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.