Ultima I

aka: Ultima I: The Beginning..., Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness
Moby ID: 12111

DOS version

Playing it 28 years after release - a wonderful experience.

The Good
This is simple and cute RPG released in prehistoric era of computers. Ultima use all resources available at a time to its limits and wants even more. Unlike Wizardry, there are world that you can see (sketchy, but still) and travel in any direction. The world consists of four islands filled with castles, towns, dungeons and monuments that increase player's stats. There are lots of options you can do like buying a mount (flyer and space shuttle is available!), saving the princess, questing for kings and others. If you want, you can just drink in the bar. The game is not looped to stats, classes and dungeon crawling. Instead it's more adventurous game and fighting is easy and simple.
Also I find saving system is simple and very handy.

The Bad
Some design choices are very odd. Most of the castles and dungeons are useless. There is no point to visit them all.
Space section of the game is kind of ridiculous. It's doesn't fit into fantasy world and looks very starwarsy (it's 1980, I can understand that) Gameplay in space is more spacesim rather than RPG, you have to scan space sectors and fight enemies from first person view. Well, at least they dropped space after second Ultima.

The Bottom Line
Good casual RPG. Oblivion of 1981. (Although I played 1987 version, but they should be almost the same) Works perfectly with DosBox.

by Bruce Wayne (2) on January 14, 2008

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