Ultima™ 9: Ascension

They kept releasing patches they claimed would fix all the problems everyone but the developers claimed to be having, and then after the 4th patch was released, they shut down their forums so no one could post any additional problems. They said judge them as they were now, not what they were before. It still sucks. You could have an enemy rush up behind you and start attacking, and before you had time to turn around to face him, you'd be dead. They were auctioning off a terrified teenage girl as a sex slave in Buccaneer's Den, and you could hire a prostitute there, and if you used a drug you'd wake up in a bed with a male pirate there instead of her, indicating you got man raped. Things like that shouldn't be in the game at all. You had one dungeon which was the most horrible time consuming massive maze imaginable, you having to run back and forth looking for different color things to get through it, and it just ridiculously tedious. Not fun at all. The lag problems won't be an issue with modern computers, so no need to bring that up. The dialog and plot are lame. Eliminating the rest of my review, so its not too long to post. I'm sure you get the point.

I actually never played another ultima game, so I can't comment about how faithful it is to the previous games, but to me Ultima IX is great fun, with nice immersive setting, rich content and awesome musics.

So much potential, so much promise. A return to Britannia and the promise of the return of things like baking bread and a living environment like VII, but in 3D. And the chance to wrap up the Guardian and the series in an epic. Instead, it was this. This tiny world where you are on a rail doing the same set of things over and over and your Avatar seems to have suffered a head injury and remembers nothing. I've definitely played worse games, but nothing really compares to how disappointing this turned out to be.

What's a Paladin?

An inglorious example of lowest common denominator marketing and that trademark lack of effort by EA, The writing in this game is so lackluster it took the legs out from under one of the longest running RPGs of all time. The Ultima series withstood the test of time, the advancement of PC gaming and the unjustified backlash of the satanic panic but was felled by the Schemes of a single producer. In addition to all this the game in its original form was barely functional prone to crashing and freezing at random along with a list of glitches and errors, on the plus side we could finally feed Lord British bread lined with rat poison.