Ultima™ 1+2+3

I just destroyed a pirate ship in my "vaccum pants" with my bare hands. How awesome is that.

I am fairly certain that the people who rated this collection high have not played the games in ages, certainly not through them. Well, I did. And I wish I had not. There's no doubt that the first three Ultima games were milestone titles that paved the way for the RPGs we know and love but the truth is that they are utterly unplayable by today's standards and could only ever be considered great due to a lack of good titles to compare them to. It's three highly different games I have to cover here so I'll have to be brief: The first game is more like a prototype of CRPGs. There's a map to explore, dungeons to be visited etc. but it's very directionless, empty and has no depth at all and there's Star Wars stuff thrown in for no reason just because it was developed by a nerd. I expected the second Ultima to build upon the original and turn it into a passable game. It did not. As a matter of fact it is widely considered the black sheep of the series with utterly ridiculous mechanics and content. What' unforgivable is extreme obscurity that makes it virtually impossible to finish the game without a guide and even once you know what to do it's the ultimate grindfest. Also, you need a community patch to make the game even beatable and get some colour (otherwise it's almost entirely grey CGA - worse than Ultima I). Finally there's Ultima III. Here we're getting somewhere. It's a lot more focused than the previous games and especially the turn-based tactical combat on arena maps, where you control up to four characters with different classes, is actually fun compared to the horror that U2 is. It's still not a good game but it's actually a functional game. Kudos. And with a community patch you get MUCH better graphics and nice MIDI music which finally make the game have some atmosphere. So that's the original Ultima trilogy for you. Highly interesting material for game archaeologists but psychological torture for anybody else.

Disappointing that only the DOS ports are available since the Apple II versions came out many years earlier. If GOG is really interested in preservation then the original versions need to be made available, especially since they have made it harder to acquire them as abandonware.

GoG selling us a game without even the (very needed) keyboard commands.

Ultima 1 - You have an overworld map with different cities, castles and other points of interests, however what you explore on one continent is simply repeated on 3 remaining continents. For example you have only 2 designs of cities, each appearing on every continent (so x4). Story is stupid, and there is no proper levelling system (you just get more hp by visiting dungeons). Only progression is based on money gathered, which you spend on transportation (that's actually cool) and better gear. The game fortunately is not too annoying and doesn't overstay its welcome. Ultima 2 - With different time zones (game includes time travel), the exploration feels more meaningful, as there is more variety between locations. Story is even more nonsensical that the first one. By far the worse part of the game is it's progression, which is again based on earning money like in the first one. However the money earned does not even cover properly your food expenses. You will be frustrated by limited resources, lack of foes to get gold from and some enemies that paralyze your legs with very annoying sound. The game frustratingly prolonged by the above mechanics and you will be sick of it. Ultima 3 - Overworld finally seems more fleshed out without copy & paste cities, gone is a lot of sci-fi nonsense. The game levelling system impacts your health (yay!) but not your stats (are you kidding me?). Story is just you finding stuff, so it's nothing to miss. Game relies on party system with 4 characters that you create - you have some unique classes to choose from. Unfortunately experience is allocated to character who gets a kill, so you will be struggling with levelling some classes until they get some more powerful spells and you also have to allocate food across all 4 characters. If you lose a ship during game (due to maelstrom), you might wait for hours for next to show up (frustrating). Overall, play these games only from historical interest. Otherwise, don't waste your life.