Ultima VII: Part Two - Serpent Isle

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.