I am a terrible person, you know.

Some months ago, Darren “Time Machine Dragon” Janeczek — whom most of you will probably know from the xu4 project — alerted me to another little pet project of his, which he had tentatively named VAGUE. You can see the (somewhat arbitrary) expansion of that acronym in the title of this post. Here’s how Darren described it:

I decided to start working on a multi-platform (desktop and mobile) game engine with sufficient capabilities to recreate Ultimas 1 thru to at least 6. And of course do a few of its own unique things that I want to see in my original games.

I decided that I would start by implementing Ultima 1.

Ultima 1 is very much an action RPG that can be picked up and played casually. Go into dungeons, slay monsters, collect gold and hit points, rescue the princess, launch a space shuttle, rent a starfighter, shoot down alien craft, crash and burn upon re-entry because you can’t afford the space station docking fee, enjoy free resurrection, then rob the weapon and food store so you can buy hitpoints from the king and hop aboard a time machine to prevent the evil wizard from crafting the evil gem that has motivated you to quest back through time after him. All good wholesome stuff. I played through the classic recently on DOSBOX. It was pretty fun!

Naturally, he posted a video of VAGUE running Ultima 1:

Darren continued his analysis of Ultima 1 and VAGUE thusly:

• Lots of random U1 monsters moving around, at various speeds per tile.
• No ‘pause’ for turn-based action (ie: instant pass)
• Cheesy 3D billboard effect for solid landmarks and creatures.

When I’m at a satisfactory point in development, I’ll have something that I can use to make all sorts of interesting games that fall in line with what makes an Ultima. Until then however, this is just a dinky little map wanderer program implemented with OpenGL designed to be completely portable between iOS, Android, PC, Mac, etc.

Even so, Dragons and Dragonettes, there’s a measure of promise there. Not a month goes by in which I don’t see someone on Twitter pleading for EA to release this or that Ultima game for one mobile OS or another. The possibility of creating a dedicated engine which could run many of the Ultima games and easily publish to a variety of desktop and mobile platforms is a tantalizing thought indeed.

I spoke with Time Machine Dragon briefly by email today, and he reported that he hasn’t actually had much time to work on VAGUE since he first told me about it. Switching jobs and buying a house do, admittedly, exert such pressures on a person. Hopefully he will find time in the near future to pick up where he left off!

I’ll put up a project entry for it in the next day or so, but for now I wanted to actually get the news out about it…because it’s been too damn long already.

Courtesy of Pix and Natreg Dragon, Ultima Aiera is pleased to present over 120 images of the pages for the manual, quickstart guide, reference guide, and maps shipped with the Ultima Trilogy, a compilation of the first three Ultima games released for DOS.

The Ultima 1 portion of the documentation, not unlike…say…the Compendium that shipped with Ultima 6, does not delve into the actual mechanics of playing the game at all; it is entirely comprised of descriptions of the game world and what inhabits it (friend and foe alike). All of the artwork therein is hand-drawn (probably by Denis Loubet; it looks like his work).

The Ultima 2 and Ultima 3 manuals, meanwhile, have a similar look and feel to the Ultima 1 manual, but balance the descriptions of in-game things and hand-drawn art with gameplay screenshots and information about how to actually play the games.

Anyhow, enjoy! Pull up the images, download the documents, and pore over them. Search out every little detail. Ultima Aiera is indebted to Pix for collecting all these documents, to Richard Garriott and Mary Taylor Rollo, and to anyone else who worked on the original documents at Origin Systems.

Courtesy of Pix and Natreg Dragon, Ultima Aiera is pleased to present over 60 images of the pages for the manuals (and, in the case of the Apple II, quick reference card) for the Atari, Apple II, and PC versions of Ultima 1. As you can well imagine, Dragons and Dragonettes, the manuals for each version of the game were about as different from each other as were the platforms the game was released on!

In fact, it’s really quite interesting to see how different each version of the game’s manual really was. The PC manual is the most elaborate and art-heavy, with ornate borders on each page and illustrations of many of the playable classes, locations, professions, and enemies that one encountered in the game…and doesn’t once describe how to actually interact with the game proper. The Apple II manual is a bit less ornate, and still features some artwork and a few descriptions of things encountered in-game, but is also more focused on game controls and how things work in Sosaria.

The stark Atari manual, meanwhile, is all business; it details how to control the game, and that’s about it. It is entirely devoid of art, save for the cover.

Anyhow, enjoy! Pull up the images, download the documents, and pore over them. Search out every little detail, and ponder just how deep the differences were between the different platforms on which Ultima 1 was released. Ultima Aiera is indebted to Pix for collecting all these documents, to Richard Garriott, and to anyone else who worked on the original documents at Origin Systems, Atari, and California Pacific.

It’s been a while since we’ve had one of these, and my inbox is getting full of emails-to-self containing links to interesting stories. As such…open thread!

Need a little more wi-fi range? Have a beer!”

And then follow the directions at the link above to turn the can into a surprisingly effective DIY parabolic reflector.

The Good News: Syndicate is coming back!

The bad news: Starbreeze has reincarneted the franchise as a first-person shooter. Bah!

Is the PC re-emerging as a gaming platform?

A better question might be whether or not the PC ever vanished or died out as a gaming platform. But if the word of a World of Warcraft developer means anything to any of you, it is his opinion that the PC is coming back into its own from a gaming perspective.

This is the Blizzard, though, that makes a point of sidestepping being labeled a “PC developer”, however.

Do you feel that people try to take advantage of you?

It should surprise nobody that Canadians and Americans tend to be fairly trusting people who expect that others have the best of intentions:

The interesting result, I think, is India. It would seem that just under 2/3rds of the Indian population tend to be highly distrustful of others, while the remaining third tend to be highly trusting of same. There is basically no middle ground to be found; Indians (it seems) will either completely trust you, or completely distrust you, and that’s that.

Kind of cool: A web-based iPad 2 simulator.

Skyrim developers will keep the “fun bugs” in the game.

“We try to solve most of it, we’re sensitive to a lot of it,” said producer Todd Howard. “There is a subset of that where we say ‘Well, that’s what can happen.’ If there’s entertainment value in that, whatever it is, we’ll leave a lot of it. If it’s gonna break the game, or unbalance the game in some way, we do try to solve it.

“If the solution is gonna make the game less fun … well, hey, leave it in. It’s their game.”

This is hardly a precedent, of course — one thinks of the weird graphical effects of eating mushrooms in Ultima Underworld, which was actually a glitch that the programmers opted to deliberately trigger in a special in-game case — but it’s rather heartening to hear, I think.

Do read the whole article; Howard also comments on MMORPGs and how Bethesda knows when big “is big enough” for a game.

I don’t know how many of you are Unity3D developers…

…but I’ve been toying around with that particular middleware for the last month or two, and I found this feature piece from Gamasutra to be a fairly interesting read.

You can play as a vampire in Skyrim!

The catch is that you need to catch the vampirism malady first, however.

A handful of Mass Effect 3 screenshots from PAX.

The game looks great, and I am honestly impressed with how well BioWare has been keeping a lid on details. It’s a bizarre thing about me, but I’m actually impressed that I’m starting to lose just a bit of interest in the game. Oh, not a lot; I still very much want it to come out, very much want to play it, and very much want to play it again after that. But, well…I’m a spoiler junkie; I love leaked details, and I tend to find that those are what thrill me the most during the run-up to a game or movie release.

And…well…there just haven’t been that many leaks where ME3 is concerned. None, really, that I can think of, apart from what few details BioWare has handed out. Kudos to them for that, even if I am disappointed by it.

Skyrim looks awesome, of course.

No, as in: really, really awesome.

Okay, here…twenty-odd minutes of Skyrim action. Are you happy now?

Tonight’s post brought to you by what if?:

The Brainy Gamer — who in real life teaches a class in which he periodically subjects his students to classic computer games like Fallout and Planetfall — has written an interesting article that really hammers home the gulf between gamers of yesteryear and gamers of today. Of particular interest is that the game that serves as the foil in the article is nothing other than Ultima 4.

He summarizes the core of the issue handily:

I had supplied them with the Book of Mystic Wisdom and the History of Britannia, both in PDF form, but not a single student bothered to read them. “I thought that was just stuff they put in the box with the game,” said one student. “Yes,” I replied, “They put it in there because they expected you to read it.” “Wow,” he responded.

Some of their difficulties must be chalked up to poor teaching. I should have done a better job of preparing them for the assignment. I resisted holding their hands because in the past I’ve found it useful to plop them down in Britannia and let them struggle. Figure out the systems, grok the mechanics, and go forth. Ultima IV may be a high mountain to climb for a 19-year-old Call of Duty player, but it’s well worth the effort.

At least that’s what I used to think. Now it seems to me we’re facing basic literacy issues. These eager players are willing to try something new, but in the case of a game like Ultima IV, the required skill-set and the basic assumptions the game makes are so foreign to them that the game has indeed become virtually unplayable.

And as much as I hate to say it — even after they learn to craft potions, speak to every villager, and take notes on what they say — it isn’t much fun for them. They want a radar in the corner of the screen. They want mission logs. They want fun combat. They want an in-game tutorial. They want a game that doesn’t feel like so much work.

In a way, this sort of shift was inevitable. Gaming on the PC was, at its inception, very much the province of the bookish, techie types. So was console gaming, though to a lesser degree. Conversely, gaming today, as Warren Spector recently mused, now has a much wider audience across a much wider variety of platforms. And as a result, the nature of games themselves — and the expectations that gamers have going in — has changed substantially.

But let’s keep our focus on Ultima specifically, and PC RPGs in general. Take something like my favourite Ultima, Ultima 6, which doesn’t really offer the player much in the way of an in-game tutorial. Lord British, if you talk to him, explains the conversation mechanics a little bit when you first speak to him, but after that you’re more or less on your own figuring out how the game works. Unless you read the manual, of course, which was just something you did back then.

Fast forward a few years and consider Ultima 9. Ascension still included the usual Ultima documentation in the box — the bestiary, the spellbook, the game controls explanation, etc. — but it also featured an opening tutorial in which Hawkwind guided you through the basic interactions that would drive the game forward. Between the Avatar’s house on Earth and Stonegate, you were introduced to the inventory system, clothing, the journal, the spellbook, combat, keys, switches, and jumping…all the things you would need to navigate through Britannia.

A lot of Ultima fans didn’t like the introduction of an in-game tutorial element. Many felt it broke immersion, or that it broke with tradition, and/or that it was poorly executed and felt tacked on. I’m certainly prepared to grant the last point; the tutorial was very overt. Compared with something like Mass Effect‘s tutorial — which used the context of an initial set of missions (Eden Prime > the Citadel > Investigating Saren > Becoming a Spectre) to introduce you to the game, its environments, its controls, and combat, and which gave you control-specific instructions with pop-up notifications — Ultima 9′s opening sequence does stick out like a bit of a sore thumb. I don’t think it breaks immersion, per se…but you definitely get the feeling that you’re starting in the shallow end of the pool.

But since I’m kind of digressing, let me now return to the main point: even in the Ultima series, we saw the shift. Ultima 6 was very much a gamer’s game (for lack of a better term); the developers could (reasonably) expect that its audience would have a certain level of literacy and technical proficiency. Ultima 9 wasn’t strictly a gamer’s game; given the wider audience of Ultima 8 (which was, if memory serves, the top-selling Ultima game), Ultima 9 was in turn targeted toward a wider audience, and took steps to ensure that people who couldn’t necessarily be bothered to pick up and read a manual through from cover to cover could still get into the game and play it to completion.

In other words, Ultima 9 was, in part, targeted toward a very different kind of player than previous Ultimas had been. The developers tried to do this in a way that wouldn’t seem egregiously out of place to established Ultima fans; the debate over the level of success they achieved has been raging ever since.

This is something that modern developers — including developers of Ultima remakes and new Ultima stories — need to consider, I think. The days of expecting a player to grind his way through something like Ultima 4 in order to get completely leveled up and recruit every companion are pretty much extinct. Granted, enthusiastic players may still opt to churn their way through every fresh hell the game can throw at them in order to reach that level cap (be it level 8 in Ultima 6 or level 60 in Mass Effect)…but that’s not an expectation that can be placed on the person who is going to play the game through once, for fun.

Your parents were wrong.

A new study from the University of Maryland shows that more time spent in front of a computer doesn’t hurt a child’s academic performance, and, in some cases, actually improves test scores. Led by family science professor Sandra L. Hofferth, the six-year study followed a group of 1,000 children, who were between the ages of six and 12 in 1997, and continued through 2003. As the students spent more time on computers, their test scores didn’t suffer significantly, even if they spent most of their time playing games on their PCs.

The results, published in the academic journal Child Development, show that African-American boys’ reading scores improved by four points as they increased their computer time, while girls’ math and reading scores both increased by a point. The only group to experience a decline in academic achievement, however, were white male adolescents, who displayed a small, but statistically significant decline — a trend that Hofferth attributes to too much time spent aimlessly surfing the Web.

The conclusion to draw here, then, is that it isn’t the time spent in front of the computer that will eat away at your mark in school…it’s what that time is spent doing.

Granted, it should have been fairly obvious — and probably was, to Ultima fans — that playing many computer games would have resulted in some manner of academic benefit for the players. Games like Tetris and even Guitar Hero exercise the player’s ability to both recognize and predict patterns, which is a concept that in turn relates to mathematics, and likely stimulates the same area of the brain.

Equally, games like any of the Ultimas, or Mass Effect, or almost any other RPG, feature immense amounts of interactive dialogue; it’s not hard to understand that one might have to grow one’s reading skill a little bit in order to master said games. And don’t get me started about puzzle-based and problem-solving-based games like Myst or any of the modern titles which have followed in its wake and tradition. It really isn’t a surprise that games such as these have a positive effect on the academic performance of children. Even FPS games have been shown to boost reaction time and foster quick thinking and analytical problem solving.

On the other hand, simply surfing the web, updating a Facebook profile, and otherwise not directing one’s energies into a focused electronic pursuit has a detrimental effect on the academic performance of children, and this too is not particularly a surprise; it’s the electronic equivalent of sitting on the couch and aimlessly flipping through the TV guide.

So the next time someone gets on your case for spending too much time in front of Halo: Reach or Ultima 6…

There’s a lot of heady legal concepts in this article, and I admit that I haven’t yet re-read it in order to absorb it fully. But if I understand it correctly, it would appear that the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has come perilously close to striking a death blow to the concept of used game sales:

The first-sale doctrine was added to the Copyright Act of 1976 after being introduced in case law in 1908. In short, the doctrine lets you, as the purchaser of a legal copy of a book, movie, game, or other copyrighted work, resell or give away that legal copy to subsequent owners without permission from the copyright holder. It doesn’t give you any rights to the work protected by the copyright, or the ability to otherwise violate the copyright by making copies of the work; it only removes the copyright holder’s control over legal, physical copies of the work after they are first sold to a consumer. In other words, GameStop’s business owes everything to this doctrine.

…

In short, copyrighted material that is licensed to an end user is exempt from the first-sale doctrine, and the license agreement controls what the licensee (the consumer) can and can’t do with the product. As pretty much every PC or Mac game comes with an End User License Agreement, there has been a long standing argument between whether or not those titles are subject to the first-sale doctrine, just as other licensed software would be. Console games, on the other hand, have been viewed more like music and movies, which have always been considered sold and subject to first sale for home use.

While past cases haven’t been perhaps as clear cut on software, the [Vernor v. Autodesk] decision is relatively unequivocal: The software was licensed and was therefore not subject to the first-sale doctrine.

I don’t have the specifics of the Autodesk case in front of me, but at a first glance it would seem that this ruling makes it…legally difficult to resell games, since it arguably interprets the EULA that most games ship with as evidence that no legitimate “first sale” of the software ever occurred (to license a piece of software is, technically, not to buy it outright, but is instead to pay a fee in order to enjoy specifically limited use of the software even while the creator retains a measure of ownership over it).

Troublesome.

From the good Dragons and Dragonesses at U6P:

Team Archon has released the 1.0.1 patch for the Ultima 6 Project for Dungeon Siege 1 (PC and Mac). This release fixes a number of issues which prevented players from completing the game, including:

• Issues with teleporters and orbing
• Conversation loops and broken conversation triggers
• NIS sequences which were not clearing the letterboxing upon completion
• Other miscellaneous items which were affecting game play

If you find problems with the release, want to exchange play hints with other players or discuss the game in chat, want to give us kudos, or (heaven forbid) want to tell us what you really think, join us at our forums at:

http://www.projectbritannia.com/index.php

To download the 1.0.1 Patch release, go to the Ultima 6 Project web site at:

http://www.u6project.com/

Or check out the project entry!

First, let me just remark that all the Online Remakes are once again available for download, and in fact have been so available since last Friday. The reason for the delay was the fact that I had mis-categorized Dransik as a remake, which it is not (though it is an online game).

From here, there are three main categories to restore: Spin Offs, General Utilities, and Joke Remakes. There’s also the Orphanage and Cemetery…but I’m (understandably, I hope) not in as much of a rush to get those categories up and running again.

Broadly, my plan is that the General Utilities section will be pared back, somewhat, because some of the downloads in there (DOSBox, for example) are hopelessly out of date and not particularly Ultima-specific anyhow. I’ll replace the actual downloads with links to the project’s downloads page, where appropriate. The Joke Remakes section will remain much the same as it is, though I believe there is one addition I need to make to it. And come to think of it, neither the Orphanage or the Cemetery will change all that much, if at all.

However, the Spin Offs section will be completely overhauled.

For example, I think the Inspired Works section needs to be expanded and given a little more of its own visibility. I also need to start tracking those projects better.

Moreover, I want to start looking for other projects that, if they aren’t directly inspired by Ultima, are at least inheritors of Ultima traditions in some way. These won’t be categorized as Inspired Works, but will fall under a new and somewhat related category. I’ve already begun looking at a handful of iPhone games, some of which will probably be featured. Sergorn Dragon has put me on to a couple of mainline PC titles that will probably also qualify. The Exult Total Conversions category will probably disappear, since two of its three entrants are remakes, and the third is basically an Inspired Work.

And to be fair, the Spin Offs category will not disappear entirely; there are a few projects which fit that label and will keep it as a result.

The area of the site that will see a lot of change, however, is the Engines section. For starters, it will be expanded to include discussion about 2D and 3D engines which are not tied to any specific game (e.g. Unity, Torque) and are available for free. It will also expand to include discussions of the advantages and disadvantages of using each platform, the pros and cons of each.

More than that, however, I want to expand Aiera into something akin to a “developer connection”, which exists as a place where past project developers can share created media content — 2D art, 3D models, music, and suchlike — with the Ultima community, so that other developers can make use of these things in their projects. Because really, it’s daunting at the best of times to take on the task of creating an Ultima-like game, and the sheer volume of stuff that a development team needs to create for its project can be overwhelming…and thus the death of an otherwise promising effort.

I’d like to position Aiera in such a way as to help aspiring devs get past those pitfalls.

Fundamentally, I think there’s more stories that could be told by the fan community. In part, that’s why I signed on to work on Return to the Serpent Isle…because it isn’t a remake, but is in fact a new story set in the Ultima universe, and which will strive to remain faithful to the universe that Origin built for our minds to play in. And I think there’s an argument to be made that indie devs can turn out amazing work given time and enthusiastic support from an engaged community.

And I don’t believe that Ultima is dead. My site traffic logs would seem to support that belief, as would the overwhelming response to the release of the Ultima 6 Project just recently, and to Lazarus before it.

So in the weeks to come, expect to see this all getting built. And hopefully, once it’s built, we can get a little Field of Dreams action going on here.

May I also offer an extra-special huge-frigging-big “thank you” to Aletys from the Ultima 6 Project for her supportive [donate]donation[/donate] to the site. I will be adding a Sponsorship page to Aiera once I finalize the new design; expect that she will be right at the top of it.

Aletys, you might have made my wife cry, just a little bit. It was that stunning, and I am duly humbled by it.

That’s right…it’s been nearly a decade in the making, and it comes out today!

On this, the 20th anniversary year of the release of Origin Systems Ultima 6, it is with much pleasure that we announce the 1.0 release of Team Archon‘s Ultima 6 Project, for Dungeon Siege 1 (PC and Mac). Players will find a huge and exciting world waiting to be discovered:

• Travel throughout the lands of Britannia, exploring dark forests with bandits lying in wait, deserts and swamps teeming with monsters, and peaceful towns and villages filled with shops, old friends, and interesting people just waiting to give the player numerous and exciting quests to solve.
• Explore deep and dangerous caves and caverns full of treasure and hidden surprises. Bring your breadcrumbs to mark your trail, or be prepared to be thoroughly and completely lost, with your remains left to be found by future explorers.
• Sail the savage seas to explore remote islands, but be vigilant for there are sea monsters lying in wait for the careless traveler.
• Discover a hidden new world, far from Britannia.
• Encounter strange and exotic races, including the mysterious Gargoyles.
• Fight fearsome monsters, find pirate loot, solve a murder, and discover the truth behind the numerous attacks on Britannia’s towns.
• Learn the commerce of the land for fun and profit.
• Learn magical spells, search for magic reagents, and join guilds to gain special benefits.
• Those players with proclivities to the dark side can follow an “evil path”.
• And, last, but not least, ferret out the hidden Easter eggs.

Click on through to continue reading the press release. If you just can’t wait and have to start downloading the project package, click here for the project entry at Aiera, or visit the project website for additional download links.

(more…)

Well, today is an exciting Monday, isn’t it? That’s right…the newest Beta release of the Ultima 6 Project is available for download:

It is with much pleasure that we announce the release of the Beta 3 Release of Team Archon’s Ultima 6 Project, for Dungeon Siege 1 (PC and Mac). Some things to look forward to in this release:

• Many bug fixes have been implemented since the Beta 2 release.
• All NPC’s are in place, and all the quests have been implemented.
• Those players with proclivities to the dark side can now follow an “evil path”.
• Additional enhancements have been made to the map and journal systems, and the Compendium is now complete.
• Performance improvements have been implemented

It should be noted that anyone using a previous version will have to uninstall it prior to installing the Beta 3 Release, and start a new game,

While this is not the final release of the game, we feel that it is reasonably polished, enough for public consumption (read: scrutiny). We still expect that there will be some bugs, and are soliciting your help in finding them.

If you find problems with the release, want to exchange play hints with other players, want to give us kudos, or (heaven forbid) want to tell us what you really think, join us at our forums.We have set up a special forum for the Beta 3 Release on the Project Britannia forums.

To download the Beta 3 Release, go to the Ultima 6 Project web site.

You’re still here, good reader? Get thee to the project website and download that Beta! Or, if you like, you can get it from the project entry here; Aiera is pleased to serve as a download mirror for the U6P team.

Not that I mourn its passing, exactly. It was a pretty darn ancient system, my old AMD Athlon XP 1800+ that I bought in 2003. Clocking in at about 1.18 GHz and backed up by 1.25 GB of RAM, it wasn’t exactly the powerhouse of the house. It did have a pretty decent video card, though. But anyhow, the system would appear to have well and truly “snuffed it”, as they say. The power supply is fine and everything is connected, but neither the processor nor the hard drives show any sign of life when the system is powered on.

So I’m thinking it might just be time to upgrade. As such, let’s haul out the old format for a bit and contemplate options. I’m thinking it’d be sweet to hook her up with one of these new “mini” computers that are becoming quite common these days. She doesn’t exactly need the computing horsepower, since she doesn’t use the computer for much more than a bit of music playback, checking her email, and checking various newsfeeds. Once in a while, she’ll watch an episode of House online.

Netbook guts!

Specs:

• nVidia ION graphics chipset
• Intel Atom N330 Dual Core 1.6GHz processor
• 2 GB DDR2 RAM
• 160 GB 5400RPM SATA II hard drive

Price: $429 (Memory Express)

Pros: Asus Eee computers are pretty well-known as far as miniature PCs and netbooks go. Asus itself makes pretty reliable hardware, in my experience, and the Eee Box itself can be fitted almost anywhere, so as to be unobtrusive.

Cons: Price, primarily. Though not the most expensive unit on this list, the Eee Box does cost $80 more than the Acer Aspire Revo, despite having essentially identical specs thereto. We can argue over brands, but since I’ve personally no objection to either Acer or Asus, I don’t exactly see why — if I am to choose between just the two — I should opt for the Asus.

Also, as Petrell pointed out in the comments, there’s no optical drive. I don’t see this as being the biggest obstacle, and I don’t imagine the Dragoness would either…but you never know. It’s worth consideration.

Also netbook guts!

Specs:

• nVidia ION graphics chipset
• Intel Atom N330 Dual Core 1.6GHz processor
• 2 GB DDR2 RAM
• 160 GB 5400RPM SATA II hard drive

Price: $349 (Memory Express)

Pros: Price, for one; the Revo 3610 is identical to the Eee Box (above) in terms of specifications, yet comes in at a lower price. That’s an important consideration for me these days! Personally, I’ve only ever had good experiences with Acer computers. And the size of the thing…sheesh, it’s tiny! I could hide it almost anywhere near the Dragoness’ monitor, and clean up the cable mess I made when I set up her tower, and she’d have a better computer at the end of it.

I don’t imagine she’d complain.

Also, the Revo boasts one additional USB port. That sounds trivial, and I would generally agree that it is…but at the same time, I think we’ve all been in that situation where we have one more device to connect than we have ports available. Am I right? Nevermind.

Cons: The lack of an optical drive, again, as Petrell pointed out.

I look like a Mac Mini!

Specs:

• ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics chipset
• AMD Athlon 2650e 1.6GHz processor
• 3 GB DDR2 RAM
• 250 GB 7200RPM SATA II hard drive

Price: $399 (Dell.ca)

Pros: This system offers more memory than either the Revo or the Eee Box, and a larger/faster hard drive as well. The hard drive capacity is a worthwhile consideration, since the Dragoness is always happy to have more space to work with; the extra RAM would certainly improve system performance a little bit.

Cons: For one, the HD 3200 graphics chipset…isn’t really that good. In fact, as a general rule, it’s worse than the ION chipset. For $99 more, I could jump that to the HD 4330 chipset, which is markedly better (heck, the Dragoness could probably run Mass Effect, which I’ve been encouraging her to play lately).

But that would of course boost the price of the unit from something that falls happily between the Revo and the Eee Box to something that far exceeds both units. And considering the fact that this unit boasts what appears to be a single core processor, rather than a dual core, it doesn’t seem to be that great of a deal overall.

I *am* a Mac Mini!

Specs:

• nVidia GeForce 9400M graphics chipset
• Intel Core 2 Duo 2.26 GHz processor
• 2 GB DDR3 RAM
• 160 GB 5400RPM hard drive

Price: $649 (Apple.ca)

Pros: Well, it’s a Mac, for starters, which means the beautiful, easy-to-use thing that is OS X. Overall, this is a much higher-performance system than any of the other entries on this list, and yet is quite compact (smaller than the Dell, I think). The processor is a Core 2, rather than a netbook Atom-type chip, and the 9400M graphics are…decent.

Cons: The hard drive is nothing special. And then there’s the price. The Mac Mini is easily the most expensive computer on the list here (not that I’m surprised), and probably the hardest overall to cost-justify. Yes, it’s a beefier system overall, but does the Dragoness need the power? Given her current usage profile, I’m doubtful.

In Closing

My gut feeling is to go with the Revo, both because it’s the cheapest system on the list and because it offers what will probably be the best system overall for the Dragoness’ needs. Still, I’m open to some debate on the matter, so if anyone wants to chime in with a suggestion, please do so.

That’s right: hot on the heels of their Milestone 8 (Beta 1) release, the U6 Project team have released their second beta, which features:

It is with much pleasure that we announce the release of the Beta 2 Release of Team Archon’s Ultima 6 Project, for Dungeon Siege 1 (PC and Mac). Some things to look forward to in this release:

• Many bug fixes have been implemented since the Milestone 8 (Beta 1) release.
• Weapon and armor restrictions have now been applied, by class.
• The entire world is complete, and ready for players to explore.
• All NPC’s are in place, and all the quests have been implemented.
• Those players with proclivities to the dark side can now follow an “evil path”.
• Hydras are now in game, and should pose a nasty surprise to unwary travelers.
• Additional enhancements have been made to the map and journal systems, and the Compendium is now nearly complete.
• Minor performance improvements have been implemented
• It should be noted that anyone using a previous version will have to uninstall it prior to installing the Beta 2 Release, and start a new game.

While this is not the final release of the game, we feel that it is reasonably polished, enough for public consumption (read: scrutiny). We still expect that there will be some bugs, and are soliciting your help in finding them.

If you find problems with the release, want to exchange play hints with other players, want to give us kudos, or (heaven forbid) want to tell us what you really think, join us at our forums. We have set up a special forum for the Beta 2 Release on the Project Britannia forums (http://www.projectbritannia.com/index.php).

To download the Beta 2 Release, go to the Ultima 6 Project web site at: http://www.u6project.com/ where you can also check out profiles of the Project team members.

If you like what you see, and would like to contribute to this great game (and help us get it out faster), the team is looking for additional 2D artists to help with completing the portraits. And, of course, we’re always looking for play-testers to help us find and eliminate any remaining bugs. Contact any of the team members on the forums if you’d like to join the team.

You’re still here, good reader? Get thee to the Ultima 6 Project website and grab that download.

Or, you can grab it from the project entry here at Aiera.

From the U6P team:

It is with much pleasure that we announce the release of Team Archon’s next milestone of the Ultima 6 Project, Milestone 8 (M8) for Dungeon Siege 1 (PC and Mac). This is the beta release for the project, which will be followed shortly by the 1.0 release. Some things to look forward to in this release:

• The entire world is now complete, and ready for players to explore.
• All NPC’s are in place, and all the quests have been implemented.
• New weapons are available for the player to discover.
• Tangle Vines are now in game, and should pose a nasty surprise to unwary travelers.
• Enhancements have been made to the map and journal systems, and the Compendium is now available as part of the Journal.

This is not the final release of the game, but we feel that they are reasonably polished enough for public consumption (read: scrutiny). If you find problems with the release, want to exchange play hints with other players, want to give us kudos, or (heaven forbid) want to tell us what you really think, join us at our forums. We have set up a special forum for the Milestone 8 Release on the Project Britannia forums.

To download the M8 release, go to the Ultima 6 Project web site at: http://www.u6project.com/ where you can also check out profiles of the Project team members.

If you like what you see, and would like to contribute to this great game (and help us get it out faster), the team is looking for additional 2D artists to help with completing the portraits. And, of course, we’re always looking for play-testers to help us find and eliminate any bugs. Contact any of the team members on the forums if you’d like to join the team.

About The U6 Project

The Ultima 6 Project was formed in 2001 by Sliding Dragon to develop a remake of Origin’s Ultima VI: The False Prophet with newer graphics and a more immersive engine. Soon assembled under the banner Archon, the team members, who hail from all over the globe, have set about recreating the world of Britannia, adding an enhanced storyline to bolster intraseries continuity and building on the Ultima legacy in a way that will please fans new and old.

I haven’t added the download to the project entry yet (that will happen tonight), but Team Archon were gracious enough to release the Milestone 8 download to me a bit early.

Sadly, something seems to have gone wrong with my upload of the project file. I’m working on getting a new download in place right now!

Apologies!

Update: Okay, I think the file DOWNLOADED successfully this time, which is good. But as I am currently in a hotel in Rock Springs, Wyoming, sharing an internet connection with God knows how many other people, the process of getting it UPLOADED has crossed from being a mere annoyance to a full-on pain in the ass. By which I mean: 5:35:22 remaining on the counter, with 1:55:29 elapsed already.

Painfully slow!

Anyhow, with nothing better to do on the site at the moment, I think I might take a stab at cleaning up the timeline. Which, I remind myself, still needs to have all the various remake projects included in it. Or at least the ones that make it to final release!

From Aletys:

It is with much pleasure that we announce the release of Team Archon’s next milestone of the Ultima 6 Project, Milestone 7 (M7) for Dungeon Siege 1 (PC and Mac). This is the alpha release for the project, which will be followed shortly by the beta and 1.0 releases. Some things to look forward to in this release:

• The entire world is now available for players to explore, and players will be able to complete the game, though some elements will be further enhanced in the beta and 1.0 releases.
• New NPCs have been added, including a certain Cyclops family and a two-headed llama.
• Additional enhancements have been made to existing areas.
• More quests have been implemented, including the entire main quest.
• The Journal system has been greatly enhanced, and players will be able to track their progress with it.

This is not a final release of these sections of the game, but we feel that they are reasonably polished enough for public consumption (read: scrutiny). If you find problems with the release, want to exchange play hints with other players, want to give us kudos, or (heaven forbid) want to tell us what you really think, join us at our forums. We have set up a special forum for the Milestone 7 Release on the Project Britannia forums.

To download the M7 release, go to the Ultima 6 Project web site, where you can also check out profiles of the Project team members.

You’re still here, good reader? Get thee to the project website!

Update: A download is now available via the project entry here.

I just got this notice in my email inbox, and it’s a hute announcement indeed: Milestone 5 of the Ultima 6 Project has been released!

It is with much pleasure that we announce the release of Team Archon’s next milestone of the Ultima 6 Project, Milestone 5 for Dungeon Siege 1 (PC and Mac). Some things to look forward to in this release:

• New areas to explore (Trinsic, Jhelom, Moonglow, New Magincia, Serpent’s Hold, Skara Brae, Sutek’s Castle, Trinsic)
• Enhancements to existing areas
• New plot details and quests and other subtle refinements
• Numerous enhancements to the core gameplay such as:
  • The Journal system now records may quest details automatically, but still allows the player to make their own notes
  • A new “Event Console”, which can be toggled on and off, and which will help you keep track of what’s happening during play
  • Many more tunings and tweaks to the core Project Britannia systems ( for the nitty gritty details, check the change log )

You can find the download links on the Official Website:

www.u6project.com

I will be sure to add a download for this to Aiera just as soon as I am able. In the meantime, O Reader…check thou it out!

[image:27:l:s=0:l=x]Produced by: Telemachos
Website: Peroxide
Releases:
* Mount Drash (459.5 KiB, 149 hits)

Ultima: Escape from Mount Drash is not a canon Ultima, and bears only a passing relevance to the Ultima storyline. It was not a Richard Garriot game, and it seems likely that, at the time, Sierra just slapped the Ultima label onto another game in order to boost its sales.

Telemachos, formerly of Peroxide, ported the game from the VIC 20 to the PC about a year ago, and Warwon Dragon graciously provided me with his copy of the port for inclusion on the site.