It would be super cool if Blizzard allowed GoG to sell this game again!
Some have called this game the best game ever. They're wrong, but it's easy to see how they made that mistake. After all, in terms of rewarding player choice with meaningful consequences, Undertale is indeed better than the Bioshock franchise, the Mass Effect franchise, TellTale's Walking Dead franchise, Spec Ops: The Line, and many others. Undertale's gameplay seems to be a combination of a straightforward JRPG and an even more straightforward bullet-hell minigame. But it's the way that gameplay is integrated with (and determines the outcome of) the story, the world and back-story, and the characterization of the main cast, that makes Undertale an instant all-time classic. Undertale's world seems to be a linear path almost as bad as Final Fantasy XIII. But the way it's constantly entertaining the player no matter what the player is doing, and calling back to what the player has done already, makes the linear path feel like a living world actually reacting to the player's actions. This is a game where some jokes fall flat and the worst parts are merely decent, but the best parts put teams of hundreds of more experienced professionals to shame. Buy. This. Game.
The Labyrinth of Time was released the same year as Seventh Guest and Myst, and holds up fairly well. The premise is that the famous Labyrinth of legend actually crosses time as well as space and you can travel to different times just by walking around. Some settings are smaller than others, and the technical limits of the time prevented much character interaction. However, the graphics were astounding for the time, and the game part was good as well. I'm docking one star because I was originally unable to finish the game due to being stuck on an obscure puzzle near the end (for comparison, I did finish Myst and every classic Lucasarts adventure I played). Despite this, I enjoyed most of the game and with online walkthroughs being much easier to find, you should have no trouble playing all the way through.
Gentlemen and ladies, let us not trash Ultima 9 too harshly. Yes, it is an awful, awful game. But it deserves a five star rating in the following ways: 1) On technical terms, it was amazing, even despite the buggy initial release. The graphics were fantastic for 1999. The level of interaction with the world was inferior to U7 or UW2, but still better than Diablo and other action-"RPGs". The interface and controls were superb. In fact, the whole journal idea (which first appeared in earlier Ultimas but was done best in this game), with the game explicitly tracking your progress through quests, has since been used in almost every MMO including WoW. Oh, and it's the first RPG to have full voice acting. 2) It is possible to enjoy this game ironically, and count all the awful plot holes that develop when you talk to even minor characters. Let's not mince words: the writing is atrocious, and in some places it does reach so-bad-it's-good territory (unintentionally). 3) It's probably the easiest Ultima game to play. 4) It inspired one of the biggest Ultima fans to do a massive series-wide video retrospective, culminating in a three part apocalyptic trilogy of reviews. This is no ordinary bad game. It is the ultimate bad game. You may think you've played some bad games in the past, but have you ever played a game that was bad enough to make you want to destroy the world? http://spoonyexperiment.com/category/game-reviews/ultima-retrospective/
