more graph humor and song chart memes

I will believe it when I see it, but there is a hopeful note sounded in Electronic Arts‘ latest publishing decision. I’m not much for the horror genre of games, but the decision by EA to publish a horror title from Grasshopper Manufacture/Q Entertainment is interesting, to say the least. That’s more than a little outside of EA’s usual paradigm.

The latest signings bode well for the company’s new “studio-focused philosophy,” which EA Partners general manager David DiMartini describes as “giving the world’s best independent developers access to EA’s global publishing resources, letting them focus on what they do best — making great games.“

Perhaps there’s hope for BioWare‘s Dragon Age yet!

I see that Dino’s Ultima Page has posted some news concerning a couple of new file releases from different projects. Notably, Ranman’s Ultima V for TI Calculators has released a beta version of that port for the TI-92 and V200 calculators. This download has already been added to the project entry here at Aiera.

Also, the full version of a patch translating Ultima 7 to Spanish has been released. Following up on this lead led me to translation patches for Serpent Isle, Ultima 9, and Ultima Underworld about which I had previously been unaware, and these have all been added to Aiera.

• Ultima 7 Spanish translation
• Serpent Isle Spanish translation
• Ultima Underworld Spanish translation
• Ultima 9 Spanish translation

Additionally, the Ultima 6 Project Development Tools Package has been released, which enables the user to edit and compile conversations, edit game objects, edit game logic, and provides a host of other functions as well. It can be downloaded from the Project Britannia website, or from the Ultima 6 Project entry here at Aiera.

Other Ultima-related news I found whilst wandering through the Internet today includes:

Aklabeth

The web home of this remake of Akalabeth seems to be offline. I hope it’s just a temporary thing.

Ultima Underworld for Pocket PC

Conversely, this port of Ultima Underworld to the PocketPC seems to be back online again. Nice to see. That means that I get to move this project out of the cemetery!

Exult

This port of The Black Gate and Serpent Isle to…well…pretty much every operating system one could dare to think of…doesn’t look as though it’s been updated, by its website. But I noticed that the Windows and PocketPC snapshots were updated earlier this month, as was the snapshot for Exult Studio. All of these can be downloaded through the project entry here. The chief modification seems to concern a bug with multiracial Avatars.

Ultima: Iris

This 3D frontend for Ultima Online has been updated recently, to build version 2365. Linux and Windows source, and the Windows installer, can all be downloaded via the project entry here, or at the project website.

Finally, I was contacted by Yannick “Alcibiade” Kirschhoffer regarding a new piece of Ultima-related material he has produced. I’ll let him explain it in his own words:

I’ve been huge fan of the second Ultima trilogy. In 2003, I began work on writing guitar arrangements of most of this era’s music. I did the Ultima 6 score almost entirely, and some of U4 and U5 too. Then I compiled these in a songbook that I illustrated with artwork and quotes from the games.

It is available for download in PDF format at www.alcibiade.org

This is a handy little creation, beautifully arranged and attractively compiled into one volume. I’ve added a project entry for it under the category of “General Utility”, and it can be downloaded from there as well.

Well done, Yannick!

This is a full translation of Ultima Underworld into Spanish, one of a series of Spanish Ultima translations that appeared within the last couple of years.

This is a full translation of Serpent Isle and The Silver Seed into Spanish. It may require Exult in order to work.

This is a full translation of Ultima 9 into Spanish.

This is a full translation of The Black Gate and Forge of Virtue into Spanish. It does not require Exult in order to work, although it can use all of Exult’s features.

Produced by: Alcibiade
Website: Alcibiade’s e-Den
Releases:
* Ultima Songbook (PDF) (0 bytes)

This is a neat little “utility” (sorry — couldn’t think of a better way to categorize it) for the budding musician out there to make use of. It is a compilation of guitar arrangements for the various tunes that make up the score of Ultima 6, with a few tunes from Ultima 4 and Ultima 5 also included. They have been compiled into a single e-book, and dressed up with artwork and quotes from the games as well.

This remake of Ultima Underworld for the PocketPC seems to work fairly well on most main-line PocketPC models. While the developer, ZIO Interactive, doesn’t seem to feature the game for purchase or download anymore (that I can tell — the site is in Chinese), the game itself is still available for purchase from PocketGear.

A “demo” of sorts is available, although it is little more than a slide-show of in-game screenshots and graphics.

I got this email via the contact form this morning:

I was wondering if you would happen to know what happened to the game ‘Ashes’ and their website?

Thank you,
Dagur Dragon

That’s a very good question. The project’s website appears very different from the last time I looked at it; indeed, it seems as though the main domain has “garbage collected” the subdomain that Ashes was hosted at.

I don’t know what has happened here, so if anyone else has heard what has become of this Ultima-inspired project, please let me know!