Ultima IX is the end of an amazing saga where the player portraits the Avatar, the champion of Virtues. I've loved the plot and the idea of playing Ultima in a 3D world, which still looks beautiful by today's standards, but the execution was poorly managed and they ended up releasing a product full of bugs and shallow quests. I'd say that Ultima IX is more of an Action/Adventure game than a CRPG one. Character progression is almost 100% linear, tightly tied to the progress of the main plot. Most advancements in combat are useless, and you will only need 3 or 4 spells throughout the entire game. This isn't to say to Ultima IX is a bad game. It's just that, for every great idea, there's a usually horrible mechanic implementation to spoil the fun. Do you like exploring dungeons? Great, there're plenty of them in this game; but be prepared to go through some pretty annoying ones (Hythloth is the worst, in my opinion). The soundtrack is usually great, especially after cleansing a shrine (which is what you'll be doing most of the time, btw). The city feels peaceful and people change their behaviour towards your hero, although most monsters will keep respawning, so "peace" isn't exactly the word here. Some quests are almost useless, so any side quest is only worth doing for the sake of completeness. One particular lengthy quest that involves finding rough gems scattered all over Britannia only rewards the player with 100 gold pieces, which can be the price of a potion in a merchant! That's the level of laziness that one can find playing Ultima IX. But, even with all the issues, I still had a great time exploring the game's world, especially due to some cool places such as icy mountains, forests, caves etc. Several places seemed carefully designed. I remember the path from Yew to Wrong: it felt like a proper adventure all the way through. Added with the nice weather effects and day/night cycle, it can really become an immersive experience. Fare-thee-well, Avatar!
I didn’t have the chance to play Warcraft 1 when it was released back in 1994. But GOG has given me the opportunity to try it out and I am absolutely glad that I took it. Most players will complain about how terrible the UI is, with the constant clicking and use of keyboard shortcuts to perform simple actions such as moving your units around, but oddly enough that’s exactly what kept me interested. The game can be brutally difficult for some, especially if you don’t appreciate micromanagement. I played at the highest speed setting and it was definitely hard. I reloaded my saved games dozens of times during the Human campaign, and even created experimental saved files to try things out in order to avoid having to restart the whole map from scratch. Because you can only select up to 4 units at a time, you will find that you best approach is to simply keep your units in strategical positions in a way that you don’t need to constantly issue orders to them. It’s almost like a tower defence game, only with units. Correctly positioning your troops is essential for this kind of strategy, but even so, I almost gave up the penultimate campaign map because I couldn’t defend my town from the multiple paths that the AI was using to get into my base. I admit I was being a bit lazy, though. My simple strategy was to get my knights and archers into line backed by a bunch of clerics to heal them, but that rarely stands against catapults and high-level sorcerers. Then I’ve finally found out the power of stationary catapults and water elementals, the latter summoned by the most advanced creature the Humans can train. Better late than never, I guess! Warcraft 1 doesn’t take long to finish and there’s a multiplayer component that I didn’t test myself, but I am sure it’s possible to get it working with a bit of DOSBox wizardry. Punishing difficulty and late discoveries aside, I had a great time trying out this classic!
