This was my first time playing the original Apple II version of Ultima which has proved something of a learning curve in and of itself. I might get some sort of capture device one of these days but it hasn’t happened yet. I’m going to be playing this on the original hardware which unfortunately for any reader means more photos of my TV by way of screenshots. It’s basically going to be Ultima 3 after all since the underlying game logic and mechanics are presumably unchanged. That isn’t a whole lot to go on but I’m sure I’ll muddle through. Civil war looms between the north and south as Maxman attempts to wrest the throne from its rightful heir, the Viceroy Faerdin. Maxman has built a castle stronghold and erected a force field of fire that separates the northern and southern hemispheres of Sosaria. The evil legacy of Exodus has been revived by Maxman, a Priest of the Snake described as a shape-shifted balron. I have no manual so this review gives me the only information I have on the background of this scenario which is:. Googling “Ultimore” “world divided” turns up all of 6 links, 3 of which are this site and the others all point to a review of the game in an edition of Questbusters. There is precious little information to be found on the web so I don’t know a whole lot starting out. Unfortunately I only have the first to try out but that’s still one new Ultima 3 to have a go at. Not content with just creating one alternative scenario, there were 5 of these in all (A Divided World, Pirate World, Spaceship Crash, Egypt and Rule Of The Slave Lords). As far as I know the expansions where only ever sold directly via magazine adverts for $10 each. Having reverse engineered the file formats, he created his own expansions and put them up for sale. All of this was of course highly unofficial and presumably breached copyright but they did still require the original disk so it would be debatable. He had realised that since Ultima 3 on the Apple II loaded itself into memory from side one of a floppy disc and then loaded the locations from the other side, it was possible to create a new scenario by using a modified side two which had new versions of all the town and dungeon files. 8 years earlier (1984/1985) however there were a series of unofficial expansions for Ultima 3 created by the enterprising Joel Fenton of Backstreet Software. There are PalmOS emulators available for Android and Windows (none of which I’ve tried) which should be able to run them all in the entirely likely event you don’t have the appropriate 20 year old PDA available.Īsk most Ultima fans what the first expansion pack sold for an Ultima game was and they would probably answer Forge Of Virtue. In the meanwhile, I’ve put the games up for download below. I’ve dug out my trusty old Tungsten T3, have ordered a new battery for it (which are remarkedly still being sold) and intend to have a go at a playthrough assuming I can get that battery fitted. These should be interesting ports also with Ultima 1 and 2 adding 4 player parties. It’s not every day a new Ultima turns up. I’ll withhold some judgement that they are complete until someone has actually played through the whole thing – it’s feasible it may be a hacked version of the demo but I’m guessing that we do indeed have the full games here. However, having had a quick go on all 3, they don’t have the obvious limitations of the demo in terms of buying food and the nag text on death isn’t there either. On first inspection, I thought that these were going to be the same demos as the files are nearly identical in size. Out of the blue, I was contacted last week by someone going by the name of randomdays claiming to have found the full versions in some undisclosed part of the internet. I wasn’t even able to buy food in the demos if I recall correctly severely limiting how far I could get. The first 3 games in the series were ported to this unlikely platform around 2004 but all I was able to find were demo versions. Five years back, I had a very quick look at the Palm OS port of Ultima 1 but wasn’t able to get very far with it.
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