The weekly round-up of news pertaining to Obsidian Entertainment and their various RPGs.

Richard Garriott discusses Mars, Earth exploration, traveling in space, and of course what his next plan for revolutionizing gaming and RPGs is, in a lengthy interview with Motherboard.

Rowan Kaiser, writing at Joystiq, argues that Ultima was the most important game series — ever — and discusses many of the ways that it influenced both later RPG development and gaming in general.

Good Old Games has added Warren Spector’s dystopian classic, Deus Ex, to its catalogue of games.

Stephen Emond’s massive book, Ultima: The Ultimate Collector’s Guide, has been put on sale by Amazon.com. Get it at a 22% discount now!

The weekly round-up of news related to Bethesda Softworks and their excellent RPG series, The Elder Scrolls.

The weekly round-up of news related to 38 Studios/Big Huge Games and their upcoming open-world RPG, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.

Zygon Dragon has posted another update to the Ultima 6 Remake project website, this time with some comparison screenshots demonstrating the look of the remake as compared to the original game.

Over at the Wing Commander CIC, Bandit LOAF reviews — and much approves of — a new, indie space sim called SOL: Exodus.

Some months ago, Time Machine Dragon alerted me to a side project of his, which he had tentatively named “VAGUE”. Here’s a look at what he had in mind.

The weekly round-up of news related to Piranha Bytes and their two excellent (and Ultima-inspired) RPG series, Gothic and Risen.

Kevin Fishburne, developer of the Ultima-inspired online RPG Sanctimonia, and his wife are expecting their first child!

Adam Burr has posted a couple of updates to the Ultima Dragons Facebook page, announcing some recent developments in his Ultima-inspired tile-based RPG, The Dark Unknown.

Stephen “Cmdr Falcon” Emond has published his Ultimate Collector’s Guide for Ultima through Amazon’s Createspace; order your copy now!

MIT’s GAMBIT Game Labs is featuring a series of podcasts with former key people from Looking Glass Studios.

Gaming blogger The CRPG Addict has, at least for the time being, decided to cease his blogging and focus on real-life matters.

Firstknight has posted several new comparison screenshots to demonstrate the texture updates present in Beautiful Britannia 2011 R3.

As of 4:17 PM (MST) today, Ultima Aiera has logged over a million hits since the beginning of its website traffic statistics tracking (in 2008). That’s a pretty major milestone for the site, and a testament to the long-term staying power of Ultima.

Blair “Flashy Dragon” Leggett has published a blog post which describes his take on the events and circumstances surrounding the shutdown of his Flash-based Ultima 4 remake last year.

NASA has evidently relented, to some extent, and will at some point green-light the release of Richard Garriott’s “Apogee of Fear”, the first sci-fi movie ever shot in space.

Pix has updated his Windows-based Ultima Patcher utility to apply the latest Ultima 3 graphics updates from the Exodus Project.

Former Ultima Online lead designer Raph Koster has published an interesting blog post arguing that narrative in games is not a game mechanic, but is instead a form of game feedback.