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Ultima iii time lord12/21/2023 You do not gain back any HP after each battle, rather you get back a certain amount that you lost plus extra when you exit a dungeon. Yep, this is also how you "level up" your hit points in preparation for later battles. To my understanding there are only two ways to gain back lost hit points: bribing a king or visiting dungeons, with the latter way being the most ridiculous sounding yet the best way to both regain lost HP and also stock up for future usage. Even understanding the wackiness as demonstrated in the early Action RPG, Dragon Slayer, didn't prepare me for the horror that Lord British had unleashed upon the masses. Basically throw out every conception of hit point regeneration that you have ever known. Now let's talk about the way hit points are handled. ![]() For the love of a context button, people. Oh, I was so ignorant once, when I thought of the first Final Fantasy as primitive. What? Pressing "u" will attempt a pick/force the chest, which will usually result in damage before finally yielding a pittance of copper. If you come across a treasure chest while trolling around a dungeon (for hitpoints) you would naturally press 'o", after which the game will snootily inform you that there are no coffins to open. You can "s"teal from store counters and even "t"ransact with those same merchants, but my two personal favorites are "o"pen and "u"nlock. To attack you press "a" (for "a"ttack), then a direction to attack. You move around with the arrow keys, but to actually enter a town you have to press the "e" key (for "e"nter). Pretty much every button on the keyboard does something, with no redundancy to speak of. Out of all the oddities, there are two things I'd like to share with you all that stand out the most, especially to those that never wandered into those ground-breaking early days of RPG games, when everything was new and strange. I can say that pretty much none of them survived to Ultima IV. There are also some very strange and interesting design choices here, which pretty much all ended up as evolutionary dead ends. However, not all is well in the house of Ultima I. It has a large overworld, consisting of four continents with several islands, travel by several vehicles, from a raft to a hovercraft and spaceship. Yet, playing it I feel that I can see the foundations upon which the genre would eventually be built. Ultima I has stats, which don't amount for much, it has experience points, which have zip to do with leveling, and it has NPC characters, which don't have a thing to say. In fact, it can be really hard to see just exactly what it contributed outside of the overworld map and transition to towns. ![]() In a strange twist, Ultima I has almost none of the usual tropes that now exist within the RPG genre space that it had a hand in creating. Another five minutes with Google, and we are back in business. The GoG release of Ultima I does not have the proper instructions necessary to play the game, a fact I learned after about five minutes of play. ![]() I feel the need to preface this with a little caveat. But, I want to stress that I'm not quite sure how this will turn out. Rather, I would like this to become a collection of thoughts regarding my travels, hopefully with a bit 'o humor in it. I don't want to this article to be a exhaustive set of reviews. Since I now own all of them legally, why not plug through some of them? You never know, might be a laugh or perhaps I might even enjoy one or two of them. But at some point I started to think, knowing all that I know, just how easily could I expect to play through these games? Now, I'm a huge fan of "retro" and "abstract" RPG games, but I've yet to play any of these games (despite my earlier beliefs to the contrary). Between all the retrospectives and insult/swearing/worship videos and articles, I'm pretty sure I've heard it all. Blahblah rocketships, blahblah Time Lord, blahblah Lord British. I feel that I know pretty much all the salient points about these titles. I've read and watched a ton of articles and videos regarding this series over the decades, pretty much since the information became available (and I got the Internet). So with fully configured and patched downloads from GoG imported into DBGL on my MacBook, I pushed forth to see just what all the hubbub is about. This months article was to feature my plodding (and hopefully, exhaustive) journey through the first three Ultima games, which are generally referred to as "The Age of Darkness." But you know what? Despite my undaunted love for sometimes crusty, old-school RPG games, I find the older Ultima games intimidating and unapproachable, so much so that I had this puppy on the back burner for nearly a year.
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