing about it. ;) After that, Lazarus, and then U6, which I've never played. It will be interesting to see how a fresh play of an Ultima game goes for me at this stage in my life.

Have you played any of "The Bard's Tale" -- We had EXTENSIVE notebooks and maps from that game, much more than in Ultima.

I think BT4 was the hardest, if I recall -- and the walkthrough books were also hard for us to get back then and both reviled and revered.

If your doing nostalgia marathons, try that series as well.

I played Bard's Tale III Thief of Fate for HOURS and HOURS when I was younger. I didn't understand the concept of grinding back then, so I never made much progress beyond the 3rd world (there were 8 if I remember correctly). Mostly because I kept getting into trouble by not building my characters up enough to be strong enough to tackle the next section.

I had this idea in my mind for the longest time that I would go back and try to replay that game with what I know now and see how much better I could be at it.

So I tried, and you know what?

The game is fucking terrible. It's nearly unplayable. It's tedious, the graphics suck, the sound sucks, the interface sucks, the combat sucks. It does not hold up. I can't believe I spent weeks of my childhood playing this garbage.

On the other hand, Ultima VI and Ultima VII are as good as the day they came out.

HAHA, thanks for that - My memory is completely clouded in 7th grader nostalgia... so I appreciate you having a much mre recent objective look at the game :)

I recall having a blast in bards tale, and memorizing the exact arrow keys to get from town to dungeon entrance without even looking at the screen.

I recall dutifully mapping out all dungeons on graph paper.

I played a ton of Bards Tale 1 on my Apple 2. I don't think I ever passed it, though. For me, after seeing Bard's Tale I could never get into Ultima--the 2d top down graphics were just too poor compared to Bard's Tale's 3d view of the towns and dungeons.

And I definitely remember mapping out all the dungeons and Skara Brae on graph paper. Eventually I borrowed the hint book from a classmate and photocopied the whole thing.

Later, when my friends were playing Ultima V, I was playing Dungeon Master on my Amiga. I just couldn't get over the graphical difference. I never understood Ultima...

I got hooked on TSW [1] recently. Two years old it should count as a modern game where you probably need to take notes quite a bit.

People playing can hand out "play for 72 hours" invitations. If you are interested, let me know.

1: The Secret World, in the MMORPG genre with.. attitude and interesting ideas

But did you start with Akalabeth?

No, it wasn't in the package. :(

They have a version available for iOS. It's just a simple BASIC game that evolved into Ultima I (also written in BASIC, with some Assembly).

> There was a lot of 'searching' in Ultima IV. You had to find party members, you had to find secret doors. You had to find hidden items.

No kidding. One of the party members, Geoffrey (who was a fighter and represented the virtue of Valor) is behind a locked door in a game where it's not entirely easy to buy keys to said doors.

My father, brother and I had the hardest time of finding the shepherd companion (Katrina). I think in the end we solved the problem by starting the game as a shepherd, which is basically "hard mode" as you have the weakest starting position (level 1 out of 8, whereas other starting characters begin at level 2 or 3), you can never use magic, and you start off on a small island near a ruined city.

Much later on, we found the damn shepherd, south of the starting point in said ruined city, entirely off of any road there.

Using Katrina is definitely "hard mode." Her best weapon long-range weapon is the sling. And you need to get her up to level 8 to complete the game.

My friend and I had noticed we hadn't found her, so I decided to do a four-corner search of the town, and she turned up very quicklu. To be fair, I had been trained by Ultima III that there were often cool -- but not necessarily required for game completion -- things hiding the corners.

I'm torn as to whether I agree. If there's one thing I appreciate about modern games -- games within the last 10 or so years -- is that they respect my time. There's a lot we could unpack here, so I'll just be brief. Ish.

While it might have been awesome at the time (I loved Ultima IV) I'm not a kid anymore. I don't have summer vacation. I also don't have ADHD. What I do have is an hour a day to play a game before bed, so that game damn well better make it worth my while.

Besides, the consistent popularity of MMOs and particularly MOBAs belies the whole idea of ADHD as driving factor. Both reward a large investment of time & mastery. And both are practically PC-only.

> Most PC games today are built for kids with ADHD that aren't going to sit down long enough to use a decoder wheel. Heck, how many people actually read the quest text in world of warcraft?

I find this ironic, as when I was a little kid I had the time and patience to use a decoder wheel. As an adult it doesn't seem as fun or interesting.

The decoder wheels were never fun. They weren't supposed to be fun. They were copy protection.

Some games liked to dress them up with thematically-appropriate text and images, which was nice, but it was still just a tiresome chore you had to deal with before playing the game.

"I love to think about it, love the fact that it exists, that Richard Garriott had the courage to make it — but just thinking about playing it makes me tired. Like a work of conceptual art, to some extent the real power of Ultima IV today is just the fact of its existence."

I played the NES version, which was probably a little more tolerable. Even though it's a slog, it is one of my favorite games at least in concept. I love how the air vehicle is a hot air balloon that you can't control other than cast spells to change wind direction. Good times when you run out of MP.

The game is up there with Inindo for the SNES, which is another game that is a chore to play, but is one of my favorite concepts.

Nit: MP was rapidly regenerated in U4. However, you could run out of Wind Change spells. ;)

I'm a dork.

Ah yes, and I remember it not being so much the MP but the herbs needed in conjunction to cast. Can't make anything simple. :)

The only Ultima game I played was Ultima VII. I love that game. It's one of the high water marks in computer gaming. I recall being around 7 or 8, playing it with my younger brother, both of us completely obsessed, but at the same time unsure of how really to play it. The game-play and world were for the most part completely open, and immense; you could either talk to every person you cam across and progress through the game, or you could explore the woods, dungeons or go to random islands complete with pirates to battle. Then there were the character development aspects of the game, like if you steal too many things, your companions will leave you. I loaded it up again a few years ago after seeing it for sale on GoG. It is timeless in every way. And now I am feeling very nostalgic :]

Also, was there a secret way to kill Lord British in Ultima IV? I know of two ways to do it in Ultima VII. You can either surround him with like 8 barrels of gun powder, or double clicking this anvil thing in his castle while he stands under it at 12:00 PM every day.

> Also, was there a secret way to kill Lord British in Ultima IV?

The Ultima Wiki actually has an entire page devoted to killing Lord British in the various games:

http://ultima.wikia.com/wiki/Killing_Lord_British

Of all the 1000+ games I've played from the original Nintendo games on, if I had to pick a list of five favorites, Ultima IV would be on it. The Ultima games were impressively ahead of similar games such as the Wizardry series.

All of Wizardry I on consisted of building characters with stats, navigating a menu-based town with no graphics, taking steps through a first person perspective dungeon, and fighting monsters. Ultima I on the other hand, had equivalent dungeons, many towns with top down views and people to talk to, an overland world a space ship and more. The difference was staggering!

In terms of plot, early Ultima IV was a quantum leap from its predecessors. Here were the goals in each game:

Ultima I - Kill an evil wizard.

Ultima II - Kill that wizard's evil apprentice.

Ultima III - Kill an evil monster.

Ultima IV - Become an avatar who symbolizes the eight virtues and inspires the people of the land!

Needless to say, against the backdrop of RPGs with rigid or non-existent plots, it was refreshing and immersive in a way that would be very hard to replicate in today's flooded game market. In some ways the frustrating nature of the game that the author mentioned, like the conversation system actually made the game more immersive. Since any stray word in a conversation could be the keyword to unlock further secrets in a conversation with someone else, I hung on every word. I filled a notebook with notes—"Talk to this person about mystic armor", "Ask that person about navigation", "Ask the mage in the woods at Yew about deep magic", and so on. I can certainly see how modern gamers wouldn't want to go through all of that note-taking or draw their own maps of dungeons. I probably wouldn't either, now that I'm not eight. Nonetheless, Ultima was an impressive work of art I'll never forget.

I lived and breathed Richard Garriot's fantastic world for months until I finally made it to the final question at the bottom of the Stygian Abyss, ready to open the Codex of Ultimate Knowledge. And I kept getting the damned answer wrong, which resulted in me being sent back up to the surface and losing hours of work. Stuck within a single word of victory I finally gave up. For three years, I didn't play the game. And then one day, somehow all of the game conversations I'd burned into memory came together and I had it! I felt confident knew the answer to the last question. I booted the game back up, fought through the 8 levels of the Abyss, got to the final riddle, and with trembling fingers, entered my answer.

The raw answer never appears in the game, AFAIK. Smith The Horse was supposed to tell it to you, or a critical clue, but they forgot that part of the game. His two talk prompts are both "A" "A".

Smith became a running joke after that; in each game, he would tell you something critical for the previous game.

Yeah, that was great! I'd almost forgotten about all the inside jokes and easter eggs. Also interestingly, I tried to edit my stats and Lord British appeared killed my party for pirating the game.

Good times.

Which Ultima was that? I got scolded by Beyond Zork for messing with stats and not handling the checksum: http://danweber.blogspot.com/2008/08/shove-beyond-zork-under... control-F for "checksum"

...and was it wrong again. Damn it!

I think one essential part of the Ultima formula was its geometric discreteness- The world was one in which the physics is broken into motion in orthogonal directions through discrete cells, and everything in the game leveraged this fact for maximum effect. It led to a really different gameplay feel than many modern games. Other games of that era had that as well, of course, but not many really leveraged it as well (Boulderdash and Archon would be two other highlights)

Some modern games of course also use this approach to physics (Advance Wars comes to mind) but it is far less common.

As someone who's never played this series, can you give more detail about what this means?

I think this is just the most complicated description of "grid system" I have ever heard.

There were many "Gold box" DND games that also used this approach. How far you could walk and how your enemies were positioned were very important.

I recall interesting tactics like standing on a downed troll so it couldn't regenerate.

Most modern tactical RPGs use a similar approach. Shadowrun Returns, X-COM, Final Fantasy Tactics, and SpiderWeb's RPGs come to mind.

Advance Wars adds an interesting resource control strategy to the mix. Personally I found it sometimes so difficult it bordered on a puzzle game.

Ultima IV was awesome. Here's text maps that were passed around from when the game first came out. Designed for 80-column, tractor-feed output. Just print them out, and tape them together. Woot! =)

World maps:

http://www.kitchencloset.com/home/bryan/text_files/ultima_IV...

City maps:

http://www.kitchencloset.com/home/bryan/text_files/ultima_IV...

CRPG Addict is replaying all computer RPGs - yes, all of them -- in chronological order and writes about his experiences. Here's his first post of many on Ultima 4: http://crpgaddict.blogspot.de/2010/04/game-16-ultima-iv.html

If you've got any other 80s era CRPGs you want to read about, the likelihood of him having played it and written about it in-depth is pretty much 100%.

Damn, it would seem that I need to play this. After playing Fallout 2 my dream was the play a game like that set... in a fictional renaissance Italy with more tech and maybe some magic. There would be no evil in the world. Just the possibility to raise one town or family above the others and at the end of your life/game have a retrospective on how your actions made a difference in the world.

Maybe dwarf fortress can get us close to this, because to pull it off you need a reference history (or rather set of histories) from which to compare. But the idea of being able to see whether you as an individual can actually make an impact on a simulated world seems incredibly valuable and educational. Sadly most cRPGs today have completely forsaken the idea of truly simulating the world in favor of narrow story telling. What happened to games made by programmers?

My first ever computer game that I got into was Utima II on the Apple ][e.

I have played every Ultima since. I was also in beta and then a long time on UO -- which for me was my golden age of gaming as I worked in the Intel Game lab and played 4 accounts on 4 machines side-by-side on what was one of the fastest corporate inet connections at the time!

I still reminisce about Ultima and UO a lot.

I still think I have the Ultima V cloth map somehwere... I used to be fluent in the Rune Alphabet when I was in 7th? grade and my buddy morgan and I would write school notes in the Runes...

EDIT: in one of the Ultima games, I recall finding a bug where you could dupe ships -- I had oceans full of ships that I could use to bridge between continents/islands...

Anyone recall this dupe bug and how it was done?

I seem to remember you could board enemy ships at sea? Something like you would sail out, X-It your boat and stand on the enemy ship and then board it. The enemy ship would still be there "underneath" and you would have another ship you could use.

This! I remember it as well. Edit -> pretty sure it was II, or III... hell I don't remember, can picture it though. What about dropping a coin in the lake in I to get a random weapon, do it enough times and your puny starting character gets a blaster (most powerful weapon).

In U2 you get ships by having some item that lets you "take over" the ship, and then by a pretty easy bug[1], duplicate the ship repeatedly.

[1] It was hard to not exploit the bug.

I remember 2 useful bugs in Ultima IV on the Apple //e --

  * If you readied a weapon that you already had readied, one would get added to your store. Which you could then sell. 
  * If you exited the balloon without landing, you could walk anywhere (over mountains and through forests without slowing down) and see anything to the edges of the screen.

Nostalgia trigger warning: Classic PC games

Seriously, there should be a warning--I just lost a few working hours. I don't think I've ever seen so much well-written, well-researched content about classic PC gaming and interactive fiction on a single site. Bravo!

I loved all the Ultima games. But, as others have said; I can't imagine putting in that much time today. [Because I'm old with responsibilities and can't spend 8-10 hours a day on a game for weeks at a time].

A few others mentioned cloth maps; so at the risk of tooting my own horn; here is the "Jewel" of my collection; a cloth map for the First Ultima game, apparently only released in Japan and very rare:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kMprGHococ

The game stands in contrast to Ultima 3 (which I loved as well).

Ultima 3 you could go into a city fight and loot, then leave and go back again, and everything would be back to the way it was before.

I remember exchanging hints with friends also playing.. I can't believe I finished it. Those games where hard.

Some of the difficulty (and complaints in the article) was the lack of hand holding and guidiance the game gave you. Given the limited hardware of the time (64K memory...cpus of 1 -10 megaHz) these games were astounding.

I beat Ultima 4 when I was 13 on my Amiga 500. I found the game to be much easier than some other RPGs that I played when I was a kid. Bards Tale 1 comes to mind as about the hardest.

U4 reset cities, too, although the virtue penalties to massacring a town could be severe.

In U5, you could permanently kill off city residents, even residents who still hadn't given you a critical piece of information or equipment.

I remember how, after winning the game and maxing out my party, I would go clear out Montour East and Montour West (both of which were loaded with guards) just for kicks.

> Cast Spell! Wizard spell-P

Ah, good times.

the only place where Ultima IV does even lip service to the idea that there can be conflicts between its virtues, debate about their merits, is in those questions that open the game

There are some actions in game where you might have to choose one virtue over another. Such as running from battle versus being victorious in it. If you weak enough, you might have to take some karma-hits on the chin.

This was one of the first games I ever played on my brand new Packard Bell XT, with its tiny orange monochrome monitor running SIMCGA to simulate a 320x200 4-color CGA screen.

It was a cracked copy, and so I didn't have a cloth map. Instead, I would use the in-game map "gems" to show a tiny part of the map, sail a little bit further, use it again, and so forth, all the time drawing a complete map of the world in pencil.

I also didn't have a manual, and so I didn't know how to mix reagents to make spells. In one town I had to get past a magical barrier and didn't know how to make the "dispell" spell. I ended up writing a poor man's map editor in QuickBasic, finding the hex code that corresponded to the wall, then using a hex editor to zap that section out of existence. I figured that was some pretty powerful magic right there.

While in the hex editor I found a strange bunch of text, including the words "Note: you can't win!" and "Yvonne Yu has big balls!" The latter was in the world map and manifested itself as a giant structure in the southeast ocean consisting of dozens of writhing characters floating in the sea.

I took painstaking notes, writing down every possible hint I received from every person in every city. It took months. I became somewhat obsessed with the game, thinking about it during all hours.

At one point I realized I wanted to equip all my party members with magic bows. I did this by going to the bridge just to the east of Castle Brittania and walking over and over until trolls appeared. Shoot, get treasure, walk back to Britain and sell, rinse and repeat. Over and over. I did get those bows though.

Eventually I made it to the depths of the Stygian Abyss and faced the final question. That's when the game bugged out and would say nothing more than "It looks like you could use a good horse!" repeatedly. I figured this was Yvonne Yu's handiwork. Damn you, Yvonne Yu, wherever you are!

A few years later I saved up enough to buy the Ultima 1-6 collection, which included all the games on a single CD with manuals and many of the cloth maps, and a single token (the metal coin with the virtues symbol on it from Ultima V). Disappointed that it wasn't the ankh, I went and bought an ankh on a chain from a street vendor and wore it a couple of times before it started feeling a bit weird.

Anyway, I went back, using my handwritten notes, and finished Ultima IV completely, getting the end scene noted in the article.

Ultima IV was my favorite game for a long time. Even then I knew there was something special about it.

> Eventually I made it to the depths of the Stygian Abyss and faced the final question. That's when the game bugged out and would say nothing more than "It looks like you could use a good horse!" repeatedly.

I haven't played the game, but this struck me as suspiciously relevant:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8022817

Ultima IV and Infocom's Sorcerer are the only two games I remember solving/finishing without taking any hints. I remember both as hugely satisfying experiences. I even called the company to ask for an extra ankh so I could give it to my girlfriend. :-)

I came really close to finishing U5 without any outside help whatsoever, but I didn't even realize there was a harp puzzle. :/

The 'bad ending' to U5 is probably the cruelest in video game history, considering how hard Dungeon Doom is, and how you have exactly one chance to learn about the very existence of the sandalwood box from a single character that you're not supposed to trust and who will only talk to you if you tell them a password you get by doing something extremely unvirtuous...

I'm pretty sure that you were intended to get through the entire game without finding the sandalwood box, get the bad ending, and go back and replay the whole thing the right way. That's how you got value for your dollar in those days.

The sandalwood box in U5 is right up there in the pantheon of obscure paths to victory in games, along with the numerous unwinnable states in King's Quest V (eating the pie, not saving the mouse) and the legendary Grandmaster Ending in Wizardry IV (itself arguably the hardest RPG in gaming history).

At least in U5, if you clear a dungeon room it stays cleared, so the next time through Dungeon Doom is lot easier.

U4 really kicked us in the crotch, though, with its "INFINITY" riddle ending. There was only an extremely vague way of figuring it out: each time you would get an eighth, a runic letter would be put on the screen. But reading runes wasn't really required for U4, so at the time I didn't even recognize them as runes.

Entirely by coincidence, I had a card where I had all the virtues listed horizontally, and I manually drew the "weird symbols" I saw at the bottom. When you play U5 you get good enough to read runes by heart, and I glanced at that card once and immediately saw the answer leaping out at me.

The fact that you could beat Ultima IV without hints is hugely commendable. Well done! I still have the cluebook around somewhere, I think...

I have Ultima: Runes of Virtue for game boy lying around somewhere. Worth checking out?

Mostly no. Ultima has a couple of bizzare cash-in games in the console world (in addition dodgy ports of the mainline series). Apparently that one isn't atrocious (... for a Gameboy game...), but it's not a good introduction either.

Ultima IV and Ultima VII: The Black Gate are widely regarded as the high points of the series. The Runes of Virtue games are mostly forgotten afterthoughts, but they're supposed to be decent games for what they are (action-adventure games). They're not representative of the mainline series, however.

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