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ultima6.txt
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1997-11-07
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From: Kai Hortmann <CHBRIN5@DKNKURZ1.BITNET>
Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Jason L. Tibbitts III
Subject: REVIEW: Ultima 6
Keywords: game, adventure, graphic, ultima, commercial
Path: karazm.math.uh.edu!amiga-reviews
Distribution: world
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews
Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.games
Reply-To: Kai Hortmann <CHBRIN5@DKNKURZ1.BITNET>
[ Ultima 6 is a role-plating graphical adventure game that uses a top-down
world view and sports a large amount of character interaction. - JLT3 ]
I give Ultima 6 a rating of 8.5 out of 10. If you don't mind having to find
out everything by yourself that should be in the manual and maybe have a
faster machine, you would probably rate it even higher.
Game: Ultima 6
Platform: Amiga (1 Meg required)
Also available on: IBM PCs (and compatibles)
Company: Mindscape/Origin (US: Phone 1-800-999-4939)
Here is my review of Ultima 6 for the Amiga. I have seen the game a
year ago on a friends 386, so there are some references to that version.
Fun: Ultima 6 is great fun and kept me glued to my Amiga every spare
hour I had in the last week since I got it. Its more like an
interactive picture book than a role-playing game, you can watch
the non-player characters (NPCs) get up in the morning, go to
work, have lunch, and so on. This leads to realistic situations
like having to wait for a shop to open or waking up a healer in
the middle of the night to heal a group member.
Graphics: The graphics are good. You see everything in pseudo-3D
from above. There is much detail, many things that move or
can be handled.
Sound: After some hours of game play the background music tends to
be a nuisance. I haven't found a way to switch it off, except
for turning the volume down. But as there are no sound effects,
one doesn't miss anything when doing so.
Speed: The game is faster than I had feared it would be with
7 MHz. But it slows down visibly when monsters are around
sometimes even before you can actually see them. Sea
travel seems to take forever, especially because you won't
move when you keep a cursor key pressed, it only moves you
two spaces and then stops. Keeping your mouse key pressed
does work, but I haven't found a way to keep my mouse key
pressed without using my hand yet. :)
User Interface: This hasn't changed from the IBM version, only
the response is sometimes very slow. A short mouse click
usually doesn't suffice, I have to click at the object or
icon longer or several times to make it work. I started to
use keyboard commands instead of the icons. There are only
5 things one can do with an object: Get, Drop, Use, Move
and Ready. The other icons are Talk, Look, Cast and the
combat On/Off toggler. Sometimes its not that obvious how
to get things working, but up to now I got everything
working except the horseshoes. (Please respond if you know
how to use them. :) )
Manual etc. : This is the games weakest point. There are absolutely
no explanations about the user interface. While the icons
are pretty obvious, I had to TRY every key and key combination
to find out about the keyboard commands. Why keyboard commands,
you ask, in a icon driven game? Well, not all commands are
available as icons. Especially saving and exiting the game are
done by keyboard, as are solo/party mode and possibly some other
things that I haven't found out yet.
Hints: Ctrl-S saves your game, while Ctrl-Q exits WITHOUT saving.
(Guess which one I pressed first.)
Saving: You can only save one game at a time. If you need more, you
have to DOS-copy all the files in the SAVEGAME directory to
somewhere else. I would advise you to do so, because it is
very easy to make a mistake that keeps you from ending the
game without noticing it at once. I had to restart the game
because I USED a moonstone and was unable to recover it
afterwards. Also, if you DROP items outside the castle, they
are usually gone when you come back, so thats another way to
lose key items that you would have needed later.
Bugs: I haven't found a bug that crashes the game yet. The game is
absolutely NOT multitasking and won't even start if you have
a CLI-window open. There are no programs running in the
background once you have started the game, neither SETMAP
nor mouse-accelerators, screen-blankers nor anything else.
HD-Install: Yes, you can install Ultima 6 on a hard disk. I was
even able to install it on my HD having ROM 1.2, although
a label on the box says that you can't do so. It just
works a bit different from the procedure in the manual.
Copy-Protection: The game is copy-protected by manual-lookup. But
don't worry, you don't have to look into the manual every
time you play, just when you talk to two of the main NPCs
for the first time.
Cheating: The game has a Cheat Mode and several ALT-key combinations
that could be called cheating as well. If you want to know
more about this, you can download two cheat-files via FTP from
risc.ua.edu (130.160.4.7) from the /pub/games/solutions
directory. The files are called hints.ultima6 and sol.ultima6.
Summary: I give Ultima 6 a rating of 8.5 out of 10. If you don't mind
having to find out everything by yourself that should be in the
manual and maybe have a faster machine, you would probably rate
it even higher.
<* Kai Hortmann - University of Konstanz - Germany *>
<* chbrin5@dknkurz1.bitnet or chbrin5@nyx.uni-konstanz.de *>