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"All great things must start somewhere"

I have always been into Richard Garriots Ultima series since I got Exodous (Ultima III) for Nintendo. For the longest time I wondered what Ultima I would be like, after playing Ultima VII Part 1: The Black Gate and Ultima VI: The False Prophet a bit. I finally got my answer when I decided to get the Ultima Collection at a local Pawn Shop for $4.00. This showed me not just the advancement of the Ultima games, but the advancement of Computer Technologies between 1979-1996ish, and my how far we come, so as a side note, this review will compare Ultima to other games of the day, as it would not be fair standing up against something like Diablo or even Postal for that matter (which kind of reminds me of Ultima for some reason).

Installation
Ultima I alone: 10/10 (just one 1.44 Megabyte Floppy with space to spare)
Ultima Collection: 3/10 (their batch file for DOS has a glitch)

Few these days still have the original issue of Ultima on 5.25'' 360K floppies, so I am mostly going to reveiw the installation off the Ultima collection CD-ROM. The CD-ROM is pretty sorry if your using anything running an operating system short of Windows 95, mostly due to some kind of fault in the install batch file that causes the computer to only copy a small handfull of files and the directories to the hard drive of your computer, yet, there is a way around this little problem, you can go to dosshell, or Windows (any version), and copy all the files to the apropriate directories then run a quick attribute change from read only to either no attribute or archive. I have no clue as to when they fixed this bug (or if they ever did).
A redeeming quality in the installation is if you have Windows 95 or higher, you have what is called the Ultima Gateway, which is probably one of the best collection installation programs I have ever seen. It has clear and concise menus to do everything from install direct X and some then new Origin game demos, you can also see trailers for the games and listen to interveiws with Lord British himself (aka. Richard Garriot). This makes the installation process much easier, but then, most people these days run Windows 9x or higher, but if you have an old 386, beware, and be ready for a little bit of a hassle.

Plot: 5/10

This game has what I would call the stereotypical computer game plot, get all the objects, pass all the quests, and kill the big bad guy. Basically you run around performing service for the king until you have to travel through space and time to defeat the evil wizard Mondain and save Sorsaria. I can see what Richard Garriott said in his interveiws and what he means by ''Your just some big brute bashing things around'' in this era of the series. Mondain does nothing to you as far as we can see, you just kill this supposed ''threat''. But then this is what almost all early adventure games were like, except Akalabeth, which really had no plot at all, so I can't really give this a very low rating at all.

Graphics: 8/10

I am not sure if they improved this for the Ultima Collection or not, but the game is a little better than almost all games of the early PC period. The game runs in a 320X200 resolution at 16 colors which are well used to simulate parts of the landscape. This game does have a flaw in this department though, and one more often seen during the 486 era machines with built in SVGA and VGA capabilities. A company called Cirrus Logic made some internal graphics cards (which I have on my IBM PC-330 100DX4, a 100 MHz 486, and a souped up Zenith/Packard Bell Legend w/ on-board networking capabilities) that are incompatible with the EGA version of this game, so you will have to use the less desirable 4 color CGA graphics mode. I am not sure if EGA was in the initial release for PC, but it seems like it was designed for it. The dungeons in this game give an early 80's computer science fiction ''War Games'' ''Matrix'' type feel due to their use of colored lines on a black background.

Sound: 4/10

Being an old DOS game back when PC's did not have Hard Drives, this game plays through the internal speaker. Some people might not be able to have sound since alot of the newer Pentium Machines (ATX motherboards come to mind) don't have this ear grinding feature. On faster computers the sound becomes less apparent, as on a 486 DX4-100, sounds will just be little blips out of the speaker that last less than a millisecond. But I can't say too much, as the only noise comes from battling foes.

Gameplay: 8/10

Gameplay is quite innovative for a time when Pac-Man was king. You use the keyboard to direct our hero around with the arrow keys, and the numeric keypad is good for attacking on the fly in all 8 directions. It can be a little confusing to people used to a mouse and simple point and click, but after awhile, you get used to it, it's alot like riding a bike, you'll learn it and never forget.

Overall: 8/10

It's not the best, but Ultima I was certainly ahead of it's time when it came out after seeing much of it's competitors banished to the Abandonware sites. It's a great nostalgic look into the past of computer gaming. I suggesst getting it on the Ultima Collection though, just beware of the INSTALL.BAT file.



Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 12/27/02, Updated 12/27/02