Ultima™ 8 Gold Edition

All right, Ultima VIII was more of a bad platformer the day it was launched. After being patched, it became an excellent adventure game. The city of Tenebrae is incredibly vivid, the game feature an excellent exploration component (you can really spend several hours in Tenebrae and haven't seen it all), the graphics are state-of-the-art VGA and the music is simply the best MIDI has to offer. So yeah, it certainly is a bad Ultima, and a mediocre RPG, but a great game nonetheless.

not as bad as everyone says. best in the series? no. A fun enjoyable and dark action rpg. very yes, give it a shot with an open mind an i promise you, you will have a good time.

Included Cluebook is a horrible amateurish scan of a used copy that even includes someone's notes!!! Chronicle is scanned a bit better, but still pretty bad. Manual and ref card are very ugly pdfs. The map is a photo of the cloth map which is held in place with pins - really, with PINS!!! The game is terrific of course, but the goodies are baddies at best.

Since I happened to play this game before playing Ultima VII and VI, I think that most of the hate it attracted was due to how it compares with the other two (well, actually three, since VII is split into two games) masterpieces: first of all, it is a different kind of game, and even when factoring that into the equation, it lacks a lot of depth and polish compared to the other two titles. According to the information leaked afterwards, the blame for its lack of success as launch rests squarely on the shoulders on the developer, as I believe it could have been a smash hit if the devs had more time to refine the content and adjust the difficulty of the game better. Still, I found the game as it was engaging enough to play through it when it was released (and in the spirit of full disclosure, I played it before patches, so the couple of sections of the game which require a lot of platforming were as fun as eating nails). Considering that the patches take care of the most glaring problems in the gameplay, I can recommend it to those who are able to play it without expecting it to be the same kind of game as Ultima VII

I played it like 1-2 years after its release and I must say... that's different from any other Ultima game ever created... BUT, it's good. You crave for something comparable to Ultima 7? Then the game's not for you, but the dark atmosphere that covers all the world of Pagan is great. Is a good adventure game, even if the world is not enormous, and it's not easy. But I always like the unforgiveness of this world.