Good Old Games - Ultima 1-1V Coming Tuesday

Both Kalniel and Frozen Fireball send news via PC Gamer that GOG will release Ultima 1-IV on Tuesday 30th. The first three will be bundled for $5.99 and the Ultima IV will be free, apparently:

The gregarious and gracious guys at Good Old Games are at it again: Richard Garriott’s Ultima I, II, III, and IV will become the latest additions to their collection of PC classics for sale on Tuesday, August 30. The first three Ultima games will come bundled for the same price. And Ultima IV? That’ll be free for the taking!

More information.

The PC version of U3 was mediocre. Atari 8bit was very nice. Think the Amiga one was maybe better still. 80's DOS games sucked, frankly.

That's pretty damn awesome, if you ask me. It's been a long time, but I recall enjoying the hell out of Ultima iV. I know I played the hell out of it. Will definitely give that one a spin, at least.

I'm picking them up just on principle.

Not so good for me. I picked up the "Ultima Collection" on ebay about 5 years ago. I suppose it will depend on what the "extras" are with the bundle.

Better than nothing : The "Ultima Collection" would be a high-price collector's item here, I guess.

But anyway, I bought the games I think 6 or 7 years ago on a flea market already.
Only from IV on, though.

If they have the manuals budled with these games, the better.

Next thing GOG should imho do is publish all of these *really ancient* "Official strategy Guides" from for example Prima Publishing. Even in PDF format they'd be interesting, I guess.

Originally Posted by Daroou
The PC version of U3 was mediocre. Atari 8bit was very nice.

The Atari 8 bit version was what I played too. I had bought an Atari in 1982 but didn't get a floppy drive for it until the next year - they cost over $300 at that time. The first games I bought on floppy were Infocom's Enchanter and Origin's Ultima III. That was my first real RPG and I have been playing them ever since.

I bought Ultima IV on the Atari 8 bit and started playing it but picked up an Atari ST shortly thereafter. I contacted Origin and they allowed me to trade my Atari 8 bit discs for the ST version for a nominal shipping charge. The Atari ST version of Ultima IV was fantastic. It would use the built in MIDI ports on the Atari to play the music. I had a Yamaha DX7 and Ensoniq Mirage, and playing the game with those devices rendering the music was something that nothing on the PC come close to for nearly a decade, until the Soundblaster AWE cards were released in 1994.

I have to give this a shot. I bought both 1 & 2 for my apple II, and they were a buggy mess for my machine. Never got beyond the first hour for either game. I ended up playing Ultima 3 on the NES but Ultima 4 of couse worked fine. I've never had a problem with GOG so this looks like a must buy for me.

BTW, I still have all of those games, in their game box . . I guess ready for Ebay???

It's interesting that they're giving the best one away for free, and charging for the others.

I have all the original ultima games on 5.25" and 3.5" floppies (as collector items). Same with the UU series. I also have all the ultima games and UU games on CDs from various compliations put out over the years.

But if GoG makes these games where you just install and play - that alone will be worth the price of admission - not having to mess the configuring DosBox or tweak settings - that's all golden to me.

They are most likely giving 4 away for free as you can download it for free from ea new site for Ultima http://www.ultimaforever.com/

I still own these games for the C64 and the Amiga.
Luckily, I also still have my C64 and Amiga

I don't remember the DOS versions of these requiring much fiddling at all to get going in DOSBox (I could be wrong), so unless there is some other value added to the package, I'll pass on this one.

Originally Posted by Shagnak
I don't remember the DOS versions of these requiring much fiddling at all to get going in DOSBox (I could be wrong), so unless there is some other value added to the package, I'll pass on this one.

It isn't all that hard to get the Ultima games working in DosBox… but I'd still buy an updated executable that just works in with Win7. I'm lazy that way.

Ultima 2 was my first ever computer game! Jeez, that thing was expensive. Played the behoovies out of it.

Probably time to watch Spoony's reviews again!

I've got the "Ultima Collection", too, though as a 125MB .rar file. Not sure what to do with it though… Never played any of them.

Never had a problem getting them to run in DosBox, but the lazy factor is intriguing. Hopefully they can come up with a way to get VII working. I'd buy that in a heartbeat.

Originally Posted by blatantninja
Hopefully they can come up with a way to get VII working. I'd buy that in a heartbeat.

What's wrong with Exult?

I onced used Exult myself. Seemed to work okay.

I haven't used Exult in a long time, but didn't it have things unimplemented? For example, NPC schedules.

Oh, from last update (11 February 2011):
"fixed many NPC schedules (baking, serving food, eating food, …)"

Unfortunately:
"Let's start off with the the bad news:
We have a bug that causes random objects in the games to disappear forever. When this happens Exult tends to crash badly. Unfortunately this bug is unpredictable and we have no sure way of reproducing and thus fixing it. We have some ideas of what is happening but no fix yet. This is a real show stopper and unless we fix it we can't release another release candidate or a final version. If you encounter this bug (disappearing objects, random crashes, especially in combat) best you can do is revert to an earlier savegame."

Urk