So I played it, I finished it, and it was pretty ok!
The story was pretty lackluster. I haven’t played the first game so maybe I’m missing out on some key character development.
The force powers were awesome. I highly enjoyed tossing various bits of the environment around in the midst of combat.
Darth Vader was imposing and a little scary at the start of the game, very reminiscent of his role in the first Star Wars movie.
All in all, worth $20.
Ian Albert had already created a complete in-game map of Ultima 6. Now he’s imported that map data into Minecraft with his Ultima 6 Minecraft Conversion.
It’s the real deal. Every town, every castle, every dungeon. It’s literally all the map data from Ultima 6, transformed into the Minecraft world format.
It wasn’t just a simple conversion either. From the details in his post:
Gargoyle land. This was the trickiest conversion because the Gargoyle area is supposed to be on the bottom side of the flat earth, upside-down. It clearly wouldn’t be much fun to make the 3D version upside-down where you couldn’t interact with it, so I made it right-side up. Also, the Gargoyle area is outdoors, but I can’t inject sunlight way down underground, so I made the ceiling out of lightstone to give it at least a little bit of “sunlight”. I had to make the ceiling low in order for the light to reach the ground at a reasonable brightness. More compromises than I would have liked to make.
That’s some amazing attention to detail.
Walking around the world is rather strange. It’s clear that the Origin
map designers never intended the world to be seen in 3D. The lack of
the working mechanisms from Ultima 6 like gears, drawbridges, etc. is
also noticeable. The biggest oddity is that most structures lack a
roof. [Ian points out that this was done so that the buildings could
be brightly lit by the sun. Makes sense, Lord British’s throne room lit
by torches would be weird.] But these are all minor.
It’s amazing to run around the world I spent so much time in twenty years ago. Great work Ian!
This time of year always reminds me of Grim Fandango
That’s means it’s time for some videogame nostalgia.
The CRPG Addict started earlier this year and is one guy playing through all the old CRPGs: nethack, The Bard’s Tale, Ultimas, etc. Well written and worth a read if you recognized any of the games or genre in the previous sentence.
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“On the other side of the screen, it all looks so easy.”
