Ultima VII: Part Two - Serpent Isle

The Good
What's with these guys?.. We're talking about an essential classic here. In terms of depth, richness, immersion potential, atmosphere and invention, its sole match may be Arcanum, released 8 and a half years later. Every single ambitious isometric RPG after 1993 had drawn upon Serpent Isle for inspiration and basics. With Ultima7/1, Origin had developed way too masterful an engine not to employ in another game; this is that game. More polished and accomplished than Ultima7/1, it is arguably still the best 2D RPG around.

The Bad
The early, amateurish voice-acting and nothing else. Period.

The Bottom Line
This is the original sacred source of all your fancy Baldur's Gates, Fallouts and Icewind Dales--which were generally put together with much less love and attention to detail (similarly to Origin's own Ultima 8, but that's another story).

The Good
Now, now, burning game boxes won't solve anything, will it? Especially not if you'd earn decent money by selling it on Ebay. Or you could simple give it to me, since I like Serpent Isle as a decent, engrossing fantasy adventure.

Sure, it's not exactly the families brightest child. Okay, you could argue that Origin wanted to milk the engine. And yes, it strains your patience with its infamous memory manager and some vexing puzzles.

But, hey, its still a good RPG. Think about the huge and detailed game world. Think about all those secret caves you discovered, the credible characters you talked to, the joy of exploration. That's Ultima style for you, and you'll get plenty of it in Serpent Isle. If you liked the others, there's little reason to hate this one.

The Bad
That Dupre d... oops. Almost spoiled your fun. :-)

The Bottom Line
Doug, do nothing you might regret! Hand me that box!

The Good
The box looked good. It had an interesting manual with a bit of cryptography in it. Some very humorous explanations of weapons and armor ("Many experts consider the helmet a vital piece of armor").

The interface was OK. Basic paper-doll inventory, and point and click for just about everything else.

It had some OK background music.

The Bad
Pretty much everything - even the things I liked had negatives to them.

To start, the installation sucked. If you have a CD-ROM, you must put a CD in before the game will install. The game comes on diskettes and will abort the installation (with no error message) if it can't find info on every drive.

After struggling to get the game running with sound and having enough conventional memory for this hog, I finally got to start playing.

Even the paper-doll inventory had problems. You never knew where the pointer was if you picked something up, and it was easy to mis-place something. The story line was - for me - disconnected. I never had a clue as to what to do next; I had never played the previous games before (which probably didn't help). I gave it six months of trying and finally gave up.

I finally gave up and found a walkthrough. That was a mistake. I tried following the walkthrough (and actually progressed very well over the next 3 months). Then I found out that something I had (or had not) done back near the beginning was preventing me from moving forward - and there was NO WAY to get it now.

The Bottom Line
First, don't buy it. If you're given it (like I was), read the manual and throw the whole thing away. Re-format the disks and re-use them to store old copies of AOL on them - it'd be a better use of them.

In all, bad install, problem-matic interface, bad story line, no hints to next step, problems with vital equipment being required - but not being able to go get it.

I literally keep the entire box, walkthrough, map, manual, and diskettes around and try to tell people how bad this game is, then ask them if they'd like to try it themselves. I even offer my first-hand knowledge of what to do in the game. I haven't gotten any takers.