Ultima™ Underworld 1+2

UU1 is the best scrolling dungeon forever. The Best atmosphere, great graphic, great design. UU2 is also great. (I hope that GoG bring us also Ultima saga very soon, especially Ultima 1 - 6 collection, because I have U 7 complete, 8, 9, but U 4, 5, 6 I cannot find anywhere in legal original for acceptable price.:-)

Very immersive games. The only thing I really dislike is something that's common throughout the ULTIMA series: It requires a lot of inventory management and sometimes you can't tell if you need an item ir not.

These games really taught me the meaning of the "Epic Quest" that so many games these days purport to offer. These are the original "Start with nothing, build yourself up" games that a lot of others owe a great debt to. Highly, highly recommended.

Two important things to know about these games: 1. The audio settings are messed up by default in this download. You'll have to search how to set it to use Soundblaster audio. Trust me, you don't want to play it with the default settings, unless they happened to have recently fixed it. 2. Controls can be greatly improved (adding mouselook + a context sensitive "use" key) by searching for "John Glassmyer Ultima Hacks." You'll need to rename the .gog file to .iso and extract the game files, then use the patcher on the Ultima Hacks page on the executable. As for Ultima Underworld itself: the game holds up amazingly well for a game from 1992. It's very atmospheric with some great interactivity and player freedom. It's a major milestone in RPG history and I strongly recommend it to fans of immersive sims and first person RPGs/dungeon crawlers. So many games have been inspired by this one that it's hard to really understate its impact. The Elder Scrolls series, for example, started off as an imitation of Ultima Underworld and still contains a lot of elements of it. You can see bits and pieces of it in tons of games. It also has a lot of impressive tech, like physics on objects and fully 3D levels, before Doom even came out. Why am I not giving it a full 5 stars? It has a few flaws, mainly some backtracking and obtuse puzzles. You'll almost certainly consult a walkthrough at some point. Also, most of the "side quests" are actually required, even if they don't seem to be important at first glance. The game gives you the ability to attack or insult all NPCs, but you can ruin the main quest by doing so, so it's not really as open ended as it may seem (this is a problem that was inherited from Ultima and its focus on "virtuous" play). Overall though, an absolute classic. I don't like the 2nd game as much as the first, but it's nice if you want more after finishing the first one.

I remember getting this game on disks years ago and then spending two weeks trying to make it work with sound. It was worth the work. This is still my favorite game to date, and I replay the first one every few years. A huge place to explore, puzzles, cool use of runes for magic, NPCs with quests and stories, and an amazing fully 3d experience, including a little flying! No game has ever captured so much in one title before or since.