Ultima™ 9: Ascension

Interface controls are versatile and the world to explore is huge.

I don't know Ultima, loving it so far though now that I've figured out I can change controls to my beloved WASD movement. Everything feels pretty intuitive which is a nice change after wondering what I was doing in Ultima VIII. *marge voice* I just think it's neat.

I completed it 25 years ago. I found it on GOG and bought it. I'm very grateful. Some of the controls are out of date, but that's fine too.

Butchery of the Ultima series aside... The storyline is pretty bad, making little to no sense in a lot of places. The voice acting is laughable at best... Hit detection is a right pain, menus are annoyingly designed, and even with the patches, it's packed with bugs, making some puzzles almost impossible to complete a lot of the time, scripts have a tendancy to hang for... my record was longer than five minutes just waiting for an NPC to actually talk after interacting (Not graphical lag, literally just standing there, animated, waiting, until the NPC speaks.) There's a number of other flaws I could list, but they've already been covered. The good points; the graphics are good, the soundtrack is pretty nice.. for a while anyway, and some of the quests were rather fun. Not a game I'd recommend if you enjoyed the ultima series, or if you're easily annoyed by repeated crashes, reloads due to gamebreaking bugs, and the suchlike, but if you're looking at a game you can laugh at, this is probably a game for you.

(Note: I am talking about the cd rom release. Some of these faults may have been fixed in the Go release) Let me just begin by saying I love Ultima. They did so much for rpgs, stories in gaming, gaming in general, and so much more that If I could talk about all of Ultima, I would be writting this all day. There were so many great things about it, memorable characters, deep themes, fun speels, a vast world for you to explore. The Ultima games and some other games by Oigin systems pushed what PCs could do. Then Ultima 8 happened. Ultima 8 was a very bad game with horrendous controls, dumbed down combat, broken mechanics, plot holes and betrayal to Ultima's formula that it failed baly. Little did we know things would get worse. Let's get to the positives first. For the most prts, the graphics are beautiful! The backgrounds are amazingly detailed anda good number of enmies look good too. However a lot of character models look bad, look very jointy and look unfinish, similar to John Romero's Daikatana. The music is fine though not as memorable or grand as pevious Ultima games. epecially Ultima 8 whichwas one of th strong points of that game. Gameplay wise...it's broken. The battling is just clicking the mouse button over and over again, and don't think you can use magic because you can't use it until 2/3s into the game so if you pick a spellcater as your startng class, you're doomed. Also there is a long, frustrating, tedious quest that takes you almost the entire game and what is your reward? 100 gold pieces...the same amount you can get from killing a couple rats in the game. There are glitches EVERYWHERE!!!! Characters will ranomly start flying, you character will freeze in place, unable to move. The worst though I am not entirely sure if it was in this Gog rerelease though I know it's in the original version. THE GAME CRASHED ALL THE TIME!!!! The game's bugs kill you more than the actual game's enemies. Storywise....It's a complete betraya to Ultima. The Avataris an idiot, betraying all the virtues, does not know anything about the world whic he has visited over and over again, Plot oles are everywhee within the game itself an all the inconsistincies with therest of the games are unforgivable (The codex of Ultimate Wisdom back on earth, Dupree coming to life, Blackthorn being a villain even though in Serpent Ile he was reveald to have changed his ways, Pyros is alive again after Ultima 8 and there is sooooooooo much more. Those alone make this one of the worst gamesof all time, adding all of the other features I mentioned, along with hte betrayal of the virtues, dreadful voice acting, no partners, NONE OF THE PROBLEMS FROM ULTIMA 8 BEING FIXED, too easy of enemis. Make this, in my humble opinion, the worst game of all time....It's not easy for me to say that considering the competition from games like Big Rigs over the Road Racing, ET or hte Atari, Superman 64, The Sniper 2 and more. But tis true. Ithink the only reason GOG released this is because they wanted the rest of the series which is not a bad reason though I think people would like to forget about this one.