He does have a point...or, er, uh...

Spoony’s review of Ultima 4 is online and available for the watching, and Spoony himself is at his profane best throughout it.

His…observation about the shape of the dungeon is unfortunate but, in this modern age, sadly accurate.

(hat tip)

Thanks to the efforts of Infinitron Dragon, A New Breed of Dragon’s Ultima: The Dark Core is now compatible with modern web browsers (or, at least, with Internet Explorer 8 — other browsers are as yet untested).

Grab the updated version at the project entry.

Flyleaf

Call me picky, but if I’m going to be a fan of a band, I tend to make it a general requirement that they be at least as good in a live performance as they are on their album(s). Granted, there’s some flexibility built in to such a policy — obviously, in a live performance, the occasional missed note can’t be smoothed over with auto-tuning, and guitar riffs can’t be redone if a off chord is played here and there. Human beings being imperfect, it’s understood that one will occasionally hear such missteps in a live performance.

But given that understanding, there’s still an expectation that the band will perform to a certain level. And Flyleaf delivered handily in that regard.

I’ve been to only a few concerts in my life: Matthew Good (twice, once when he was still touring with the Matthew Good Band and once when he had gone solo), The Tragically Hip (twice), LiVE, Rebecca St. James, the Newsboys, the Dixie Chicks, and now Flyleaf. And in general, I’ve been lucky…most of the groups listed above did pretty well in concert, with one notable exception.

Of all the concerts listed above, two were held at Telus Field (the baseball stadium in Edmonton), and both times the band I went there to see hailed from Texas. The Dixie Chicks hail, I believe, from Lubbock, whereas Flyleaf hails from Belton. But the difference in quality between the concerts was pretty striking.

When I saw the Dixie Chicks perform, the band itself did well; the music behind the vocals was excellent. But Natalie Maines was having an off day, I guess…she was often off-key (and compensated by singing louder when she was — ugh!), often off the beat, and just generally failed to impress. Which is a pity, because the rest of the band (as noted) turned in a fine performance. That was the one concert I’ve been to which didn’t impress, and did quite a lot of damage to my appreciation of the Dixie Chicks as a musical act, especially because most of their songs don’t exactly feature challenging tonal progressions.

Conversely, Flyleaf turned in an all-around great show. What few off-key notes Lacey Mosley sang weren’t nearly as offensive as Maines’ missteps, in no small part because Flyleaf’s songs tend to feature somewhat more complex tonal progressions, not to mention a fair bit of minor key work. And their cover of How He Loves has basically ruined all other versions of that song for me, for how much power and drive they added to it. And of course, the band was just on fire; Sameer Bhattacharya‘s guitar work was particularly impressive.

Also, their closing piece — a cover of How He Loves Us — has forever ruined other, slower and/or more acoustic renditions of that song for me.

My apologies for the title; the pun was irresistible.

Anyhow, it looks like former Ultima developer Warren Spector‘s upcoming game for the Nintendo Wii, Disney‘s Epic Mickey, is getting the ol’ Collector’s Edition treatment.

Actually, this does look pretty cool.

The $69.99 bundle includes everything seen in the image above: A copy of the game, a pair of skins for the Wii, a faceplate for your Wiimote, a DVD containing behind-the-scenes videos and other marketing materials, some special packaging and a five-inch vinyl figurine modeled after the game’s falsetto protagonist.

I bought my wife a Wii for Christmas last year, and I honestly keep forgetting we have the darn thing (she’s the console gamer, not me). Still, I might just have to check this game out…and I have to admit that I am just a little bit tempted by this package. The Wii is aesthetically pleasant in its design, but its white shell is rather plainspoken, whereas this skin for it has all the right kinds of randomness and contrast.

Michael Hilborn — AKA A New Breed of Dragon — is a name well known to those who have played through (or who followed the development of) Lazarus. But before there was Lazarus, there was another fantastic work of New Breed’s Ultima-inspired storytelling, which was Ultima: The Dark Core.

What was arguably the first browser-based Ultima spinoff (take that, Lord of Ultima!) is once again available for download here at Aiera, and I have also updated the project entry with some notes and considerations for getting the game running on modern systems. Downloads to compatible Internet browsers (The Dark Core’s requirements are, sadly, very specific) have also been added.

As such, I haven’t been uploading files this week, or doing much of anything really. That said, things are going well in Paulsboro, New Jersey; things have been going swimmingly with the client, we’ve located decent coffee at the Dunkin Donuts (it’s not Starbucks, but there aren’t any of those within morning striking distance), and the hotel is at least comfortable, if not particularly impressive otherwise. It’s clean and it has Internet access; that’s all I need. And we’ve found some good eats. Also a good thing.

Anyhow, regular download updates and news posting will resume next week.

Some of you may recall that Aiera did in fact play host to a demo version of Arkane Studios‘ epic, Ultima Underworld-inspired RPG Arx Fatalis. Also to be found were a handful of update patches in various languages.

I rather doubt that the collection of files was ever all that complete; the demo was available in English, German, and French, while the update patches were available in English, Italian, and French (so I’m missing, at minimum, one demo version and one patch). Be that as it may: what files I did have are once again available for download.

Because I’m a horribly forgetful person, I failed to post this news when it was at its freshest. Firstknight left a comment on his project’s entry to bring us all up to speed on the status of the project and the progress he’s made on it:

Sorry, but I haven’t had the time to create a homepage so far, so I want to provide some quick info on the actual project state here:

Currently (after being offline for about 6 months) I continue working on basic tasks, like categorizing items and upgrading the creation tools. When this is done, the next step will be adding bigger objects (mainly rocks and trees) onto the Britannia overworld (which invovles pure hexcoding) Both of these tasks will take until approximately Summer 2011.

After that I will have something new to show (which is not really the case ATM), so this will be a good time for providing a homepage. Also, a new demo is planned for late 2011 (I hope that I get the .NET Launcher done before then).

Furthermore, I’m sorry to say that there will be no way to remove the fogging on overworld maps in Windows 7, but it doesn’t make much sense to do so anyway, simply because a MiddleClip value higher than 6000 makes the game unstable.

Long-term goals for Beautiful Britannia:

• Providing many more details for the Britannia overworld
• Making several unsued maps (overworlds and dungeons) playable
• Shortening the linear parts of the game and adding nonlinear elements instead

So there you have it, folks.

I have to confess a certain particular affinity for this project, in no small part due to the fact that it makes use of the original Ultima 9 game engine. Even in this day and age, that engine stacks up not badly against more modern systems, at least to my thinking.

Yes, the engine doesn’t do as well with DirectX (it was built in the era of Glide), and yes, the polygon counts are lower and the textures are low-resolution. But equally, the world of Ascension was far more interactive than most 3D RPG game worlds are these days (at least if one does an “out of the box” comparison), and few games these days do as well making a world feel truly seamless (many don’t even try). Many of the game’s systems (its conversation engine, for example) were quite well-implemented.

And while I’m not exactly the biggest fan of jumping puzzles, I actually rather miss the ability to jump and climb objects in many of the games I enjoy today. In Ascension, it was no big deal to jump across a small chasm or climb up a ledge…and I can think of a good half-dozen situations in Mass Effect 2 where I would have killed to have either ability.

The former Ultima developer is evidently a bit down on the approach many big-name game developers are taking these days:

…one of his main problems with games’ stories is their tendency to be dude-centric — he warned the Gamescom crowd “if we don’t break out of big buff guys with swords and guys in tights and space marines in armor, we’re going to get marginalized in the way comics have been in the United States.” He also warned about attempting to ape blockbuster films by filling games with obscenely expensive visuals, as “we still fall far, far short of what people expect from a movie.”

Ultimately, the only form of storytelling Spector thinks games should attempt to emulate is oral conversation, as the person interacting with the game is equally responsible for shaping its story. “Player experience comes first,” Spector explained, “we have to allow them to show their creativity. No other medium has allowed them to do this. We are unique in the history of humankind. Every player becomes an author when they play a game.”

I, for one, don’t necessarily agree…or, rather, I take somewhat more of a both/and stance rather than an either/or stance on the issue. I’m in total agreement in regard to the importance of good, interactive conversation in a game — an Ultima hallmark, to be sure.

At the same time, I don’t see what’s so bad about some of the conventions* (the epic hero, space marines, whatever) that Spector seems down on. Yes, they are conventions, and yes, Spector has a reputation for attempting to defy convention…but the beauty of many conventions is that they resonate with people. We crave the stories of the epic hero, because we find meaning in them, and we connect with them. Not because space marines or epic heroes actually exist, but because they represent ideals of form and philosophy toward which our minds and imaginations are naturally, as if by design, drawn. (If you haven’t read John C. Wright‘s various essays on this topic, you’ve been missing out.)

Nor do I see what’s so bad about developers who have the solid foundation of a compelling, conversation-driven story adding in the cinematics and other visuals. Granted, if all a game has to offer are good visuals, there’s a problem there, sure, and I’ll grant Spector his point in that regard. But the visuals/plot dichotomy is not an absolute, and there are lots of great games out there that offer both. Granted, the visuals don’t quite aspire to the quality of Hollywood movies…but is that such a bad thing? I can’t be the only one who’s noticed that the overall quality of Hollywood’s productions has been in steep decline over the last decade**, whereas the quality of games has been on the rise, overall, over the same period of time. These days, I’d much rather play a game like Mass Effect than watch the latest piece of sci-fi drivel to appear on the big screen, or the television.

And what about games like Starcraft — a great game, by any metric — which use visuals and cinematics to great effect in order to drive the plot of the game forward? Starcraft‘s mechanics really don’t allow for a lot of conversation in the first place, yet the game is both fun to play and tells a good story (again, thanks to its expensive, but well-made, visuals).

As to the “still making cartoons” bit…this is the man who is helming Epic Mickey. As in this Mickey. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course — Epic Mickey is actually a very interesting concept. However…

* To be fair, some conventions (heroines with DD cups and combat uniforms that fail to rise even to the level of undergarments) could probably be done away with.

** Much the same can be said for the quality of Marvel and DC comics, and then over the same time frame, and then precisely because they abandoned the conventions that really resonated with their fanbase in some misguided effort to become more gritty, edgy, and politically relevant. Captain America getting bagged by that sniper was Stan Lee‘s shark-jumping moment, if ever he had one.

This is a browser-based parody of the early Ultima games, and looks very much like them, though it purports to be set in Britannia post-Ultima 9.

So…check thou it out!

The original version of Mount Drash is, as was previously noted, awful and generally unplayable. Just ask Ophidian Dragon, in case you don’t believe me.

SantiagoZ’s roguelike adaptation of the game, however, is a bit easier on the eyes, a bit neater overall, and just generally a better experience. And it is once again available for download.

The former Ultima developer and Epic Mickey mastermind is, apparently, very interested in doing something with the Duck Tales franchise next:

In a new interview with Industry Gamers, he now says that, “A day does not go by where I don’t tell somebody at Disney: ‘Uncle Scrooge, come on! Donald! Huey, Dewey, and Louie! Come on, let me do a duck game!’ So yeah, I would love to do a duck game.”

Of course, being the animation geek that he is, Spector prefers the Carl Barks version of Uncle Scrooge and the nephews, so we probably won’t get any Fenton Crackshell cameos (even though that would be awesome). If Epic Mickey does take off, you never know what franchise Disney may let Spector put his own spin on next.

It would seem that if he is able to have his way — which is, I suppose, to say “if Epic Mickey doesn’t bomb” — Warren Spector will be sticking with Disney for a goodly while, and bringing his unique brand of warped awesomeness to whatever other franchises Disney is willing to hand over to his care.

Personally, I think a Darkwing Duck game headed by Spector might be interesting. Or something set in the darker Gargoyles universe.

Work is once again sending me to the field, this time to the town of Paulsboro, New Jersey. Actually, I find it quite amusing that the airport I’ll be touching down in — in Philidelphia, of course — is literally just across the Delaware River from the site I’ll be working at.

So if there’s any of you Ultima fans out the Philly (or Paulsboro) way who’d care to meet for a beer or suggest a favourite cheesesteak joint…let me know, eh?