Ultima Online

[Jizaboz]

I do not run and design my own shard anymore, but I'm still a member of the oldest private UO shard in America.

Totally free if anyone is interested! It's our 20 year anniversary!

Easy registration and game client download:
http://dxgaming.com/obsidian/join.php

Their forums:
http://dxgaming.com/forums/

Note: For Linux users you can easily install and run this in WINE. Unfortunately for MacOS users, WINE is no longer supported on that operating system.

If any of you guys try it out and need some help in-game getting started just let me know. I don't have a lot of gold to spare atm but I have tons of spare rare weapons and armor.. and can tame horses for you all day long.

[RetroRomper]

1. The following question is serious.
2. I'm morbidly curious as to what happened with it.

Did anyone migrate or even try Ultima Forever? Believe the servers shutdown years ago, but am curious how it was viewed within the community proper.

[Jizaboz]

1. The following question is serious.
2. I'm morbidly curious as to what happened with it.

Did anyone migrate or even try Ultima Forever? Believe the servers shutdown years ago, but am curious how it was viewed within the community proper.

Good question! I only remember the reviews and did not get a chance to try it myself. I heard it was totally awful. I did try the Lords of Ultima strategy game too and it was ok for a couple of days then got really boring.

[RetroRomper]

I've been thinking about trying to finish The Black Gate, but I'm still sore from having played the SNES port for I think around fifty hours, only to end up in an unwinnable state.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I've been thinking about trying to finish The Black Gate, but I'm still sore from having played the SNES port for I think around fifty hours, only to end up in an unwinnable state.

Whoa! How did it get unwinnable in that version?

[pinback]

I've been thinking about trying to finish The Black Gate, but I'm still sore from having played the SNES port for I think around fifty hours, only to end up in an unwinnable state.

Whoa! How did it get unwinnable in that version?

Ahhh... I don't... I'm not sure he was talking about the game.

[RetroRomper]

Whoa! How did it get unwinnable in that version?

This quote about Serpent Isle sums up everything I could find about the game being flubbable.

As good as it is, Serpent Isle is a flawed game. Many of these flaws probably would have been fixed had the game gotten more development time, but that doesn’t make them any less game-breaking. There are quite a few events that, if done out of order, can result in an unwinnable game. There are even a few bugs you’re relatively likely to run into unless you specifically avoid them. If you go off exploring too much, you risk causing problems – for best results, stick to what people tell you to do.

And this may explain the issues I ran into with the SNES version of The Black Gate.

This version is largely different from the original, since the PC version of the game was a then-huge 20 megabytes, yet this translation could use only one megabyte of memory for all of the game data and program. The game is largely real-time action, bearing many similarities to Ultima: Runes of Virtue I & II.

The maps and many usable items and plotlines had to be redesigned from scratch, and the game program had to be rewritten entirely in assembly language.The 'party' system was scrapped; instead, the Avatar journeys alone. Also, the story was largely changed in accordance with Nintendo's content guidelines: instead of murders, the Avatar is asked to investigate kidnappings.

Sounds to me it was a jumble of design, port, and programming errors wrapped up into a 1MB SNES cartridge.

[RealNC]

I've been thinking about trying to finish The Black Gate, but I'm still sore from having played the SNES port for I think around fifty hours, only to end up in an unwinnable state.

That's a different game. It may look like it's a port of the DOS version at first glance, but it's not. It has very little to do with the DOS version. They did this kind of crap a lot back in those days. They would release a game with the same name for a different platform, making people think it is the same game, even though it wasn't.