Ultima™ 8 Gold Edition

This is a terrible game. A broken, barely playable mess that was sold in alpha state and never fixed. GOG should not be selling this in the first place. Hugely excessive fanboyism is always a major problem with GOG user reviews. But the fact that there are insane fanboys giving this objectively worthless game 5 stars completely and for ever discredits all GOG user review scores.

I absolutely love this game. You get a lot of freedom to do whatever you want. you can mess around the streets with the magic you learn in the deepest catacombs. Perhaps you get too much freedom. you can throw a very important item into the sea somewhere and its gone forever. you can never finish this game. just throw one of the obelisk items somewhere and you'll never find it. I loved making my spells. putting reagents in a bag and summoning. i loved carefully crafting sorcery spells by using the pentagram. i would be reading the scroll and putting reagents and choosing the right candles. you make your spells while listening to the sound of a crackling fire near the avatar or the rain. this game has an awesome mood and that's what its all about. the mood. there are tons of secret off shore item to find and tricky dungeons to explore. the harder you look the more you'll find. nobody can tell you how to play this. you can learn all the different schools of magic and walk around messing the city up with it. forget the story line and go have fun. or just finish the game and become all powerful.

Still have the collector Box with floppy Disks , Tissue Map and metal Pentagram! One of my most treamendous game memory !!!!

But I do have a copy of this version with the speech pack which is pretty much the same edition, I believe. While I haven't played the game in a while, I still do have fond memories of the game, and exploring its environment. I don't see it as a 4 star game, more a 3.5 star game (though I'm rating it a 3 because it helps keep it at its current average score which I feel is the right score), but I never saw it as particularly terrible, though it does get .5 knocked off for being rushed and incomplete; the fact that it was my first Ultima game might have something to do with why I'm a little less harsh towards it compared to others. The graphics of the game do look good for the time (and still do look pretty nice now I think) and the gameplay isn't too bad either overall, though I do understand it is a radical departure in placrs from the other Ultimas with it being a solo affair; this is by no means a bad thing as it does take things in a new direction. You can clearly see that despite the fact it was rushed, the game had a lot of potential (which was unfortunately never fully realised), and when the game works, it does work well. Overall, while the game does have its problems, it's not as unplayable as people have claimed, seeing as it is completeable. Sure, the game has a lot of bugs and is an incomplete product, but you can clearly see what was put out was crafted with love. It's therefore quite unfortunate that it was never finished, as if it were completed I could have seen it being a classic (especially with the addition of the expansion), but if you're interested in seeing the continuation of the Ultima saga (or want to complete the collection), then it's certainly worth a play. The best advice I can give you for this game is save a lot (especially during the jumping bits), and try not to have too high expectations for it. While it may not be the best Ultima game (I believe that distinction goes to its predecessor), if you look past the flaws, you'll still find it to be an enjoyable game in its own right. It's just unfortunate EA chose to rush its release, as it had the potential to be so much more than it was.

It's hard for me to imagine that too many of the people reading this review right now are not at least familiar with that special time in PC gaming history where graphics and imagination seemed to meet in perfect harmony. There is no telling which game that may have been for you, but for me that game was Ultima VIII: Pagan. It's always important to note when a game has glaring defects in game play, and certainly Ultima VIII is full of these. And not just minor annoyances that require a small redo of the previous quest. No no no. I am talking severe game breaking monster ****-ups that require you to restart the entire game over from scratch because of something you did (probably entirely by accident) dozens of hours ago. And hey, I totally get that no amount of Scott Summers style nostalgic glasses inspired sugar coating is going to make someone affected by those kinds of things feel better, but hey, I'm gonna do it anyway. Wanna fight about it? So here you are, dropped by this giant demon dude into some podunk fishing community with nothing but the clothes on your back and a giant square metal head. That is his head, right? Anyway, the whole story revolves around trying to find your way out of this little burg of insanity, which happens to be run by the wicked bitch of the west, and to be honest none of what happens in the story makes a whole lot of sense. But does that have to be a bad thing? I mean, in a good story you might care that you got the captain of the guard murdered by the pentagram insta-kill dude that seems to be especially harsh on people that steal chicken legs from plates where they were only going to spoil anyway...what the hell is that dudes problem anyway. Is there any crime that doesn't get you exploded into bits and pieces? But yea, that crap might bug you in a game with a halfway decent story, where as in Ultima VIII its just freaking funny as hell. A special mention should also be made about the brilliant Mario Bros. inspired mini games scattered throughout the cavernous underground tombs. Who doesn't love using a mouse powered click to move (but with a once second input delay) double click to jump (also w/ delay) platformer? You thought Megaman 10 was hard? You ain't seen nothing yet. Looking over the community opinions, it's clear some people here simply did not have fun with this game. I think they simply didn't get the point. Seriously, who doesn't love spending hours looking for the reagents to a spell -- a spell required to advance the plot -- only to cast said spell in the wrong place, and thus forcing you to reload a save game. And yep, the only save you had was from just before the jumping stones of doom...WHICH YOU NOW HAVE TO DO ALL OVER AGAIN ARGGGGGGG! Ehem, sorry. Get this game. Play it. Learn to love your hatred for it. Oh, and all that crap I said about imagination and harmony and crap -- I lied.