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)

This is just a Photoshop job, not a real screenshot. Sadly.

I was told the most interesting thing today.

As the good reader is probably aware, a port of Akalabeth was recently released on the iPhone (or, more correctly, iOS) platform, Apple‘s mobile device operating system. The good reader is also probably aware that I’ve had some contact with Mythic Entertainment. Mythic, as most hopefully know, basically holds the rights to the Ultima name at present, and produced the most recent expansion to Ultima Online.

Well, it turns out that Mythic would be very interested in any effort made to port Ultima 4 to the iOS platform, so much so that they would work to get any functional, well-implemented port published on the Apple App Store under the EA Mobile label.

So…if anyone out there has some experience with development on the iPhone platform, and if such a person would be interested in creating a port of the original game, which offered context-dependent controls not unlike how the Akalabeth port does: here’s your big chance. Not only to remake an Ultima title (and a darn fine one, at that), but to get it officially approved and published.

As Aragorn, son of Arathorn, asked: What say you?

Well, last night he contacted me with a request for assistance. He has undertaken a new project, called Sanctimonia, which he describes thusly:

For the last six months or so I’ve been working on a new project called Sanctimonia, which borrows elements from Ultima IV, V, Online and arcade titles such as Gauntlet. This one’s 2D with faux 3D effects and is not a mod, as I’m coding it myself. This should allow for a much more reasonable workload as far as asset production is concerned. Other than landscape textures and building tiles, all the objects (trees, furniture, people, animals, etc.) will be photographed from real models from 16 directions to create the faux 3D effect when the screen is rotated.

[snip]

Sanctimonia will be using a largely unpopulated Britannia circa Ultima IV/V, allowing players to build it up as they please. A modest server and Internet connection (256 KBps upstream) should support around 1000 players simultaneously per server.

Currently, he’s attempting to raise funds to offset the cost of developing the project, but is still far, far short of his goal.

You can read more about the project at that link, and if it interests you, I would encourage you to toss Mr. Fishburne a donation. I’ll be adding a project entry to Aiera within the day.