Blogging Ultima
A hard core gamer is blogging his way through every Ultima game, in order. So far, it looks like he’s going through each game in around 25 hours, give or take, which is only possible since he’s done them all before.
It’s pretty fun reading– probably more fun than actually going back and playing them. His descriptions of painstakingly drawing dungeon maps just make me glad we don’t have to do that any more. There’s still some great content in those old Ultima games, but it’s amazing how punishing games were back then. Even the most sadistic RPGs nowadays have nothing on these old dungeon crawls.
March 30th, 2007 at 10:47 pm
Great stuff. Brings back memories and reminds me how much easier it is to do cool stuff in 2D.
March 30th, 2007 at 10:58 pm
Agreed. There are a few platforms on which it’s still “okay” to do stuff in 2D: handhelds, web games, … maybe that’s it. Of those, it’s only “okay” to charge a real list price for the former. There are a zillion ways to monetize the latter, though. I think on both platforms, it’ll remain acceptable to do 2D for the foreseeable future. Nobody’s going to start demanding that every Flash game be in 3D just because you can.
April 7th, 2007 at 8:13 am
I am not the mass market.
A game that is fun and draws me in will always trump a game that is “technically advanced”
Things like Lumines, Meteos, Geometry Wars, still seem to have a market. Maybe I’m a year or two behind the curve, but they still seem to capture an interest.
What if it’s time for people to say “nuts to the expectations that various marketing departments thought up” and aim more towards what’s fun. Sure, there’s some people that care about techie-buzzwords when it comes to selecting what games to play. I still believe in fun. I hope there’s others out there like me. (because if there aren’t, everyone’s going to keep chasing after the next big thing and many will fail having gone down the wrong path (witness CD-I)
April 9th, 2007 at 7:11 pm
Wow, Ultima 5 had a lot of freakin’ dialog:
http://www.notableultima.com/literal/Transcript_U5.html