Worlds of Ultima Retrospective | Savage Empire & Martian Dreams

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Welcome to Origin. Creators of software worlds. By 1990, Origin Systems was on a generational run, and it seemed like they were only getting started. Through the Ultima series, they had helped define and repeatedly redefine the computer RPG. Their biggest problem at this point was the skyrocketing cost and time required for game development.

A smaller but intrinsically connected problem was that the customer pool of CRPG fans didn't seem to be growing. This was in stark contrast to console RPGs, which were exploding in popularity. Commercially successful console franchises such as The Legend of Zelda and Castlevania were dipping their toes into the RPG genre. It didn't always work out, but hey, that's just how big RPGs were over in Japan.

Anyway, there was a sizable audience for CRPGs in the West, and this had repeatedly resulted in more than respectable sales for the Ultima games. The 200,000 copies of Ultima 6 sold were nothing to scoff at. However, it was a simple equation: the ballooning development costs needed to keep Origin competitive were increasing, sales weren't. This warranted a new approach.

Origin had resigned themselves to reusing Ultima 6's engine, and this would help fill the gap until the next major Ultima release. They hoped to pull new blood from outside of the typical CRPG niche and induct more people into the cult of Ultima, or the CULA, as I've decided to call it just now. Still, a problem remained. Despite Origin's best efforts, and there had been many, they'd never managed to truly reach an audience outside of the Ultima core.

If they wanted to maintain their forward momentum, they would need another flagship franchise. Of the many non-Ultima games they'd released, it seemed as though Paul Neurath's Space Rogue was a prime candidate to draw inspiration from. It was a highly ambitious blend of Ultima-style role-playing with full 3D space combat simulation. While Neurath had more than proven his design chops, he was busy penning a design document for a wholly different kind of game. Richard Garriott had his nose to the grindstone, planning Ultima 7, and Warren Spector was busy doing preliminary work on the upcoming Ultima 6 spin-offs.

This left another of Origin's rising stars as commander-in-chief of their next big project: Chris Roberts. The games that Roberts had made at Origin never quite landed financially in ways that the company had hoped for. Nonetheless, there was no doubt that he was a shrewd designer. His work was foundational in developing the interface for Ultima 6, which would be one of its biggest upgrades. All that to say, he was no slouch in the design department, and he was about to prove that in a big way. He wrote up a design document for a project tentatively titled Squadron.

Roberts' CRPGs generally had more of an action bend to them, reflecting his own preference for fast-paced, high-impact games. For Squadron, Roberts would leave the RPG elements to Ultima and focus entirely on adrenaline-pumping action. The game would be fast, fluid, and cinematic. A space opera in which the fate of characters, factions, and systems would be left in the player's hands. It would do everything that home consoles were known to do, but bigger and better. Chris Roberts was in his element. He'd never been so confident in any project he'd worked on, and the higher-ups at Origin wisely moved aside to let him do his thing.

The work title Squadron was changed to Wing Leader after yet another brutal period of crunch. Development costs of around a million dollars, astronomical at the time, and yet another name change. On September 26th of 1990, Wing Commander was released on an unsuspecting public. Nobody at Origin could have predicted just how big it was going to be.

The game takes place in the year 2654. You play as a fighter pilot in the far reaches of outer space, defending humanity from the encroaching threat of the Kilrathi, a feline race of imperialist warlords hailing from the Venice system. Your time is split between the inside of your home base, a freighter called the TCS Tiger's Claw, and of course, the cockpit of your fighter, where you spend most of your time. The gameplay is surprisingly simple but with enough nuance and depth to keep the player interested. A colorful cast, including a wingman who joins you on your missions, adds some character and stakes to the plot.

What really sets the game apart in terms of its story is how it handles player failure. Rather than simply asking you to restart, succeeding or failing a mission actually alters the progression of the story. These branching paths allow the player to experience the consequences of their failures, while succeeding leads to rewards in the form of rank increases and superior ships. The game trades in the polygonal 3D of Space Rogue in favor of 2D sprite-based visuals. The graphics, designed by Denis Loubet and Glenn Johnson, looked very impressive for their time. The cockpit, full of gauges and changing displays all relevant to gameplay, really gives you the sensation of piloting a spacecraft.

The enemy sprites are detailed, featuring rotation, scaling, and other advanced tech that home consoles would have struggled with. Perhaps most impressive are the game's numerous animated cutscenes. Using technology built specifically for Wing Commander, these scenes had some of the most impressive artwork ever featured in an Origin game. The stylized lighting and fluid animation of your fellow pilots running to the hangar and climbing into their ships creates a truly cinematic display that elevated Wing Commander far beyond its competitors.

Chris Crawford, a developer at Atari during the 1980s, recalled Wing Commander with almost some level of eye-acting as a catalyst for a huge industry shift. Just as Jaws had ushered in the era of Hollywood blockbusters, so too would Wing Commander act as a mission statement for the big game publishers: if you want gigantic returns, you need gigantic budgets. Sink or swim, an attitude that's only grown more pervasive in the video game industry over time.

Wing Commander was just what the doctor ordered. If the goal here was to create a game that would help Ultima shoulder Origin's burdens, they couldn't have asked for a better wingman. It surpassed Ultima in sales, was hailed as Game of the Year by many gaming outlets, and remained at the number one position in Computer Gaming World's Reader Choice Poll for almost an entire year, an unprecedented feat. It would ultimately be knocked from its lofty position by Wing Commander 2. For now, Chris Roberts had found his niche in epic space combat sims, and he was going to strike while the iron was hot. Origin rerouted much of its resources to the Wing Commander department, which was now the company's shining star.

Back in the world of Ultima, the minds at Origin were brainstorming. Garriott, Spector, Dallas Snell, who'd worked on many of Origin's projects, and a newcomer named Jeff Johannigman worked together, planning the next step for Ultima. They planned on reusing Ultima 6's engine for a series of spin-offs, which would leave the world of Britannia behind. The swords, the dragons, and the magic would be moved aside in favor of a classic turn-of-the-century adventure spirit. Now, the sky was the limit here. The purpose was to once again make the Avatar a person out of place and time, and this left many options open.

They decided to pursue a setting based on adventure novels such as The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth. It wouldn't be the first time that Ultima went to such a strange place, but it had been a minute. With the engine built, a small team was assembled to write the plot and dialogue, make some alterations to the engine, and develop new artistic assets and music for the game. This resulted in an uncharacteristically expedient and cost-effective development cycle. So it was in Fall of 1990 that Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire was released.

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Now, even with the reused Ultima 6 engine, there's one major difference you'll notice when booting up the game: that being the inclusion of the Origin FX [Music] logo. The Origin FX engine was actually developed for Wing Commander specifically. It was used to create the cutscenes in that game, but it was repurposed for the Worlds of Ultima games. None of Origin's in-house engines up till that point had really supported cutscenes, at least not as we know them. Of course, the Ultima games did have sequences bookending the experience, but never with any kind of complexity, and never spliced in during gameplay.

It may be a bit quaint to hear that now, but smoothly transitioning in and out of gameplay to watch animated bitmapped cutscenes was a pretty tall order for PCs at the time. Origin FX basically streamlined this process. Now, the amount of heavy lifting the program actually did may be up for debate, but it wasn't even really what the engine could do. Like with the Criterion sting or the THX production logo before a movie, the technical details aren't really important. It's more like an informal seal of quality: "Sit your ass down and get ready, you're about to experience an Origin Systems game."

Of course, the intro titles of Savage Empire deliver layers upon layers of gorgeous, detailed pixel art, which they just called art back then. Paint a portrait of the vibrant jungle world that awaits us. The details, such as the hard-edged pixels being softened with a gradient to make the water's reflective surface appear realistic, are just superb.

As with other Ultima games, the onus is on you, the player, to undertake some due diligence before you really get started. Cracking open the game box, we have the discs, the reference slip, and a map of the game's world: the Valley of Yodona. Fake pulp magazine called Ultimate Adventures. The contents of the game box are a bit lean this time around. Rather than cloth, the map is printed on glossy paper, and there are no big boxes or trinkets here. This, of course, is because the Worlds of Ultima games were seen as budget titles, so the lack of emphasis on goodies does make sense. Besides, Ultimate Adventures is actually a creative little game manual. It's a fun and topical way of introducing us to the story and the world. For instance, there's a letters to the editor segment where readers and magazine staff exchange info about survival tools, much of the information actually being applicable to the game.

The meat of Ultimate Adventures is a short story contained within. We are given the setup for our arrival in E. Odon. Lord British has tasked us with investigating the Black Moonstone, which much of Ultima 6 was centered around. The Avatar, upon arriving back in the present day, takes it to a laboratory to be investigated by his associate, Professor Rafkin, curator at the Museum of Natural History. There, the Avatar runs into Jimmy Malone, a nosy reporter who's after his next scoop. As Rafkin investigates the Moonstone, his laboratory is suddenly engulfed in a bright light. An all-consuming moongate appears in the center of the room, swallowing everything in its path, including Rafkin, Malone, and the Avatar himself.

Before they can get their bearings, they see a tribal woman being attacked by a pterodactyl. The Avatar, Bowie knife in hand, manages to rescue her, or so it seems. Before the Avatar and the girl named Aya can smooch, she's kidnapped by a warrior named Darden, riding on the back of a plated dinosaur. The Avatar is knocked unconscious, and shortly after, the game begins. There's quite a bit more to the story in the manual, so depending on your tastes as a player, the plot can be as simple or complex as you want it to be.

You have to make your character, which for the first time since Ultima Exodus, does not involve you answering questions about the eight virtues. Instead, you're asked three questions by a shaman, and the answers only affect your starting stats: strength, dexterity, and intelligence. This is also the first Ultima game in which the Avatar's appearance and gender is predetermined. You're this handsome blonde stud, whether you want to be or not, making this a very relatable character for me.

When the Avatar rouses from unconsciousness, he finds himself in the hut of a shaman. Not the same shaman that asked the questions, though. This is a different shaman. There's a few shamans in this game, let's get that straight. It seems that the Avatar was rescued by a tribe known as the Kurak, although Darden still managed to make off with Aya. Our problems then are many. We've been separated from Jimmy Malone, as well as Rafkin, who hopefully has some plan to get us home. Aya is the daughter of Alleron, chief of the Kurak tribe, who would very much like an intrepid meathead such as the Avatar to find and rescue her.

In addition to those immediate problems, we have a far more existential threat to worry about: the Meridex. This insectoid race has used a certain smooth black stone to mutate and evolve, surpassing humans in both strength and intelligence. Seems like they're not too keen on diplomacy either. In order to slay the Meridex and restore balance to Eadon, we must unite all of the tribes in the valley, and they happen to hate each other, so this will be easier said than done. Joining our cause is Trollo, a shaman who bears a striking, but perhaps coincidental, resemblance to Yolo from the previous games. Alleron agrees to lend the strength of the Kurak to our collective cause if we can find Aya. So, we've got some kind of a thread to follow, and we'll need one, because Eadon is big.

When it comes to tackling objectives, this game is as open-ended as any Ultima game has ever been. Of course, Savage Empire uses the Ultima 6 engine. Functionally, there have been only a few changes here. For one thing, dialogue text now takes up the main gameplay screen rather than being sequestered in the corner. This is an unambiguously good change. With such a strong investigatory focus in these games, having more room for extensive, uninterrupted conversations is really important. It's nice to be able to see the entire conversation, including the red-highlighted words of interest, without having to reread and retype topics. Also, the music doesn't abruptly start and stop every single time you talk to a character or interact with the world. Hallelujah.

The karma and thievery systems from the previous games have been completely removed. You can take anything now with no consequence. The only thing stopping you is your inventory capacity, which is quite a bit more limited. You can also just kill innocent people wantonly, although I'm not sure about the precedent this sets. There are some other key changes to the game, but we'll talk about those shortly. Aside from these changes, the gameplay remains largely the same as Ultima 6, with many of the same foibles. The play window is still restrictively small, inventory management is still clumsy and time-consuming, and combat is still largely an uninvolved process.

As mentioned, Savage Empire begins in a nerve-wracking, nonlinear way. You and Trollo set off with naught but shiny rocks to your names, looking for, well, anything really. If you follow the road, you'll come across Professor Rafkin in a nearby village. He lets you know that Jimmy has been kidnapped by a tribe called the Dis Kiki, giving us another goal.

At the core of Eadon's world are the tribes. Each tribe has its own little village, usually a shaman, and always a chief. The chief will agree to join the other tribes to fight against the Meridex after you've done a favor for them. This makes Savage Empire the first Enlightenment-era Ultima game in which your quest does not have you visiting eight towns, collecting eight runes, and or finding eight shrines, which is honestly kind of a breath of fresh air. There's a real sense of novelty here. Not only that, but danger. These are unfamiliar surroundings. You have no idea what kind of creatures are out there waiting to tear your throat out, and you don't know how the tribes are going to react to your presence.

In large part, they treat you with suspicion, but don't write you off entirely. The world of Eadon is meant to be an amalgamation, a blend of different geographical locations and pre-agricultural epochs from human history. However, with little intertribal contact, the cultures here and their current level of technological advancement remain quite distinct from one another. For example, the tribes we first interact with are the Kurak and the Yolu. The antecedents of the Kurak are Native American groups, while the Yolu are based on tribes from the African steppes. Their villages are comparable, but with some notable differences, such as the weapons they use for hunting and what it is that they even hunt.

The Yolu agree to unite with the other tribes on the condition that we bring them 10 swords from the Nahuat tribe. The Nahuat are far and away the most advanced civilization in Eadon, based on the Aztecs. They've developed currency, discovered metalworking, and built their city in pyramids entirely out of stone, which makes them aesthetically quite unique. As you go around taking their swords with no real consequence, you'll find that something ain't quite right in the Nahuat city of Tikal. The previous king of the city has been deposed and replaced with a ruthless warlord. The guards will try to kill you if you speak to them, and everybody lives in fear of this new regime.

It all comes down to the influence of one man: Warren Spector. Well, actually, it's Dr. Johan Schiman Spector, but I mean, look at him. It's Warren. While Spector may have only written the story outline for Savage Empire, he still plays a crucial role in the game somehow. He's exercising control over the city and appears to not only be insane but completely invulnerable. The most advanced civilization in the entire valley, and we can't forge an alliance with them because Spector has gone mad with power. In fact, if you even suggest the possibility of unification to either Spector or Whe'laki, the current puppet king, the entire city will show up and try to kill you.

This actually points to an important aspect of Savage Empire's main scenario. I guess you could say you're given these basic strings of plot to follow, and as you pursue them, more strings continually fall into your lap. Rescue Jimmy and Rafkin becomes rescue Aya. Rescue Aya becomes unite the tribes. Unite the tribes becomes figure out what kind of warlock shenanigans are going on in Tikal. As you play the game, you're introduced to more and more of these problems to solve. You really need to keep track of them, too. Information is hard to come by, and it's critical that you keep your eyes and ears open for leads related to problems from hours ago. The game is distracting by design.

Near the Yolu are the Dis Kiki. It's always good practice to check out the Ultimate Adventures book for a briefing on the tribes. You hear about the Dis Kiki being considered irresponsible and annoying by many of the other tribes. They tend to be happy, musical, and rather notoriously amorous. Oh, baby. If these are the people that have Jimmy prisoner, I don't know if I'm doing him a favor by breaking him out. Just as soon as the Dis Kiki are sort of the comic relief tribe, and by that I mean they're literally just based on The Three Stooges. They even have unique dialogue if you say the word "yuck."

It's here that we find the exiled king of the Nahuat, Mock theal, who's being offered protection by the Dis Kiki until he can return to his throne. As a first order of business, freeing Jimmy is just a matter of opening his cell and letting him walk on out. Nobody really seems to care all that much. Secondly, the Dis Kiki agree to join our cause under a very odd condition. There's a Tyrannosaurus Rex named Sharp Tooth that's been causing the tribe problems lately. We need to attach a bell collar around its neck so they always know when he's coming, at which point they'll agree to an alliance. This sounds intimidating, but it's pretty easy. We're taught how to make a spear of Sharp Tooth, which is just a spear dunked in some very strong liquor. Poking Sharp Tooth with it knocks him out cold, allowing us to slip a bell on his neck and securing an alliance. Easy enough.

It may seem, given the sequence of events so far, that Savage Empire is a straightforward game, but that's not the case. I've been giving you a truncated version of events so far. There have been numerous tweaks made to Ultima 6's core gameplay structure that really changes the tempo of Savage Empire. Ultima 6 had a focus on environmental problem-solving. The game presents you with obstacles and different tools within a certain level of restriction. You can use those tools to overcome problems in multiple different ways. Using the game's basic physics simulation, you could telepathically grab objects from another room or send Sherry the mouse through otherwise inaccessible walls. With a big list of spells and plenty of environmental interactions, you were encouraged to experiment rather than taking the obvious path to success.

Savage Empire is not like this. To say that the magic system has been pared down would be an understatement. It barely resembles the magic from the previous games. Rather than having 80 different spells to cast, Savage Empire gives you just nine. Your spellcasting party members use skulls to invoke three different spirits: Apas, Motaz, and Hus, each a spirit loosely based on the three principles. To each spirit, you can give one of three offerings: Chadal, Pinda, and Yopo. For example, if I offer Apas the Pinda plant, that will allow me to cast a healing spell. If I offer Hus a Chadal bean, I can cast a light spell, which serves the purpose of a torch. The nine spells here are very straightforward: stat buffs, charming enemies, summoning an animal to help you in battle, that kind of thing.

I like the method through which spells are cast. The idea that you have to invoke these different spirits using particular offerings is kind of cool. They could have just had some device built by Rafkin that acts as the magic substitute, but instead abided by the worldview of these tribes, bringing some of this mythology to life. Having to memorize which combination produces what effect does make it more engaging than simply pointing at a spell in a book and casting it. The issue is that the interesting utility spells from Ultima 6 are absent. Using invisibility to sneak past a group of enemies, casting an explosion to break open a door, or using telekinesis to bring a boat to shore. There's nothing like these in Savage Empire. That's because you're not really presented with such opportunities in this game. The world isn't constructed as a sandbox the way that Britannia was.

Now, that makes sense. Ultima 6 was made across two years in a stressful and problematic development period. It had a much higher budget, a much larger team, and had much more development time. Even with all of these silver bullets, the game was released in a buggy and messy state. Savage Empire was obviously seen as a less consequential project, and it was produced in about a quarter of the time. To build a new world full of these same possibilities with a fraction of the resources simply wouldn't have been tenable. This is a shame because those mechanics were by and large what made Ultima 6 great and shaped its identity.

Still, Savage Empire manages to pull off a unique system of its own, dulling some of that pain. The focus here is on crafting, crafting, and in a loose sense, survival. This becomes apparent once you recruit Dr. Rafkin. He starts talking about building rifles and grenades. Yeah, that's great. Five minutes in, and we're already thinking of unique ways to terrorize the locals and ruin their lives. I have an idea: why don't we introduce the Dis Kiki to the hydrogen bomb while we're here?

Rafkin, the moongate having consumed everything in its immediate vicinity, also absorbed Dr. Rafkin's laboratory, or at least part of it. If Rafkin is in your party and you're standing in his lab, he can use resources to build rifles out of bamboo and grenades from several other materials as well. This is where many of Savage Empire's strengths lie. The world of Eadon is rife with natural resources. As an emissary of Britannia, it's your right, nay, your responsibility, to exploit the land as much as possible to build destructive implements of power.

The bamboo flintlock is a perfect example. It's one of the most powerful weapons in the game, and it's really easy to build. All you need is one length of bamboo. Now, of course, you need to find the bamboo, and that's not easy. Even if you're given directions, Alleron tells you that bamboo is south of the Place of Many Bones and then gives you directions to this place. That's only if you specifically ask him about bamboo, though, which points to an obvious, age-old Ultima truth: ask people about things. You will never learn about things unless you inquire about things. You find the Place of Bones, you head south, you find the bamboo. It turns out that bamboo is pretty sturdy, and you can't snap yourself a piece. You have to acquire a sufficiently sharp weapon and equip it to get the bamboo. Not just any old axe or knife will do, either. You need something substantial.

You get the bamboo, you think to yourself, "I've said the word bamboo so many times that it's completely lost its meaning." Then you have Rafkin turn it into a primitive flintlock rifle. That's all well and good, but how are you going to shoot things out of it? This is where gunpowder comes in handy. You can mix together gunpowder in any of the mortars available across the game, but the materials required to do so aren't exactly common. First, you need sulfur, which can be found in any of the few sulfur deposits located around Eadon. You also need a wire screen to harvest it with, though. Then, there's charcoal, which can be produced by snapping branches off of trees and burning them in fire pits. Finally, you'll need nitrate. Deposits of nitrate can be found in caverns, although you'll need Rafkin in your party to harvest it, since he's the only guy sciency enough to identify the mineral. Finally, you can combine these components in a mortar to create gunpowder.

A change that's been made to balance this system is your carrying capacity. Your characters are less capable of shouldering a large variety of items, so you really need to prioritize what's worth keeping and leave the rest behind. Scarcity isn't the issue; storage space often is, though, as well as the player's knowledge. Just knowing where and how to acquire resources. Now, I don't want to overstate the breadth of the crafting system. There are relatively few items you can make: rifles, gunpowder, grenades, torches, I guess tortillas too. The thing is, these few items are important, and building them is always an involved process. Even if you don't plan on using explosives, the use of grenades is sometimes necessary to knock down trees and create bridges. Even if you plan on using the light spell instead of a torch, you have to be aware that offerings are limited, so they're best saved for special occasions. Not only that, but torches are still required at certain times. How do you make torches? You need to collect flax, spin it into cloth, use scissors to slice that cloth into strips, find buckets, collect tar with those buckets, dunk the cloth strips into the tar bucket, then wrap them around a stick. Tar strips can also be used to create grenades. Buckets of tar and even piles of cloth are pretty freaking heavy, so you have to think carefully about how you'll allocate your resources.

In this way, despite the limited number of craftable items, the crafting system kind of touches all other aspects of Savage Empire. From the beginning of the game until the end, you'll be thinking about this system. You'll plan your route through the world so you can swing by some tar pits, clearing out inventory space in anticipation of lugging around flax or whatever else you need. Even though the simulation elements of False Prophet have been greatly simplified through this crafting system, Savage Empire manages to retain that sense of existing in a living world where all aspects interact with one another. It also adds a survival flavor to the game, which is really unique within the Ultimas series. It feels like you're in a hostile environment, carefully managing your tools. You can go fishing or use your knife to carve meat from an animal you've slain. Nightfall comes quick in this game, and it's really difficult to make your way around without light. Sleeping in a tent with food available gives you a healing bonus, so there's always a good reason to stock up on victuals. Your resources here are more limited than they've been in other Ultima games. Without reliable ways to make money and exchange it for goods, arrows aren't nearly as common, for instance. Well, that doesn't necessarily increase the difficulty of combat, it puts you in a situation where you always have to put in the work to stay secure, which is the essence of survival.

In that way, Savage Empire really does feel like a progenitor to the crafting survival games that would become prolific years later. Even more contemporary games such as Robinson's Requiem seem to borrow and expand on elements from Savage Empire. I'd mentioned that your inventory space is even more limited than in Ultima 6, and I guarantee at least one person's eyes shot open in horror upon hearing that. It's not as negative a change as you might think, and that's partly because of how Savage Empire divests Ultima's RPG priorities. The sixth game was already a pretty major step in the simplification of Ultima's RPG-ness. There's got to be a better way of saying that. The RPG DNA is even less intact here, and that might be worrisome, depending on who you are.

Savage Empire takes on the form of an open-ended point-and-click adventure with light RPG elements. Again, that's not totally removed from what Ultima purported to be in the sixth game, but it's laid out even barer here. Character creation is simplified, leveling up is now almost automated, there's not a big catalog of weapons to choose from, and there's even less by way of armor: just three types of chest pieces, the best of which can be acquired minutes after starting the game, and some shields, helmets, boots, rings, and amulets don't actually affect anything. They're just there to make you feel like there's more agency in principle. Streamlining the RPG elements isn't a totally bad thing. I think this format works, works for an Ultima-related game. That's especially true of one that's Ultima 6 adjacent, since that game was far more focused on exploration, conversation, and puzzle-solving than it was about combat or character progression. As adventure games go, this engine is a good fit, allowing for more player expression than a typical point-and-click game but approachable and simplistic as an RPG. While the Gold Box D&D games and Wizardry series became more complex as time went on, Savage Empire makes no bones about working as an entry point for series newcomers as well. As it all works for the goal it's trying to achieve, the question remains: what do the Worlds of Ultima games mean for the series' identity? Could this focus on simplifying do more harm than good? There's only one way to find out: that's to keep playing them.

So it is that the combat here is not only as basic as it ever was, but even more basic. Or, no matter what the sex guys of the internet tell you, you do not want to be within kissing distance of any dinosaur. Unlike the previous game, where the magic bow was the obvious best weapon, there are some variables worth considering here. First of all, your party members. Not all of them use modern weapons, and that's because not all of them are modern. You can find prehistoric versions of all your faithful companions: Trollo, Shimaru, and Do, with period-appropriate mustache and toe.

As for the modern party members, we've got the three Neo Amigos: the Avatar, Dr. Rafkin, and Jimmy Malone. Party members from the modern era can use any weapon, including the modern rifle. This is far and away the best weapon in the game, but at this point, you can only find one. You also can't craft ammo for it, so what you find is what you get, and there's not a whole lot. The tribal party members don't have access to modern weaponry but make up for it with superior stats. They'll have to use weapons like the Adad, which does great damage but uses spears as ammo. This is a lot of extra weight added to inventories. Some can still use the bamboo flintlock, but they've balanced that gun by forcing you to reload between shots. This effectively cuts its damage output in half, making them best for high dexterity characters who get more turns in combat. You can see whether or not the bamboo rifle is ready to fire based on the position of the hammer. I just wanted to mention that because I spent about 70% of this game never noticing and wasting my turns firing nothing at enemies. Kind of a clever way to avoid the clumsiness of another UI element, but you have to be a clever person to notice it, and I'm not.

Stats do matter here, but not a whole lot. First of all, intelligence is worthless. And no, that's not a personal mission statement. The stat intelligence in this game doesn't serve much of a purpose at all. I've been told it does increase a character's magic defense. In a world where your greatest threats are plesiosaurs and tyrannosauruses, you may be surprised to learn that magic is not an existential threat to you, unless you too are a subscriber to Magic T-Rex Theory. But the powers that be don't want us talking about that. So, moving on.

Not all dinosaurs are created equal. Most of them are just chilling and minding their own business, so there's really no reason to kill herbivores unless you just have a destructive impulse. You'll come across the odd predator, which are some of the tougher foes, but for the most part, your enemies are Merc soldiers. After killing enough and gaining experience points, you can level up when resting, choosing which of the three stats are really just the two that matter to invest in. Almost every character starts off at level five or six, which is pretty close to the level cap of eight. This furthers the notion that character progression just isn't a big focus in this game. Jimmy starts at level one and otherwise just kind of blows.

There is a key reason to keep Jimmy around, though, and that would be his journalistic instincts. Whenever you speak to a character who has some important quest-related information, Jimmy will write about it in his notebook. You can consult those notes at any time, which acts as a primitive quest journal. This is actually a great quality-of-life feature. With many RPGs, but especially Ultima, it can be hard to remember where you are and what you were doing after a brief hiatus. This is the consequence of open-ended design without modern conveniences like quest markers and mini-maps. There's always a reorientation period where you have to remember what you were doing when you left off. Once upon a time, this necessitated a real-life notebook of your own, but now Jimmy accounts for your current goals, and that's a nice addition. Given the fact that he's not useful in combat, you're essentially trading a party member slot for a mobile quest journal.

Rafkin, with his crafting and nitrate-gathering abilities, also serves a supplementary purpose despite not being a great combatant. I like the idea of this exchange. It's rare in an Ultima game for party members to serve any purpose beyond contributing to battles or acting as pack rats for your gear. For party members to specialize in skills like crafting and, well, literacy, I guess. It had some degree of consequence in party building that has been lacking in the series for quite some time now. On the narrative end of things, certain characters will also chime in during conversation, adding another variable to subsequent playthroughs. Rafkin, for instance, is fascinated by everything and just lives to learn. Jimmy is never short of smart-aleck comments. Offering their input gives them a little bit of personality and can even flesh out their backstory at times. In terms of Ultima's companion mechanics, these are small steps, yes, but they're heading in a very positive direction. For much of the series, it's been incumbent on the player to care about their companions simply because they're supposed to. It's good to have reasons for this to be the case.

The next tribe we come across is the Barako, based on Indo-European tribes. The chief, Halawa, asks us to rescue her daughter, who's been kidnapped by a gigantic ape thing. All right, I killed the last living mountain gorilla. Only, how do I get up on that ledge? You can try walking all the way around, but there's no clear way to get on this ledge specifically. You want to know how to get on this ledge? I'll tell you how to get on this ledge: you have to explore nearby to find this area right here where you need to throw a grenade in this exact spot, which causes the boulder to roll into the river, damming the water and allowing you to enter a cave that leads to a ledge. I talked to every person nearby, and nobody had any clues that this would be the case. You know how you figure it out? You read The Savage Empire clue book, available for $12.95 from Origin Systems Incorporated. Richard, you absolute son of a [ __ ]! Okay, it's not crazy to imagine someone figuring this out. Boulder placement is somewhat conspicuous, and you can see the outline of the cave, but still, knowing to toss the grenade right here, knowing to go to this exact spot... H. It's a bit of a reach.

We rescue the girl from the ledge, send her on her merry way, and secure Halawa's trust. Some of these chief quests are a lot simpler than others. Inara of the Pendo tribe, based on plains-dwelling Native Americans, just immediately agrees to a union because she's sick of war. She even calls me "Mular, Peacebringer," presumably because she didn't notice me shooting a gorilla in the face five minutes ago. Balaki of the Barab tribe, based on tribes in northeastern Asia, asks us to find the medicinal root of a carnivorous plant to cure his son's illness. This plant can only be found on the Great Mesa, which is a large raised section of land in the center of Eadon.

This may be a good time to talk about the game's map, because it's very different from Britannia. Remember how I drew special attention to the forest areas of Ultima 6's map? How deeply I loathed the trees requiring me to shuffle to and fro, backtracking to avoid their labyrinthian designs? Imagine, if you will, that, but the whole world. Welcome to Eadon. There aren't any forests here because this map is forest, a jungle to be specific. Almost every square inch of Eadon is wooded, with a few sections being so heavily forested that you can't move through them. This basically necessitates that you follow the road at all times, because it is damn easy to get lost and can be damn hard to get found again. Of course, there are times where you must venture off into the woods in order to complete a quest for a tribe. Dodging trees and trying to make sense of the landmark environments is just as frustrating as you could imagine. Directions aren't that helpful when everything looks the same and your viewport is so tiny. Even the Eagle Eye spell doesn't help all that much. Oh yeah, thanks Trollo. We'll just use this glaucoma view spell to find our way around.

In addition to forests, there are a lot of rivers running through the land, which gate your progress. To move across a river, you have to find a bridge, or if you're lucky, move across some shallows located at select viewpoints along the water. There are rafts, but you can't really use them outside of the small areas in which they're located. You also need to carry around four paddles to use them, which is just extra weight you don't want to be worrying about. You can feed turtles and ride those around, and that's pretty great, but you won't be able to do it for a while.

Perhaps more than anything else, what characterizes Yodona is the map's verticality. You didn't see these kinds of stepped cliffs and variations in height with Ultima 6. You're constantly looking for climbable surfaces on cliff faces. This creates even more choke points that you've got to find and memorize. To navigate this world, you need to find passages through trees, passages across rivers, passages up and down cliffs. So much of this game is just spent walking back and forth, checking to see if you missed some errant rocks to move across, or if the game seriously expects you to walk all the way around this river every time. There are some cool ideas here, such as knocking over trees to use as bridges or moving boulders, but they're used sparingly and never in a way that really adds convenience to navigation. That's a shame, because this game really needs that. While playing the game, I kept thinking to myself, "There's got to be some equivalent to the hot air balloon or magic carpet from the previous games," but such a thing never appears. In the name of realism, you'll spend the bulk of your time hiking through nondescript forest.

To the credit of the developers, this is probably the most helpful map they've ever printed for an Ultima game. It's borderline tile-based, just like the game world, making it much easier to identify where you are relative to the major settlements. That is, as long as you're not in the middle of the woods, which looks like anything else on the map. Look, we've already introduced gunpowder to this world. We're destabilizing the ecosystem. We've pretty much ruined the lives of the people here. Why can't we just clearcut the forest and call it a day?

The worst thing that could happen to you is accidentally ending up in the center of a Meridex nest. These things are seemingly endless. You kill some, walk a couple of feet, and a whole bunch more have caught up with you. They're really fast, do pretty solid damage, and are by far the most common enemy in Eadon. Truly obnoxious. Some of the enemies have neat little gimmicks, like the carnivorous plant. It's comprised of several different sub-bodies, but only by slaying the center plant can you kill it for good. With its roots in hand, we return to Balaki, who is able to cure his son's illness and agrees to unify with the other tribes. It seems like a lot of these chief quests have us rescuing or helping somebody's child, I guess to emphasize the fact that there are many generations ahead of each tribe.

As negative as I've been on the map, and there are plenty of valid reasons to be that way, there are some things to like about Eadon. It's different from anything we've seen in the series. This collision of different cultures and time periods, ending up in a primordial valley totally disconnected from the rest of the world, is an interesting place to take the initial idea. It would have been perfectly easy for them to set this game in, say, South America, call this river the Amazon, and just homogenize the tribes, but they went the extra mile. An African village here, an Aztec city there, throw in a couple of dinosaurs and some other excitement. Ahead of us, you got a stew going. They pulled it off better than Hugo did, I'll give them that much.

There's also a stand-in for the usual moongates to ease navigation. Near almost all of the villages, you'll find a teleportation pad constructed by some lost ancient civilization. The pad takes you to a central teleportation zone, and provided you can remember what goes where, it's a convenient, if not altogether necessary, way of getting around Yodona. With after you've been to a few villages, your potential options in any situation become predictable. There's always a chief, often the child of a chief, and usually a shaman. With few exceptions, the remaining townsfolk are all cardboard cutout NPCs with no unique dialogue or portraits. I don't begrudge the fact that they included townsfolk like this. At the risk of repeating myself, Savage Empire was a lower-budget production. Creating all of the dialogue and portraits in Ultima 6 was a massive undertaking involving many employees and months of work. My problem is that there are next to no side characters here. It's almost always two or three people in each village, and as a result, visiting all of the settlements becomes routine.

This is a funny Ultima game, and there are some memorable conversations. The writers were surprisingly sensible in terms of never allowing the levity to undermine Savage Empire. The game doesn't wink at you or break the fourth wall as often as you might expect. They're really trying to tell you a story, and the characters are more believable as a result. Caricatures at times, but Ultima has always reveled in those sorts of shenanigans. It's just a shame that there are so few characters to interact with and learn from. While one of False Prophet's greatest qualities was the number of people you could talk to, often about nothing all that important, you don't have to, but you can. You can learn about people's backgrounds, their family history, their occupations, neighbors they don't like. This is lacking in Savage Empire. There aren't many characters, and the topics you can bring up are almost always pertinent to the main quest only. This perhaps tightens up the pacing of the game, but makes it feel more urgent as a result. You feel as though you're being rushed from village to village, not being given time to stop and smell the roses, and more importantly, not being given any reasons to. Once you've achieved the goal assigned to you by a chief, there's rarely a reason to stick around or ever revisit a settlement.

It tangible rewards, unique conversations, or side quests. There's no reason to linger here, and lingering is one of the best parts of Ultima.

Truthfully, I think some people may prefer this more directed pace. The hemming and hawing of previous Ultima games could very well act as a barrier to entry for anyone who prefers to have their plot and motivations offered up on a silver platter. In that case, Savage Empire may be a great series entry point. It's got the distilled essence of Ultima 6 without any of the fluff. For my money, though, the fluff rules. I want the fluff.

While many of Eon's tribes live in villages connected to one another by roads, there are several that are much more difficult to find. The first of these is the Sakura, a race of cave-dwelling lizard people. Now, I'm just saying, a time-traveling incident resulting from a prehistoric stone reacting with modern technology, a race of intelligent humanoid lizards, a smokin' and hot cavewoman named Aya that likely caused at least several thousand sexual awakenings. Chrono Trigger owes Savage Empire some back pay, but that's neither here nor there.

The Sakura Chief, Ciscar, agrees to join the union if the Avatar can defeat Thunderer, a Tyrannosaurus who's taken up residence in the Sakura's Orchard of medicinal fruits. Here's something to know about a T-Rex: if you see one, you should leave. You will not defeat the T-Rex under any circumstances. The existence of a T-Rex is the game's way of saying, "Figure something out, smartass." Not only could I not beat Thunderer, but he hit the Avatar so hard that my game actually crashed.

Oh well. Being frozen on this screen gave me an opportunity to reflect and reassess. You ever stop to think about the fact that we're reducing the T-Rex gene pool so that they evolve to not stand directly underneath Wile E. Coyote-style boulders anymore? Oh well, hopefully, we'll be gone by then.

So, the main quest of the game is pretty cleverly constructed. You're given your first of many sub-goals while uniting the tribes. That being, again, rescuing Aya for the K'x. Most of these unification quests have us helping a chief of a particular village, but a select few actually act as a through-line for most of the game. In order to find Aya, we have to travel around Yodona. Us to take off other goals in the meantime. This is because the Urali, who have kidnapped Aya, are a very secretive group, and not many people know how to find their tribe. In order to hunt them down, you need to piece together bits of information and help particular people, some seemingly unrelated to the main quest.

One such objective has you helping Tpur, an outcast who's lost his mind. See, even after you've traversed the cave leading to the Urali section of the map, you're unable to progress due to, you guessed it, a T-Rex blocking your progress. There's a body of water, but no way to bring a raft over here. If you help Tpur, he'll reward you with turtle bait, which allows you to circumvent the T-Rex completely.

It seems that Darden, Aya's captor, has used force to become the chief of the Urali. He's stolen a statue of the spirit Fabos, which he's using to exercise control over the tribe. It's being kept in a cavern, a miniature dungeon of sorts. At the end, you find the statue mumbling the word "light." It's a big clue. It's not torches, nor the light spell you need, but a bright flash of light. You can use Jimmy's camera to snap a picture, or if you happen to pick up some magnesium strips from the lab, those will produce a flash as well.

There are a few moments like this across the game where there are multiple items you can use to solve puzzles. A tree, for instance, can be knocked down with a grenade, but if you can get close to it, you can chop it down with a fire axe. The axe also serves as a solid melee weapon for your modern party members and can cut bamboo too. So, there's a utilitarian case for it. It's not much, but little things like this give off the faint essence of Ultima 6's choice-based gameplay. You're occasionally rewarded for thinking logically or outside the box, which I do appreciate.

Fabos is returned, Darden is defeated in a fight (not ceremonious enough to be called a boss), and Aya is rescued, professing her love for the Avatar and joining the party. This is probably the horniest Ultima there is. So much ass in the official art of this game. I have to imagine that moved a few extra copies. You, I just wanted to mention it.

The scene in which we rescue Aya showcases Savage Empire's implementation of in-game cutscenes. Pretty simple, usually still frames that appear at predetermined points in the story. The art in this game is pretty great. I expected ample asset reuse, but there's a lot of new tiles, new portraits, and some visual improvements over Ultima 6. As mentioned, there's a lot of varying elevation in the world. While that doesn't make it more enjoyable to explore, it does add some much-needed depth and texture to the map. Until now, Ultima's maps have been comprised of flat, walkable surfaces or inaccessible mountain areas. This kind of bridges that gap.

The character portraits, although there are fewer of them, look great and are more consistent in their style than False Prophet. I also really like the UI redesign. It perfectly captures the Stone Age aesthetic without being too elaborate or distracting. Other than the bottom here, am I alone in seeing a face? I looked at this thing like once a minute, makes me nervous.

One change that I like is how the portrait area has been altered. In Ultima 6, you just got a flat cutout of the person's face. Now, there's a background reflecting the environment in which the dialogue takes place, and it even changes depending on whether it's daytime or nighttime. Subtle, but a nice immersive little detail. Except for this background, I don't know what the hell's going on here. I think this is just a photograph of a cave that they compressed and squeezed into the game. Seems a bit out of place.

The cutscene visuals look great, and there's plenty of them. These scenes always felt like a reward in previous Ultima games, so it's nice to have more of them peppered in at certain points throughout the story. With many years of hindsight, it's almost easier to appreciate how elaborate the pixel art is here. There's no doubt that these scenes took a lot of time and effort to put together.

As for the gameplay, the character sprites are fine, and the dinosaurs look pretty good. I have to admit, I do get tired of seeing so much green and brown over the course of the game. They break it up occasionally by having sections of the map with rivers or lava flows, but there's a lot of syrupy-looking scenery here. There's no avoiding it.

The music in the game is also pretty decent. Certainly not on par with the tracks from previous Ultima games, but solid, light-hearted, adventuresome tracks. Lots of cliché jungle rhythms and blaring horns mimicking elephants and other jungle creatures. It's fitting, but there's not a whole lot of it, meaning you'll hear the same few tracks over and over again.

The presentation, all in all, features some nice upgrades and mostly side-grades. The game looks like Ultima 6, just as much as it feels like Ultima 6. And what else would you expect from a game built from the bones of Ultima 6? It's a good-looking game, for sure, but it wasn't the belle of the ball the way that Wing Commander was.

So, Aya joins the party. She was given a gem as a gift from Darden, who stole it from the Ne'wat, but at present, it has no obvious use. In the southeastern section of the map, you'll find the Jukari, one of the most primitive tribes and one whose origins are unknown. A volcano has recently erupted in the area, killing the old Jukari Chief and Shaman. The newly elected Chief agrees to unite with the other tribes if you can somehow move across the lava flow and retrieve their sacred hide from inside of a cave. The only way to accomplish this is through the power and magic of modern technology. There's a bunch of junk sitting around in the laboratory, like frying pans and bottles of liquor. One of these things is a fire extinguisher, which inexplicably has the ability to turn molten lava into rocks.

After returning the hide, there's one undiscovered tribe left, and that's the Heur. This tribe has seemingly been pulled from a much older time period than any of the others, as they are still Neanderthals kicking it old school in a cave with only a very loose grasp on the concept of language and violent tendencies. Communicating with them isn't easy. They ask you to go kill giant spiders living in a nearby cave, which has you crafting torches in order to burn webs.

In one of the game's many dungeons, dungeons were a less emphasized aspect of Ultima 6 compared to most of the prior games, but they still had a notable presence. It was mostly caves, but several were themed and had traps or other unique gimmicks. This is less the case in Savage Empire, whose dungeons are even more simplified. As you might expect, these mostly take the form of caves. And hey, I'll be damned, the caves aren't red. Are we sure this is based on Ultima 6?

The lesser focus on dungeons works for Savage Empire because Eodon itself is basically a big open-air dungeon. Its corners are undiscovered, it's full of danger as well as constant threats, and for all intents and purposes, it's even constructed like a dungeon. Just instead of cave walls, it's trees. There are exceptions to this. One such exception being the Meridex caves. They have some pretty nice loot in them. However, they look like this. It goes without saying that they're full of Meridex soldiers. Is it worth willingly climbing down here? Depending on your current level of self-loathing, probably not.

So, we've met all of the tribes at this point, and there's a point of contention some people have with Savage Empire, and that's the race thing. Many people find the racial aspects of Savage Empire to be a source of innate discomfort. This is due to the way that non-white people are portrayed, and that your group of civilized white people come to rescue them because they're just not competent enough to do it themselves. Now, look, some people are rolling their eyes at the fact that it took me this long to mention this topic, and some people are rolling their eyes because I'm even mentioning it at all. Regardless of how you feel, this is a piece of Savage Empire's cultural impact, and that makes it worth shining a light on.

Right there in the name, "The Savage Empire." It's easy to interpret that in an unfavorable way, that the people here are savages. The term "savage," when used to describe a people, has always been a pejorative, but it's become more of a culturally sensitive issue over the years, even and perhaps especially over the past few decades. The people of Adon aren't portrayed as savages in the game, outside of the Heur perhaps, which aren't meant to reflect any particular ethnic group, no more than the Geico Cavemen were. Anyway, page 25 of Ultima Adventures states, "In a land replete with prehistoric reptiles and other beasts of antiquity, the cultures, iconography, and mythology of the people have adapted to reflect their surroundings."

Now, this is an important line. First of all, right there in the line, "reptiles and beasts." Obviously, this is the savagery in question. If anything, the various tribes are beacons of civility in an otherwise inhospitable world. "Savage" is used in the title as an adjective for "Empire," which in this case is meant to represent the geographical location that is Adon. The cruelty and violence of the flora and fauna is fierce, ferocious, and uncontrolled. In other words, savage. It's the "Empire" part of the title that's questionable here, unless Lord British has some secret plans that we're not aware of yet.

That statement in the manual also points to the fact that the designers were very cautious when discussing the inferiority or superiority of the different tribes in the game. At no point is it implied that certain races are more innately intelligent than others. You're constantly reminded that the tribes in-game were pulled from vastly different time periods with vastly different circumstances. Their characteristics aren't immutable but products of their surroundings. The game never lets you forget that the different paces of development in technology, language, and architecture are given an environmental explanation. This is stressed throughout the game and in the manual. At no point are you told, "Yeah, these people are just genetically less intelligent." That potentially explosive topic of discussion is something that the "Lost World" adventure stories that Savage Empire was inspired by would certainly have been rife with.

Another aspect to this game that points to this deliberate avoidance of attributing differences to immutable characteristics would be the mere existence of the Jukari. It's probably not a coincidence that the only identifiably Caucasian tribe in the entire game happens to be the most primitive in basically every area of development. I have to assume that this, subconsciously or otherwise, was an olive branch saying, "This isn't about superiority, okay? It's about differences."

The purpose of bringing all of this up is to first of all acknowledge that this discomfort among people exists. A lot of people speak of Savage Empire in terms of it aging well or being a product of its time. It's understandable that this is a knee-jerk reaction for some people. 1990 wasn't a million years ago, but it was long enough ago that standards and expectations around these types of topics are notably different than they are now. By and large, Savage Empire was handled with a surprising level of sensitivity, about as much sensitivity as a rolicking, time-travel-focused '90s PC game has ever had. From a time of Police Quest 4s and Leisure Suit Larrys, Savage Empire has been relatively unscathed by the ravages of changing standards.

There's no doubt in my mind that if the game were released today, there would be some alterations. For one thing, they would likely bring back the ability to select the Avatar's race of Ultima 6, if only to prove a point. Such things can easily be explained as a lack of time and resources. I mean, there's quite a few cutscenes in this game, and having to redraw them depending on which Avatar was chosen would have added an insurmountable level of work and memory on the floppy disc. Nonetheless, I believe that the uneasiness some people feel towards Savage Empire is largely unfounded. But hey, I guess that's for the individual to decide.

Well, most of the people you'll interact with are members of these various tribes. There are a few modern people who were dragged into Adon as well. One of these people is Da Fry, the only man who actually can single-handedly beat the ass of a Tyrannosaurus Rex with his bare hands. And of course, we only bump into him now. There's also a fellow by the name of Fritz, once a colleague of Dr. Spectre's, who fills us in on his story. Fritz and Spectre arrived in Adon via a similar mishap to the one that brought us here. Shortly after arriving, Spectre discovered the ruins of a lost city and within it, a crystal brain. Something about the discovery seemed to drive him mad. Fritz was forced to escape from Spectre, managing to swipe the crystal brain, which he now gives to us. It might have something to do with this metal head that you can find near the Ne'wat.

The few hints you're given regarding this lost civilization are quite intriguing. It's the classic "Lost World" setup: some kind of advanced race or alien visitors were thriving before suddenly being wiped out by a calamity. Adding this layer of the bizarre over top of everything is a great fit for Savage Empire. The story is still grounded, as much as it ever was, anyway, but it feels as if there's a bit more freedom to get weird. That's something that Ultima hasn't embodied for some time.

It's really important to keep Spectre in mind, since the Ne'wat tribe is the only one who hasn't agreed to unite with the others. This makes the city of Tik-Tooto the single most dynamic place in the game. Not just because it's so vastly different from any other village, but because much of the game's conflict centers around it. It's the only settlement that truly feels unpredictable. It's nerve-wracking speaking to the psychotic Doctor Spectre, and even with the other people of the city. If you step out of line or say the wrong thing, you're screwed. We know that Spectre's current mental state has something to do with the lost city, but the thing is, I have no idea where the city is or how to get there.

There's a problem here, so common that I might start referring to it as the "Ultima problem." You've got this big world full of people scattered across many different villages and cities, and one of these people, probably, maybe, could be, possibly, has the critical piece of knowledge you'll need to progress. Of course, you're living on a prayer that there even is somebody who will give you a hint. This leads to an all-too-familiar feeling of exasperation, knowing that you're about to embark on an information hunt. No longer do the chieftain or the well-traveled roads of Eadon or Jimmy's Quest Journal provide that faint hint of comfort and safety. Now, you're on your own.

Savage Empire is a bit more merciful in this regard, and that's because, as mentioned, the number of unique NPCs here is quite a bit lower than previous games. Less unique NPCs means less unique dialogue, narrowing the pool of potential information givers substantially. Ox, the Pac, is an imprisoned Shaman in Tik-Tooto, and he tells you what to do with Aya's gem in order to access the city. If I played this in 1990, I'd still be looking for a way into the lost city, that is, unless I paid $12.95 for a clue book that tells you to talk to Ox to learn about the lost city.

Richard, how you're meant to gain entry is by placing the gem that Darden gave to Aya on a holder located at the top of the Great Mesa. The sun shines through the gem, pointing to a now-open passageway nearby in the jungle. What follows is one of the coolest segments in any Ultima game. It's not a big plot twist or any kind of game-changing subversion of expectations, but there's a mystery and intrigue surrounding this lost city. It feels as though we're approaching a pivotal moment in understanding this world we've been sent to.

When you first enter, you find the remains of an automaton called Unipootle, which, when affixed with the crystal brain and metal head, comes to life and tells you of the city. These are the lost ruins of Codal, an extinct civilization, highly advanced and reptilian, forerunners of the Sakura. The Codal city is so cool and such a vastly different setting than most of Eodon. Accompanied by Unipootle, you're given plenty of room to look around, piecing together what kind of culture the Codal were and how it all came apart. I know I said the music in this game was decent if unremarkable, but the track here that plays is just chef's kiss perfect. It accentuates the mysterious and dangerous atmosphere beautifully. The way the notes echo in the track enhance the sense of scale you feel while wandering the city, which is now little more than a massive tomb.

[Music]

A cavernous underground space, which was once a bustling metropolis, but now only rusted robotic guardians wander around. I just can't get over how goddamn cool this is. You can find a hologram of Cattle, Codal, once the leader of the city. He tells you about the Meridex, how the people of Codal tried to create a perfect servant race. They used the DNA of ants, expecting them to be productive and subservient, but it turns out that ants have a pension for war. The Meridex rebelled, destroying the Codal and stealing the source of the city's power, a giant black moonstone. On top of paying back blood for blood, the Meridex have since become more aggressive, more warlike, and more industrious. It's only a matter of time before they take over Adon. They won't stop there. The moonstone is so chock-full of energy that even in its absence, residual power still hums in the city's generators. This power has been used by Dr. Spectre to create the force field, making him invincible. While he's no fan of the Meridex, he himself thirsts for power. So, it seems our next goal is to shut down the generators once and for all.

There are four districts in the ruins of the Codal city. The first is the Meridex district. Predictably, this whole area has been torn to shreds. All that's left from the uprising are bloodstained streets, remains of Codal bodies, and equipment left over from the battle. Thankfully, some of this equipment still works, namely the Black Stabs, which are extremely helpful. These weapons were purpose-built by the Codal to eliminate the Meridex. As such, they're pretty much useless against most enemies, but absolutely annihilate the Meridex. When one is targeted, the weapon becomes ranged, no ammunition or reloads required, and deals high damage. Most, however, are broken, so you really have to keep your eyes peeled and explore.

The largest area of the city is the Codal district. This used to be a central hub and marketplace of the city. There's plenty of rooms and structures here. What I particularly like about this area is that most of the rooms are completely useless. There's no crazy items tucked inside them, they're not related to your quest, they're just there, filled with furniture, food, musical instruments, and amenities scattered around. You get the sense that when things went wrong, it happened quick, and as such, this whole area is a snapshot of the Codal, suspended in time. You can also meet a Zoron Knight Wisp here, whose company you might remember from the sixth game. This being a place of particular interest, the Wisp investigates for the sake of absorbing new information.

In case it wasn't already obvious, you're informed that the whole valley itself is an anomaly caused by the Moonstone, a place outside of the space-time continuum. Its mere existence is causing distortions across space-time, which could result in any or all of the people inside of it to be destroyed. Well, that makes our problem a hell of a lot more existential. Now, it's not just a matter of fighting the Meridex and stopping them or Spectre from claiming the Moonstone. The Moonstone itself must be destroyed.

To the south, you'll find the Human District, where the Codal generously allowed our people to live when they were brought here against their will. They seem to vastly overestimate our love of maze-like structures, however. Navigating this area in the Ultima 6 engine was the only point throughout the Codal city where I made loud grumbling noises while playing, but I had to remind myself, "At least it's not more trees."

Within the Human section, you'll find teleportation pads, obviously implying that the pads placed across Eodon were creations of the Codal. Stepping onto this pad brings you to the generator area, inhabited by robot dinosaurs defending their home from intruders. Finding the generator control station, the Avatar destroys it, powering down the city once and for all. Vector, who's also now in the generator room, suddenly comes to his senses. The robots, including Unipootle, begin to shut down one by one. We escape Codal just as the city crumbles, no longer able to maintain its structure without magical power. It's no longer accessible, which only makes the whole experience more memorable to me. It's like The Goonies. We'll just have to savor the memories. The real treasure was the adventure itself, and of course, all of the precious Meridex-slaying tools.

Spectre, no longer affected by the Moonstone, reinforces what we already know: the Meridex are someday going to learn to truly harness the Moonstone power, and when they do, it's going to be a big problem for humanity. The good news is that the force field protecting the False Nola King has fallen. So, apparently, the people just kill him off-screen while we're not around. Kind of a perfunctory way to end this quest line. The artists were probably just sick of drawing cutscenes.

The true King, Mo'tootal, is more than happy to join our cause. We are no longer short of allies, as all the tribes have officially agreed to unify with the beating of the Great War Drum. Everyone comes together, bound for the first time by a common enemy: the Meridex. The Avatar, who looks more and more like B.J. Blaskowicz every time I see him, lets out a rallying cry and leads the charge into the Meridex Slayer. With beating sticks in hand, not even the queen herself stands a chance against us. We destroy her and, in short order, the giant Moonstone as well. Victory is ours, but it's ours to share. A celebration carries along into the night, as the petty differences that once characterized the tribes melt away in a haze of triumph and shared hope for the future.

A vision of Lord British appears to the Avatar, thanking him for his service but informing him that it's now time to say goodbye. His visit to Adon must come to a close. Rafkin lets his anthropological curiosity get the better of him and stays behind, confident that a more permanent link between worlds will one day be established. The Avatar steps through the Moon Gate, and our time in the Savage Empire comes to an end.

Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire was at a disadvantage when it released, thanks to Garriott's insistence on building new engines with each major release. The Ultima series always had a "wow factor" on its side. Not so with Savage Empire. Its most outwardly impressive elements are False Prophet's most impressive elements: a large, unbroken game world to explore, a big cast of characters with plenty of clever dialogue to pour over, lots of environmental interactions. For anybody who enjoyed Ultima 6, Savage Empire, while a more condensed package, is a no-brainer. Unfortunately, this means that the game shares many of the same weaknesses, and some even more pronounced.

Map design is an impediment to fun here. Adon simply isn't enjoyable to explore, and outside of the laundry list of villages you have to visit, there's not much to explore. Dungeons are small, self-contained, and rarely interesting. Unique NPCs who don't explicitly aid you in the main quest are few and far between. Plot-critical characters are tucked away on opposite ends of a world that's not very pleasant to traverse. Because of the game's pared-down RPG approach, there's also not much by way of loot and progression-related items to keep you interested in searching every nook and cranny.

What makes Savage Empire interesting is how it uses that RPG-light approach to build a lateral system of crafting and survival. Ultima 6's simulation is impressive, but this system is subtly impressive. That's because it's only as you're playing through the game that you realize how directed you are by the collection of natural resources and the fabrication of certain goods. On paper, it's a simplistic system, and it was likely born of the game's short development time, but it works so well for the rolicking adventure that Savage Empire is. The number of choices you have in combat and exploration are lesser, but the loose survival approach is surprisingly engaging. In spite of what was lost, the experience here is equal parts fun and frustrating. You get to build bamboo rifles, mix together gunpowder, collecting resources to become king of the jungle, but the payoff is easy combat and mostly uninteresting enemies. You have a colorful cast of characters, but the game stops short of achieving its character-driven goals. Most of the named NPCs are just means to an end, while the companions are an improvement. The pacing of the game just doesn't allow you to get to know them. The romance between the Avatar and Aya is uninspired. They're together because that's what this kind of kitschy Lost World story calls for, not because it adds anything outside of some ass, I suppose. Just when the game seems to be hitting its stride, you'll be given an uninspired quest, forcing you to trek through the jungle with little direction. But then you get to attach a bell call to a T-Rex's neck, or find yourself wandering the ruins of an ancient civilization, fighting robot dinosaurs and weeping openly, crystalline jungle tears over the corpse of a fallen comrade you met five minutes ago. I'll never forget you, Unipootle. These are the kinds of bizarre, out-there moments that Ultima doesn't usually feel like it's allowed to offer the player anymore.

Savage Empire is like a friend on a drunken night of debauchery. It lets its hair down, it has a good time, it's funny, it's still sincere, but it's also sloppy and it's kind of annoying after a while. You know, if it was like this all the time, we'd have a real problem. We'd need to sit down and address it. But once in a while, you can enjoy it for what it is.

Since Origin Systems had shifted their priorities to the IBM PC, home computer ports of the Ultima games were non-existent, but home consoles were only becoming more popular, and this resulted in some odd little curiosities. Years after the initial release of Savage Empire, Origin Systems and Pony Canyon embarked on an ill-fated odyssey to simplify the game's complex systems and satisfy the tastes of Super Famicom owners. This obscure port of Savage Empire, bafflingly released five years after the original game, was never launched outside of Japan. Thanks to the recent efforts of fan translator Night Guard, the game is now playable in English.

What we have here is a game that is simultaneously drastically different from the original in many ways and strangely faithful in others. This game could barely be described as an RPG. For one thing, there's no party anymore. All of your companions are now just static NPCs in the environment. Combat is real-time and action-based. There's no pretense of stats and skills at work here. You'll swing your weapon at enemies or shoot them until they die. More often, though, you'll be the one who dies, as pretty much everything in this game kills you in one hit. At least when you first start, the game clearly cribs some elements from The Legend of Zelda, which it's not the last time we'll hear such a thing. You can tell from the user interface alone. The action doesn't feel nearly as good as A Link to the Past. Neither you nor enemies flash or offer feedback when hit, so your best bet is to hide in a crevice and creep out one pixel at a time, swinging your weapon without any real strategy.

Strangely, they held fast to the structure of the original game. The story is largely unchanged, and the keyword-based conversations are just as extensive as ever. There are tons of items to collect, the spell system returns, and they even retain the crafting system from the original, although it's not explained very well here. It's certainly not unplayable. What this game amounts to is simply a worse version of the PC game. The action elements don't mesh with the long-winded RPG structure at all. The game frequently feels at odds with itself, and the combat is just plain bad.

The strange thing about this game's existence is that the Super Nintendo already had a fairly accurate Ultima 6 engine to use. Yes, indeed, 1992 saw the release of a Super Nintendo port of False Prophet. This version was neutered in quite a few ways. Combat had been simplified, and character creation has been done away with due to the technical limitations of the Super Nintendo. Britannia isn't just one cohesive map but is split into many different cells. The world interactivity is lower, and the spell list has been shortened. It's also a much slower-playing game. Going into your menu necessitates a short loading screen. Commands have to be manually selected from a menu. Oh, and there are no character portraits, making NPC hunts even more miserable. Nintendo demanded that the game be censored too, so much of the heavier imagery that gave the game its character has been removed or altered. In spite of all of these many problems, Ultima 6 for the SNES is a pretty solid console port. The fact that even half of this astonishingly complex game managed to land on consoles and remained playable is surprising. Even with its compromises, you're roughly getting the Ultima 6 experience here. It's a worse version, to be sure, and the Master System version of Ultima 4 remains the best console port in my mind, but this offers a solid CRPG experience on consoles. It's truly baffling that they didn't build on this foundation for the Savage Empire SNES port, but I suppose it's no less baffling that the SNES port of Savage Empire exists at all.

Because it's so different from its predecessors, it's hard to contextualize Savage Empire in a vacuum. Thankfully, though, we don't have to do that, because Worlds of Ultima isn't a one-off. It's a duology. Savage Empire was conceptualized by a small group of people, among them was Warren Spector. His role wasn't nearly as significant as, say, working hand-in-hand with Garriott to develop Ultima 6. He had helped come up with the idea and wrote a 20-page design document, which he's not even sure if the team actually used. The Origin employees working on the series recognized that Worlds of Ultima still had potential as a concept. Turnaround time was remarkably quick, and even if Savage Empire wasn't smashing sales records, the core fanbase seemed to enjoy this non-Britannian outing. It was decided that the following title in the spin-off series would be helmed from beginning to end by Warren Spectre, making this the very first game for which he was in charge. Richard Garriott was busy doing preliminary work on Ultima 7 and also running a business. This made Worlds of Ultima 2 the first series entry for which he was almost entirely hands-off. He was opening the door to others, expanding on this world he'd created alone in his room all those years ago. There was a great deal of faith being placed in Spectre. While Spectre oversaw its development, Jeff George, who was a relative newcomer at Origin, directly led the small team assigned to the game. Having written the script for Wing Commander as well as many of its missions, George had sharp creative instincts from the outset. There was quiet disagreement. It was explained to George that the follow-up to Savage Empire would move in the direction of science fiction. He excitedly imagined a world in which Ultima collided with a cyberpunk setting, a subgenre that was extremely popular at the time. Spectre, however, had other inclinations. He had long been enthralled with the Victorian era and imagined a steampunk setting for Ultima. Here, the player could interact with real-life historical figures from the early 20th century in a Jules Verne-esque science fantasy world. It was not a concept for which Jeff George shared Spectre's enthusiasm. Of the two "punks," steam won the day.

On April 4th, 1990, less than half a year after the release of Savage Empire, Origin Systems released Ultima: Worlds of Adventure 2: Martian [Music] Dreams. Inside of the game box, aside from the customary discs and quick start guide, there are a few items of interest. For one thing, you get a flyer advertising Savage Empire's "senses-shattering graphics and sound." Okay, guys, could we please take it down just a notch? Much like Savage Empire, we've got a glossy paper map of the game world, albeit a little less "gamey" in presentation. Our manuals take the form of two handbooks, which we'll take a look at shortly. For now, let's boot up Martian Dreams and see what's in store for us.

The game opens up at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. The famous astronomer Percival Lowell unveils his space cannon, supposedly able to fire a passenger capsule to Mars with a group of the world's most famous and important thinkers aboard. Admiring Lowell's work, a saboteur fires the cannon prematurely. The historical figures are sent to Mars, where they find themselves stranded many years in the future. One Doctor Spector, who is even more just "War Inspector" but pixels, arrives at the Avatar's home, having been sent a telegram to meet him. It seems that when he's not being possessed and going mad with power, the good doctor is actually a pretty cool guy. A strange woman shows up at the Avatar's front door, delivering files which includes a mysterious map and a seemingly authentic photograph of the Avatar and Spectre standing alongside Sigmund Freud and Nikola Tesla. Just saying, missed opportunity to have that photo in the box as a trinket, but I digress.

Following instructions included with the map, the Avatar stands in a particular spot and tosses the Orb of the Moons, resulting in a Moon Gate appearing. Stepping through the gate, the men arrive in the very same laboratory, circa 1895, 100 years in the past. Our present company now includes the likes of Freud, Tesla, Charles Louis Blood, and Nellie Bly. The group has been working around the clock trying to figure out how they'll rescue the 1893 expedition. Not sure what good a psychologist, a journalist, and a con man will be here, but hey, four heads are better than one. After verifying the authenticity of the letter and hearing of the mysterious circumstances in which it was delivered, the two groups agree to work together. Two years after the initial capsule was fired, we willingly enter the second, in search of the lost crew. It's time to head to Mars and save history itself.

Character creation is a similarly streamlined affair, all a Savage Empire, only instead of a shaman, you're given a psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud. That's a clever idea. Only it's 1895. Shouldn't Freud be in his 30s? Jesus, man, lived a hard life. He asks, "With which of your parents do you most closely identify: father or mother?" Not sure what the outcome here is, so I'll just answer honestly and say mother. I've always been a bit of a mama's boy. Naturally, most women see themselves as more like their mothers, while they are closer to their fathers. Yeah, I guess you can play as a female Avatar in this one. Hey, wait, what? I can't play as a girl? Everyone at school is going to make fun of me. Besides, my Avatar is canonically an outrageously handsome, square-jawed man who, according to the Ultima 6 lore update, used to be a hobbit. This is a weird and misleading way of establishing your character's sex. My dad is made of Damascus steel. I'm stuffed with marshmallows. Anyway, you're given your starting stats after answering a few questions. Like Savage Empire, intelligence is not an important part of the equation, and stats aren't that critical in any case.

So, we arrive on Mars. The Avatar, Spectre, and Nellie Bly become the shore party, so to speak, while Haggard old Freud, that scum coward Tesla, and various others stick around the capsule as a party member. Ms. Bly serves the same purpose as Jimmy Malone: limited combat capability, but has a notepad and keeps track of your current objectives. At present, our task is pretty simple: finding the capsule from the original 1893 expedition. It's been two years, so it's reasonable to assume that the crew won't still be hanging around the capsule, but we might find some leads.

From the outset, there is an almost overwhelming number of items you can find on the ship: lanterns, sextants, spyglasses, pocket watches, 1500 knives, ballpoint pens, and tinder boxes, and hatchets, and rubber gloves, and crowbars. There's only so much stuff that one man can carry around. One man who was moments ago mistaken as a woman by Sigmund Freud. I got to hand it to the 1895 expedition, they did come prepared. In so far as it's necessary to teach the players the basics of gameplay, this opening section does a pretty good job. The door to the capsule is jammed, so Tesla tells you to ask their bodyguard, Dallas Garrett, about a utensil to open it. Asking Garrett about this utensil, he lets you know that a pry bar will get the job done. Then, finding a pry bar and using it on the door, you can leave the capsule. So, you're taught the basics of investigation, keyword usage, and item interaction all in one 45-second period. These are critical skills in Martian Dreams. Organic tutorial for the uninitiated and unobtrusive for the existing Ultima fan.

We're told that the initial expedition landed due east of our current location, so it's time to get walking. At the wreckage, we meet a fellow named Dibs, a guard for the first group, who's been waiting for our arrival. He joins our crew and fills us in on the happenings of Mars over the past two years, and there have been many. Upon arrival, the first crew found the remains of four Martian cities. These were left behind by an advanced civilization that's seemingly nowhere to be found. The first is Olympus, located at the base of Mars' tallest mountain, led by a man named Jack Seagull. The Olympus group has been attempting to build a new space cannon that would carry everybody back to Earth. The next is Elysium. The group here, led by Percival Lowell, found a mysterious Martian device they refer to as a "dream machine." Using it has seemingly driven the Elysium group mad, and they now believe that they themselves are Martians. A sole member of the Elysium group named Marcus Cheney managed to escape to another settlement called Helis, where he now resides alone. Finally, the city of Argy, located in a giant crater, is inhabited by a group led by Grigori Rasputin. This insular group immediately shut the gates of the city, and none of the others have been able to make contact with them since.

So, we've got some really weird intergroup dynamics that need to be smoothed over, and once all hands are on deck, a space cannon to be built. The pathway to these objectives may not be clear, but at least we have some direction. Like Savage Empire, it feels anything but linear. Mars, in so far as we can explore it, is pretty huge. Pound for pound, the Red Planet might be the biggest Ultima map so far. If not, it sure seems like the biggest. This means that the included map is much more representational. There'd simply be no way of making it 100% game accurate without having it be mural-sized.

So, the question is, with this enormous map and Ultima 6's small view window, how do you find anything? As you can see, Mars isn't exactly flush with distinctive features. If Yodona with trees, bushes, and cliffs, then Mars, if anything, is an overcorrection. I know, I know, you just can't please me. There are vast swaths of nothingness here. You can walk for minutes at a time without seeing anything other than the dusty red surface of Mars. That being said, there are some navigational tools that make life easier. When speaking to people about cities or unique locations on the map, you'll almost always be given a set of coordinates. Using your sextant, it's pretty easy to find most of the major settlements and get a sense of where you are at any given time. You're also given a spyglass, which allows you to see pretty far off in any of the four directions.

The problem, at least at this stage in the game, is that the settlements are so far apart from one another, and Martian Dreams runs considerably slower than Savage Empire. I don't know exactly why this is, what kind of additional calculations the game is running that causes it to hiccup so frequently. All I can tell you is that it results in a game in which traversal, making up the bulk of the runtime, is boring. I'm aware that you can alter the CPU speed of DOSBox if that's how you're playing the game. The problem is that this results in an uneven experience in which animations run at a blazing speed, but your movement speed is just normal. As a result, even Warren Spector himself would later conclude that there's just, quote, "too much damn walking around."

There are different sections of the map connected via canals and bridges. The canals, which point to the titillating possibility of water on Mars, are currently empty, and without electricity, the bridges can't extend either. Therefore, it would be wise to prioritize restoring power. While there is a distinct possibility of the player getting lost on Mars, the game is able to ground you in a few ways. For one thing, close to the beginning, there are roads, or at least the faint suggestion of them. If you follow the road, you'll quickly find your way to a trading outpost owned by Calamity Jane and Buffalo Bill. Outside of the roads, the empty canals act as bumpers in a bowling alley. You can never stray too far without running into them, and once you do, you'll have at least a faint idea of how far you've overshot your destination.

The trading post offers a variety of goods, including guns, ammo, and various tools. Only the currency in Martian Dreams isn't gold or even good old-fashioned American dollars. It's a Mars native substance called Oxium. You may have been wondering, "Why can they breathe on Mars?" Well, they can, and that's weird, but they can't do it well. That's where Oxium comes in. Chunks of this mineral can be chewed to release oxygen into the system of the person biting it. In gameplay terms, characters who aren't carrying Oxium will automatically become weaker over time, with their stats plummeting. If you have a supply of Oxium, the character will periodically automatically start munching on a chunk of it, and their stats will remain unchanged. In story terms, the people of Mars can't go without Oxium, or they'll become weak and unable to work. Understandably, the mineral became a hot commodity after the first expedition arrived. As a result, it's both a critical resource and the primary currency used on Mars. You can find it stowed away in boxes or inside of geodes, which can be open with

A ballpen hammer, the crafting heavy systems of Savage Empire have been done away with, but some of its DNA still remains. Mars gets wicked cold at night, so unless your characters are bundled in extra warm clothes, you'll have to pitch a tent and sleep for the night, or else you'll take damage. Unlike Ultima 6, the worlds of Ultima games automatically skip to evening or morning depending on what time you sleep, which is a godsend. Between the weather and the constant need for oxium, some of Savage Empire's survival flavor remains, at least for now.

Speaking to the folks running The Outpost, they offer you a quest of sorts, a great way to get your feet wet and learn what the game is all about in a low-stakes environment. The trading post's oxium supplier, Cter McGee (please don't laugh, that's his name), has apparently gone missing. He was last seen at the Noctis Labyrinths in Mars' Eastern Hemisphere.

Within those labyrinths, you'll notice some of the changes made to the previous game systems. First of all, some of the more interesting powers featured in Ultima 6 have returned, turned, and others introduced. These take the form of Mars berries, replacing magic and shamanic incantations. Eating a berry has one of several effects. Brown berries give the player x-ray vision, allowing them to see through walls and in the dark. Green berries are perhaps the most interesting, allowing the players to communicate with derelict machines around Mars. At certain points, you're asked to repair these devices, and you can glean some helpful advice by talking to the machines themselves. Then there's purple berries, which act as the telekinesis spell of Martian dreams. You can interact with and move far-off objects, such as this plank, which I can use to climb up the surface here.

Another addition is in-game notes. This is the first Ultima game, and likely one of the first RPGs, to heavily feature notes in the environment as a storytelling tool. You can find notes and diaries scattered around, giving you insights about certain characters and helping you solve quests. It may seem like a pretty minor thing; after all, the idea of notes sitting around has become so common in RPGs that it's almost a cliche. But this is a great step in flushing out the world and delivering exposition in a more organic and immersive way. Here, we can learn where in The Labyrinth that Cter is hiding now.

Mars is a dangerous place, no less dangerous than Arcanum. You're given period-appropriate tools to deal with the alien threats you'll find here: pistols, rifles, shotguns, ray guns. You've got a decent selection of ordinance here. You can have characters dual-wield pistols, and yeah, they'll burn through ammo quickly, but this is the only Ultima game where you can revolver your way through fights, and I think that's wonderful. The shotgun is another thing entirely. The Belgian Combine is a weapon that allows you to select a firing type. I set it to shotgun, gave it to Dr. Spectre, and man, all I can tell you is, "Hit the dirt!" When it's Spectre's turn, this man went to the Dean Learner School of firing indiscriminately. Well, that'll stop him for real, though. The fact that the shotgun actually has spread and that you have to account for ally and enemy placements is really cool. It's also a great trade-off for the fact that you can hit more than one enemy on that turn.

Magic, which already took a backseat in Savage Empire, is pretty much non-existent here. In terms of combat, your characters will be strapped to the nines, and as long as you don't forget to keep your ammo well-stocked, combat won't give you too much trouble. Some of the enemy designs are pretty creative and plenty more varied than Savage Empire. Canal worms, sand trappers, and leviathans are all quite intimidating. One of the two handbooks included with the game is full of enemy information, giving you the lowdown on how best to deal with them. The most obnoxious enemy type would have to be the jumping beans. These little bastards show up in groups of a dozen at a time. Just when you think you've killed the last one, you move 3 feet, and more have caught up with you. Sorry to everyone, Inspector's shotgun trajectory, 800 jumping beans later, I just can't be bothered to practice precision here. Slugs aren't going to be invented for another 3 years, sorry guys.

An irritating aspect of combat is how much of it takes place in narrow corridors. Your characters have to follow each other in single file; they can't share a space. This means that during combat, most of your allies can't even see, much less shoot, the enemy around winding corners. It takes a full turn to trade spaces with someone, so usually the party leader just ends up stealing all of the glory. These dungeon interiors don't seem to be built with full-party ranged combat in mind.

After rescuing Cter from some Martian worms, he rewards you with information. He tells you where to find a buried map of some value, showing the location of oxium geodes as well as the Mars power plant. Much of the game's first act is centered around getting the power up and running again. In fact, a significant portion of the main quest here is just the Avatar repairing things. This is why it's critical to keep tabs on those tools you found in the beginning. To get the power stations up and running, you'll need to find somebody to fix a conveyor belt, use a wrench to repair a drill, use a spade to shovel coal into a furnace. You can use a shovel for all kinds of exciting things. Another of life's simple pleasures ruined by a meddling bureaucracy, ladies and gentlemen.

In order to get the belt fixed, you'll need the help of Captain Tripet inside of Olympus. The people of Olympus don't trust you yet, so you'll need to prove yourself by getting three signatures: Major Greg Dupri, Dr. David Yellen, and Richard Sherman. You know, no matter how far from home we end up, these three knuckleheads are always here, carrying the essence of Britannia with them. Sherman joins our party because we can't go through a single game without Richard Garriott watching us. With the three signatures, we can enter Olympus, which is the first major settlement here. You can speak to some of the greatest minds of the 21st century and also get that conveyor belt repaired.

Firing up the generators, the plant begins to produce power, but it doesn't distribute it. Lucky for us, we've got some power experts at our disposal to help us figure out why. Thomas Edison is kicking it old school in Olympus. He says that hypothetically, it's the towers themselves that broadcast the electricity to one another, but that's something in that dumbass Tesla's wheelhouse. "Don't worry, Mr. Edison, I'll take care of him for you." "Pioneer alternating currents, will you not, if I have anything to say about it?" Oh yeah, you can kill anybody in this game, and that can be amusing, albeit paradoxical. In reality, you'll need access to many of these characters, so you don't really want to be stuck with a dead Tesla on your hands. Like later on, we need them. For now, besides, a lot of these people are going to end up assassinated on their own time anyway.

I have to say, the historical angle of Martian Dreams ends up being one of the most enjoyable parts of the game. The other of the two manuals is full of short biographies for all of the people who have ended up on Mars. This is a nice pre-internet method of deducing who might have some info germane to the current task. For instance, asking Thomas Edison or Tesla about the Martian Towers broadcasting power. This principle carries forth throughout the game. If you have questions about the different areas of Mars, Explorer Robert E. Perry is the one to ask. Inquiries about plant life are best directed to George Washington Carver. If you'd like to know what secret blend of 11 herbs and spices to use, you can count on Colonel Sanders. What a huge get for this game! It's reliably the case that these different figures will have pertinent info, so it's essential that the player uses rational thinking to find the right person for the job. It is satisfying to think of someone with relevant expertise, find them, bring up the subjects, and actually get some concrete, useful input or instructions.

There's also just something kind of fun and wholesome about having light-hearted interactions with historical figures, various deeds notwithstanding. So often, it's difficult to see these larger-than-life figures as human. We've got their collected works and one or two grainy photographs from 150 years ago, but it doesn't give us a sense of who these people were. Obviously, Martian Dreams is having fun with the concept and doing a fair amount of speculating regarding their personalities and such, but the strange circumstances and fun conversations you can have do a good job of humanizing these people. It's historical science fiction at its finest: not too heavy, not too flippant, just the right balance of respect and levity for a "what-if" scenario. The game is, dare I say, almost educational. Savage Empire was on this track with its tribes being based on real-world civilizations. The thing is, with each tribe only getting a limited amount of screen time and the basis for the tribes being only briefly described in the manual, the player has several degrees of separation from real-world educational potential.

Martian Dreams is a bit different. Aside from a base level of historical knowledge, it doesn't assume what the player knows. You don't need working insight into who these people are or what they've accomplished. As such, these figures still work as a collection of characters even if you don't know anything about them. In interacting with them, you inadvertently learn about them too, whether you're aware of it or not. It's kind of the perfect sweet spot. On-the-nose educational products such as Mario's Time Machine just couldn't hit. Any learning being done while playing Martian Dreams is incidental, which is often the best way to get, say, kids to internalize information. You have to hook them first, then hit them with the facts, and the learning. As a wise man once said, "If it's not fun, why bother?" And Martian Dreams understands that.

As it turns out, there's an array of broadcasting towers near the power station that need their cables repaired to work. So you attempt to grab the cable and nearly die when you're electrocuted. Think, match, think back to elementary school. What did 13-year-old J. Barell teach you on daytime TV when you faked being sick to stay home? These are special rubber gloves that protect us up to 35,000 volts. Okay, rubber gloves, insulating and protective. The right tool for the job. See, I know things.

The power being back on means several things for the surface of Mars. For one thing, the bridges across the canals can now be extended, granting you access to some previously inaccessible places. You can also now use the rapid transit system with teleporters located outside of each of the four big settlements. This fast travel system, while not as versatile as the Moon Orb from Ultima 6, is such a load off of the player's shoulders. Just being able to quickly travel from city to city cuts out so much of the drab, endless wandering. The restored electricity also opens up previously locked automatic doors, allowing for further exploration. One such door is located in the power plant and leads to a room full of oxium. Not only are geodes scattered everywhere, but there's several bins with a seemingly infinite supply of oxium too. This room isn't exactly hidden. In fact, this automatic door, which has been closed till now, is probably the first one you'll try after powering everything back on, because you've walked past it 20 times. Obviously, any stress induced by the survival mechanics are thrown out the window at this point. I really don't like that. I can understand why some people may prefer to play the game without worrying about oxium, but at that point, why even introduce it as a mechanic if you're just going to trivialize it so quickly? The other major problem is that it completely destroys any kind of economic balance. With an infinite supply of the game's primary currency, you can now just stock up on as much ammo and supplies as you can carry. I don't understand why the game needed to spoon-feed the player infinite resources like this. It results in Mars being a much less hostile location and makes a very easy game even easier.

One of the main cities, Helis, is inhabited by one man, Marcus Cheney, an escapee of the now insane Elysium group. As mentioned, the Dream Machine is supposedly responsible for driving them mad. These mysterious Martian devices are located in each of the major cities, and they beg to be investigated. After doing some busywork to fix the machine up, the Avatar is able to access the unit and sends himself into the dream world. The existence of this world is a big part of what makes Martian Dreams unique. Within this area, the consciousnesses of several people are trapped, perpetually suffering nightmares until they've woken up. This is presented in the form of several dungeon areas in which the player has to overcome a focused challenge or solve a puzzle. If you consider these areas to be dungeons, and personally I would, then it's safe to say that Martian Dreams has the most memorable dungeons of any Ultima game release till this point. They really push the complexity of puzzles this engine was capable of handling, and as a result, it feels like one of the most creative segments in an Ultima game. You can tell they had a lot of fun coming up with the weird geometry and strange alien sights of the dream world.

Within these dreams, you'll often find "dream stuff," which turns into a random item when interacted with. It can be anything: a gun, a mirror, a shovel. That sort of dream nonsense is what I'm looking for. I want to recapture the feeling of driving to my cousin's house, which inexplicably looks like a Bass Pro Shops pyramid, while driving in a very, very, very long Chrysler LeBaron. One area has you helping George Washington Carver grow a plant, but worms keep trying to eat it, so you have to manage the growth of multiple anti-worm plants while waiting for the main non-anti-worm plant to grow. In another, you find Vladimir Lenin in a room with a whole bunch of cash. It needs to be distributed in 25 equal piles, so you'll need to do the math and sort it for him. And if there's a little extra, he'll probably take that too. It's so ridiculously on the nose. Lenin's worst nightmare is being surrounded by non-equal piles of cash. It combines the obviousness of a Mel Brooks punchline with the sort of historical stupidity of Bill and Ted. I just can't help but smile while stuff like this is going on. Then there's H.G. Wells being assaulted by invisible men, or Martians, I guess. You have to fill a spray gun with green paint and fire it at them to make them visible. Lewis Comfort Tiffany's nightmare is being trapped with a bull in a literal china shop. There's a minotaur wreaking havoc on his art pieces, and you have to put a stop to it. I did that by having the Avatar kill the minotaur with his bare hands. I suppose the game doesn't expect that, because Tiffany acts like nothing has been resolved, and the nightmare continues. There's a few instances of stuff like that happening in the dream world. This engine unfortunately doesn't allow for tightly designed puzzles per se, leaving some wiggle room for glitchiness. The devs seem to be aware of it, though, so you can actually exit and refresh the area at any time by having the Avatar talk to himself, as one does to wake up from a bad dream. Bit of an inelegant solution, but I guess it's better than nothing. Anyway, you have to grab a red throw rug, equip it as a weapon, and then act as a matador, luring the minotaur away from the shop and locking it outside. It's a really creative way of using some basic game systems, and that's an understated benefit of being able to use the same engine for multiple games. You become intimately familiar with its quirks and are able to think outside the box, using the engine to its full potential. These areas are just so much fun to explore, and they're not the only dream sections in the game, either. Later on, you can free Wyatt Earp from an eternal horse auction, cruise through space finding the lost pages of Samuel Clemens's manuscript, and join P.T. Barnum in finding Uranus. Haha, funny planet name. Ironically, thanks to the Neo-Ultima Cannon introduced in False Prophet, the Avatar actually has already been to Uranus. Of what Lovecraftian horror made their home there, I dare not speak.

After freeing everybody from their nightmares, you can visit them in the colony. Well, except for Lenin. I can't find him. I guess they gave the boot to his pinko ass. They're prepared to leave, but there's a big problem. The crazy people of Elysium aren't crazy at all. They're Martians using the humans as host bodies. We're given the whole sorted tale by Martians trapped in the dream world. Preeesh tells us of a plague that ravaged the surface of Mars long ago, nearly eradicating his people. The plague was created by a power-hungry Martian named Rachuk, but quickly became deadlier than anticipated. The Martians, as a last resort, used the Dream Machine to suspend their consciousness in the dream world, hoping that someday they would be rescued. When members of the 1893 Expedition showed up and used the Dream Machines in Elysium, several of the Martians seized control of their bodies, making those humans appear mad to the unaffected. The Martians are actually entirely plant-based and a great source of vitamin C.

In order to overcome the plague and allow their consciousness to reinhabit physical bodies, the titular Dream Martians offer a suggestion. "Since Martians are plants, we need only find a supply of preserved seeds, and we can grow a Martian body ourselves. From there, the body could be placed in a Dream Machine, where the Martians of the Dream Grove could place themselves into it. This would not only save the Helis Martians but allow us to bargain with the Elysium Martians for the bodies of our fellow humans." Back, Preeesh agrees to transfer himself into a usable body should we grow one. So we need a Martian seed. There's a stockpile of usable Martian seeds, but they're in a building with a door that's stuck, so we need oil to grease the hinges of the door. In order to get the seed to grow, we need some kind of fertilizer. We're told by a Martian PLF that we'll need nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium, which can be found in laboratories around Mars. Then, of course, we'll need water. Mars has ice caps at its North and South Poles, but we need a shovel to break off a piece of it and a bucket to put it in to let it melt. Are you comprehending? Do you understand how much of this game has you playing the school janitor, running back and forth trying to find tools to fix things? It's easier now because of the teleporters, but my God, your straightforward objectives rapidly balloon in their complexity. Half the time, when you finally do the thing that was asked of you, like finding a camera, you'll then be asked to do something else, like develop the photos inside of it. They keep altering the deal, and I keep praying that they won't alter it further. By about halfway through the game, you just kind of feel like the Avatar is everybody's [expletive]. Wait, did the Avatar just talk? I've never seen a casual interjection like this from the Avatar. Why is the game just acting like this is a normal thing? The quirks of having many different writers on one game, I suppose.

To make matters worse, after finally growing the Martian body, dragging it over to the Dream Machine, and making the transfer, Preeesh almost instantly dies, and this time for good. It seems that the very soil itself has been saturated by the Martian plague, so nothing viable can be grown here. It's kind of blindsiding, to be honest. One second he's this happy Martian man, and the world is his oyster. Next, he starts withering, and he just dies. That consciousness he's been storing for all of this time just ceases to exist. So weird sense of finality in an otherwise jovial little story. And talk about taking the wind out of your sails, man. I just spent a good chunk of time running around growing this plant body, and now I find out that's all been a complete waste of time.

The real last hope of the Martians lies underneath the Northern Glacier. Some Martians had established a lab before the plague wiped them out here. They were experimenting with artificial bodies, which could theoretically withstand any kind of damage, disease included. With the lab buried underneath a sheet of ice and the canals empty, it seems like we've no choice but to melt the ice caps. You know how you melt the ice caps? You fix things. You fix towers, you fix focusing lenses, you fix guidance engines, you kill weeds with pesticides. I don't mind fixing things here and there, but man, this game's pacing is just all over the place. You'll be given a big exposition dump from the Martians at the Grove one moment, and then spend the next 3 hours looking for items to use on other items. Savage Empire was far from perfect, but seldom did the player feel lacking in purpose. There was a good ebb and flow to the game in terms of offering new, unique objectives. The tribal quests were simple but engaging, and you were usually given some relevant information regarding your larger goals.

Martian Dreams is so much more interesting to me as a setting. I love the blend of elements at work here, and the Martian plight as well as the Dream Machines are compelling plot devices. The game features arguably the best writing in an Ultima game to date. As absurd as the concept may be, there are gripping moments here and there, and individual characters really shine in this game, and the different pieces of the story come together in some shrewd ways, slotting together how the different colonies drifted apart and then tying this predicament to the age-old Martian conflict makes you feel like you're a part of something bigger. You're given space to come to your own conclusions, much in the tradition of classic Ultima, but you're also allowed to pursue detailed explanations, giving you a fuller perspective of what's at stake. That sense of wanting to solve the mystery of the codal civilization you had in Savage Empire courses through the veins of Martian Dreams. That's because there's something intrinsically fascinating about space, the concept of intelligent life, and how the evolution of that life may differ. They don't strictly aim for the obvious. The fact that Martians are a highly advanced plant life, bodies cultivated in greenhouses, that they're able to seat an individual's consciousness within their dreams – these are fascinating ideas, and getting a chance to explore them lives up to the promise of those first few Ultima games. You just don't know what to expect next. This plot was panned in part by one Raymond Benson, who would go on to make quite a splash at Origin, and it hints at a continued bright future for the series.

The issue I have is how the game handles its quests. Again, many of these activities in principle are pretty cool. The first time you find the right tool for a particular job or prod the right historical figure for information, it's, you might say, intellectually satisfying. It's like, "Yeah, I saw a bolt needed to be tightened, and I used the wrench to tighten it. Just call me the handyman." The issue is that the game relies so heavily on this type of quest where your biggest challenge is just finding a pair of pliers somewhere or walking back and forth between two settlements playing messenger boy. The game would have benefited from excising a few good hours out of the center. It spins its tires in a way that at times seems to prioritize playtime over player enjoyment, leading to an unevenly paced game. This whole section where you've got to store the Martian Towers exemplifies that, as you realize how many inventory puzzles need to be solved and thus how much walking and talking you'll be doing. Dealing with combat encounters and being forced to arrest overnight start to feel like annoyances rather than core elements of the game. That's a shame because the game comes out gangbusters and gives you a glimpse into how creatively the engine can be used. It's too bad this peacocking is basically localized to the dream world. Out here in the deserts of Mars, I'm often stuck doing the Ultima equivalent of following an instruction sheet to build an IKEA love seat.

The game introduces some interesting time-based activities that hadn't been implemented before. Stuff like using your resources to plant and fertilize a seed, then waiting in real time for it to grow, or having ice melt into water for a puzzle. It would have been nice to see these types of more mechanically involved activities alongside the typical fare. Once you finally rebuilt the Martian Towers, you're able to concentrate a beam at its ice cap, melting away our obstacles and filling the canals with water in the process. What's cool about this is how Martian Dreams uses the world changes to drastically alter familiar environments. Between the power being turned on, the teleporters activating, the lab being uncovered, and the canals filling, you can see these mechanics gradually being layered over top of the world, which effectively recycles Mars as a location. Your handiwork pays off in real time, and that's some recompense for all of the unpaid labor that you do.

Within the hidden laboratory, we find the nearly finished prototype of an artificial Martian body. It's missing only one thing: a hearthstone. A robot within the lab is programmed to cut hearthstone from a material, azurite. Now that we understand how more bodies can be built, the Martians occupying the human bodies at Elysium reluctantly agree to give up their bodies, as long as we promise to manufacture more for them. William Randolph Hearst offers us a chunk of azurite in exchange for another favor, and you know, I'm trying to get us off Mars here. Just give me the azurite, you opportunistic piece of [expletive]. You're lucky that the existence of Citizen Kane depends on you being alive, or I'd have Dr. Spectre shoot you in the mouth.

With the hearthstone acquired, we can finish the prototype body and bring it to the Dream Machine for attempt number two. This time, an ambassador by the name of Cheshat is chosen for the transfer, and it's a success. Sherman, considering his work done, returns to his companions, leaving a slot open for Cheshat to join the party as a Martian's mind in a robot body. She doesn't suffer from status effects such as coldness or poison, which is handy. This means that hazards like steam, which would ordinarily kill the player, don't pose a threat to Cheshat. As long as you take control of her, she's also got a really great character design, seemingly based on Maria from Fritz Lang's Metropolis. On the topic, do the Martians look like the Metaluna mutants from This Island Earth, or am I crazy? Am I just looking for any excuse to bring up This Island Earth?

The visual design throughout the game largely maintains the quality standard set by Ultima 6, although it's a bit less consistent than Savage Empire. In general, Mars looks about as appealing as Mars can look, engine limitations and all. Lots of red rocks, in case there was any doubt we were playing a game in the Ultima 6 engine. The enemies are cool, and the Martian technology has this particular brand of Art Deco retro-futurism that really stands out. It would have been easy to default to computers and generic science fiction chachkies placed all over the place, but they didn't do that. It's a great blend of big, bulky, and Industrial Revolution-style tech with a slick, old-school utopian style, as though artists and engineers worked closely together. Lots of steam-powered contraptions, levers, and mechanical doodads of unspecified purpose. The user interface has been redesigned to reflect this, too. Though you're not on Earth, you never forget what time period Martian Dreams is shooting for.

Some of the inconsistency comes from the design of the characters as well as the cutscenes. Like Ultima 6, there's a pretty big variance in portrait quality here. Some of these portraits were clearly traced over an existing photograph of a person, while other non-historical figures weren't. It leads to a noticeable disparity in art styles. One second you're talking to someone straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon, and next, a hyper-realistic rendering of Buffalo Bill. That variance extends to the game's cutscenes. Broadly speaking, the cutscenes look great. There's much more movement and animation here than in Savage Empire, which brings the game cinematics closer to parody with Wing Commander. There's plenty of richly detailed hand-drawn art, and it really brings the otherworldly surroundings to life. Many of the still frames were hand-painted in production before being redrawn for the game, and they do look awesome. It seems, though, that Martian Dreams utilizes a digitization process to turn photos into bitmapped images for the game. This was used to a limited extent in Savage Empire, particularly for portrait backgrounds, where it's not really that noticeable. Here, it's used quite liberally in cutscenes, and the realism clashes with the hand-drawn art. Just compare the Ultima 6 poster from the beginning of Martian Dreams to the Ultima 5 poster from the beginning of Ultima 6. The latter may be smaller, but it's hand-designed to follow the principles of low-resolution digital art. The Ultima 6 poster just looks like a garbled mess of pixels and artifacts. It sometimes extends to the characters as well, like here in the laboratory. Everybody looks pretty rough. Other than Freud, you can't tell who these people even are, and that's only because he's doing the Freud sit. It has nothing to do with limitations, either. Ultima 5's stylized rendering of certain characters looks awesome despite how much more limited it is. Hell, even the characters in the previous scene of the very same game look better despite being smaller and less detailed. I think the technology just wasn't there to be blending digitization with hand-drawn art. It results in a game that looks better than its predecessor in some ways and worse in others.

As far as the soundtrack goes, it's again good, good. Lots of jaunty, upbeat tunes to reflect the time period. Nothing particularly noteworthy with the exception of one song: the dungeon music in Martian Dreams is one of the best tracks in the Ultima series, full stop. It's so eerie and so non-traditional. I would use both of these statements to describe Ultima 6's dungeon music as well, but the weirdness here is amplified to an extreme degree. There's so much dissonance in the chords they use, it just sets my teeth on edge every time I'm in a cavern. Sounds like an evil carnival or [Music].

At this stage in the game, the Ultima series was relying a lot on design work as opposed to raw technological leaps. Wing Commander scared the entire PC game industry into making their games look incredible, so the competition was stiffening. Still, for as uninteresting as the surface of Mars may be, Martian Dreams manages to carve out a unique visual identity for itself. Aside from some quibbles over the digitized visuals, there's a strong sense of steampunk style from the redesigned UI to the characters themselves. As cool as Cheshat looks, there's a minor problem here. The Martians, with their planet effectively dead, their best bet is to relocate to Earth and blend in with humankind. I love Martians, I really do, but we just met, and one of your people developed a biological weapon that not only wiped out his own species but also permanently saturated the planet in poison. I'm not saying that you guys will do that, but maybe we should get to know each other first. Well, I guess we're not that different. Regardless of the risks, we've got to find a way to disguise these Martians as humans for a trip back to Earth. There's a machine that can repurpose rubber as a sort of fake skin for these bodies, but it's pretty simplistic. Sarah Bernhardt tells us that she can create realistic pigmentation for this skin if we could bring her rouge berries. These berries happen to be located in Rasputin's colony of Argy, which isn't keen on letting anybody in. But that's no problem. With the canals filled, we can drive a Martian gunboat over to the colony and make our entrance, Kramer-style. "Who wants to have some fun with the rouge berries?" From the colony, we can give Cheshat real skin, which kind of makes her look scarier, if anything.

The leadership of Olympus enthusiastically agrees to start manufacturing bodies and skin for the Martians, fulfilling our bargain while we deal with a bigger problem like Elysium. The people of Argy appear to be delusional, but in a very different way. Instead of acting as Martians, everybody here just has a fanatical devotion to Rasputin, and it's not really clear why. The maniacal Rasputin explains that he's found a way to not only send people into the dream world but objects as well. It's there that he's hoarding the propellant fluid necessary to build a second rocket home. Apparently, bringing it back would destabilize the real world in such a way that quakes and storms would rip Mars to shreds. This gives him complete control of the situation, as any hope of heading back home rests in his hands. Andrew Carnegie is hard at work underneath Olympus, having turned the mines into a makeshift silo. The rocket is nearly finished; he just needs a bit more steel and, of course, the propellant. The steel is easy enough, but that doesn't mean it's not annoying. You have to pilot a barge down the river, anchor it near the iron mines, and get a cart full of ore onto the barge so it can be taken back to Olympus. So you repair a power drill to dig for ore, repair a track switcher to move a cart around, then use a shovel to slowly, awkwardly move piles of iron ore into the cart. You bring it back, and something ain't right here. It turns out that we don't need a regular barge; we need a cargo barge. In the immortal words of Joe from Game Sack (doing an impression of Mark from Classic Game Room): "Oh no, not the cargo barge!" And so we must go find find a cargo barge, then once again slowly, painstakingly piloted through the enemy-laden canals back to the entrance of the mine, then move it with the iron ore over to Olympus, where it can be dropped off for Mr. Carnegie. Child labor won't be banned for like 40 years, and still I'm crawling into these coal mines over and over again. Ridiculous.

Returning to Argy, we find that things have quickly changed. It seems that Rasputin was being possessed by a Martian named Rachuk, the very same Rachuk that created the plague in the first place. Using the power of Martian berries, Rachuk manipulated Rasputin into coming to Mars, where he would take this new body, then return to Earth as its ruler. Pursuing Rachuk into the Argy dream world, we're sent into a final dream sequence, and perhaps the best one yet. We encounter the Shadow Lords, the primary antagonists of Ultima 5. Their purpose, like the plot of the game itself, was to subvert the principles and show that unregulated virtue can be infinitely worse than vice. These Shadow Lords, which are only nightmare apparitions, present their oppositions to the virtues – hatred, cowardice, and lies – as means to potentially desirable ends. Their presence in the dream world proves that they've been the Avatar's most feared foe and exposes a potential insecurity: what if they're right? What if virtue and principle are obstacles to accomplishing our goals? What if we hinder ourselves in pursuit of a good that would be more easily acquired without morals or ethics? What makes the Shadow Lords scary isn't the fact that they look spooky or that they're particularly strong, but what they represent. As their names suggest, the light of the three principles casts long shadows in which they reside: truth can't exist without lies, courage without cowardice, and love without hatred. In order for good to exist, a contrasting evil must also necessarily exist – a source of nightmares for the Avatar, who perhaps attracts evil as a result of his own goodness.

In order to defeat the Shadow Lords, we must dispel their illusions by solving a puzzle associated with each, overcoming the inverted principles. In order to defeat the Shadow Lords is a great idea. Not since Ultima 4 have we been asked to exhibit virtue, well, this is a much less organic context to do it in. Like the other dream world segments, they make good use of the Ultima 6 engine. That game also utilized a trio of villains from previous games in order to teach ongoing lessons regarding the principles. Each of the Shadow Lords makes a solid case in their opposition to the principles on rational grounds. Cowardice and lies are far more likely to benefit an individual than bravery and truth. Showing courage to help somebody in a bad situation just for its own sake is an illogical reaction that puts us in harm's way. Conscience is also nothing more than a hindrance to our goals. Hatred may not have a clear benefit, but fantasizing about revenge against someone who's wronged us can be appealing. It's also a hell of a lot easier than forgiving them. Rather than spoon-feeding you or retorting to the Shadow Lords, you're left to sit with their words as you overcome their trials. Fallen, the Lord of Falsehood, presents you with two Dr. Spectres, telling you that you must find the real one in order to move on. They both seem to have identical dialogue, and nothing really points to one or the other being more legitimate. There are some dream objects lying around here, including a full-sized mirror. Moving it to each Spectre, you can see that one is real while the other is a Martian. Asaroth, the Lord of Hatred, places you in a room filled with weapons, ammo, and healing items. As you rush to the end, you find a Martian bloody and bruised, preparing to kill your comrades. Well, you could put an axe through his head, only by offering him a health potion are you able to stir forgiveness in him, allowing you to move on. Finally, there's Nosfentor, the Lord of Cowardice. You're dropped into a gauntlet full of Martians shooting at you until you're barely hanging on. At the end, a great maw is waiting for you. Only by taking sword in hand and facing it at the door can you show your courage and overcome. The fundamental flaw in these puzzles is that you know the obvious solution isn't the correct one. Despite that, I find these sections to be great, almost cinematic little moments. This whole area could have been a generic combat challenge or even just a cutscene, but allowing you to work through the challenges yourself, literally defeating the three inverted principles, gives you a sense of overcoming the Avatar's fears that you wouldn't have felt if you weren't given control. Of course, the virtues and principles don't really factor into Martian Dreams' story, so the game isn't adding much to the virtue conversation, but it is a nice way of bringing us back down to Britannia for a moment. After rescuing so many people from nightmares of their own, it's only fitting that Martian Dreams would culminate in the Avatar's own Dark Knight of the Soul, adding some gravity to the proceedings here (no pun intended).

At last, we reach Rachuk, who either really just liked the way Rasputin looked or it's a coincidence. He tells us that he'll give us the propellant if we entertain him with gladiatorial combat. With no weapons or party members, this can be a tough challenge. You have to run around these arenas collecting dream stuff and hoping that it'll be something useful. Most of the time, it's not, but sometimes you'll find a weapon or a berry. Regardless of whether or not you overcome the battles, Rachuk is a dishonest sort and does not fork over the propellant. Using the berries the Avatar collected, you can telepathically open the door to find more dream stuff. He taunts you from behind the glass, dream glass, which he himself conjured. "No currently existing weapon could ever puncture this glass." "Currently existing." There's only one problem with that, Max Chuck. I come from the future, and in the future, we have light machine guns. This is my dream now, [expletive], and it's about to become a nightmare for you. In a Nightmare on Elm Street-esque scenario, we take control of our dream, and Rachuk is defeated.

Loading the propellant into a teleporter, we return to the real world. Rachuk was quite serious about the tremors. It seems as Mars begins to crumble, the quakes intensify, and it seems the very surface of Mars tears itself apart. We struggle to find our footing as we desperately make our way back to the mines underneath Mount Olympus. The caverns crumble all around us as each and every person we've met eagerly awaits our return, hoping to catch a shuttle back to Earth before the red planet is annihilated. At last, we approach Carnegie, whose work on the ship is just finished. And oh, okay, you can't be mad. I forgot the propellant. Excuse me, excuse me, guys. Hi, sorry. Yeah, hi. Uh, we'll be right back, super quick. Sorry about that. Okay, okay. So we come back with the propellant, and uh, then yeah, we all leave. The group effort seems to have paid off. Every man, woman, and Martian boards the space capsule, with the Olympians having manufactured enough synthetic bodies to house the remaining aliens. We're fired back to Earth. Everybody somehow survives, and a parade is thrown in our honor. The Avatar and Dr. Spectre stand alongside some of their comrades for a photograph. A photograph that will be delivered to us someday in the future. Who will deliver that photograph? None other than a suspiciously Martian-looking woman. Time loop secured. The tremors of Mars bury any hint of civilization that once existed there, though perhaps one day it will be unearthed. Thus ends the tale of Martian Dreams.

I was surprised by my feelings towards Martian Dreams. By the time the credits rolled, this game really shouldn't have worked to begin with. There's never been less player choice in an Ultima game. Armor has no purpose save to save off the cold. Magic is even less present than Savage Empire. Character creation is almost pointless, given how limited your options in combat are. The world is nonlinear, and you can move in almost any direction from the beginning, but in terms of your options and the order you can tackle them, there's a preset sequence of events and not much to do outside of following that sequence. This makes the game feel even more self-contained and less replayable. It's even less of an RPG than Savage Empire and more of an adventure game. It's not quite sincere enough to work as a plot-driven game, and it's not quite accurate enough to work as an educational game. Martian Dreams is just all over the damn place, and that's partially what makes it so much fun. The entire premise of the game is just ludicrous. From the very beginning, the writers found ways to make the real-world angle funny and enjoyable. They never linger on the fact that you're interacting with these major historical figures; they're treated like regular Ultima NPCs with just a bit of tongue-in-cheek self-awareness. The fact that you can talk to Teddy Roosevelt about building a space cannon or save Vladimir Lenin from being possessed by the consciousness of a plant alien, and the game doesn't really draw any attention to that weirdness, it really helps establish the tone. If you can get the player to suspend their disbelief under these circumstances, I don't care what anybody says, that's just good escapism.

The game was clearly made with love for the subject matter. That historical curiosity blends with the speculative fiction of Martian Dreams surprisingly effortlessly. It feels like there's always something to do, and a fun little alien revelation or dream sequence is never too far off. That the game leans so hard into these esoteric elements and plays them straight is in the tradition of turn-of-the-century sci-fi, and in the best possible way. It's also an extremely optimistic game, harnessing that sense of endless possibilities ushered in by the progress of the late 19th century. There's an infectious feeling of enthusiasm and hope as you bear witness to technological marvels here tofore unseen. You may be only getting one side of the story when it comes to representing this time period, but it's an undeniably pleasant side. It's just a shame that the RPG elements, if anything, bloat the experience. Martian Dreams feels like a briskly paced 7-hour long adventure game obligatorily trapped in the body of a 30-hour long RPG. As much as the engine facilitates some really cool world interactions, it also comes loaded with baggage. The combat is repetitive, and some of the more common enemy types are just irritating. Leveling up isn't some grand event now; in fact, you can hardly tell the difference between high and low-level characters. They're all just shooting enemies in basically the same way, rarely with any mortal risk involved. Savage Empire made up for its RPG deficiencies with some simple but engaging crafting and survival elements. There's nothing that really fills that void here. How many times can you find a thing, realize it's broken, go on a scavenger hunt for a particular tool, then use that tool on a thing, rinse and repeat? Martian Dreams seems to think the answer is a lot. Going places and clicking on things is all Ultima and PC games in general had ever been.

But context is what makes the difference here. Ultima 6 has you finding treasure maps in pursuit of old relics, trying to solve murder mysteries, pickpocketing precious items, searching catacombs, and communing with ghosts. It's over ambitious at times, but it results in a game that never feels short of variety.

Martian Dreams, especially in its dream sequences, briefly reaches and sometimes even surpasses that level of creativity. But presumably out of duty to inflate playtime, these high points are separated by hours of chores spaced out across a huge, mostly empty map without a sandbox to mess around in. The weaknesses of Ultima 6's engine just become all the more apparent.

Despite their shortcomings, Savage Empire and Martian Dreams both emerge as good Ultima games, and almost great Ultima games. Both maintain a balance of strengths and inadequacies. The variety of objectives in Savage Empire is stronger, but Martian Dreams has a more interesting cast of characters. Martian Dreams has a wider selection of weapons, but Savage Empire has functional armor and spells. Either game has very good traditional dungeons as a rule, but Savage Empire has a great Mega dungeon in the Lost Codal City, while Martian Dreams has some awesome mini-dungeons in the dream sequences. You see what I'm saying?

What both games share are their 1990s Saturday morning cartoon sensibilities: shooting tyrannosauruses in the face with flintlocks and manufacturing robot bodies for Martians. These are activities with a colorful, light-hearted appeal that aren't often seen in Ultima. The Worlds of Ultima games play fast and loose with the series' identity. These are zany concepts cooked up by people looking to think outside the box. In doing so, these games ran the risk of cheapening what Ultima stood for. This is a series of tradition and familiarity, or at least that's what it had become by this time. Much of each Ultima game's identity comes from the ways in which it references and builds atop itself. It's a unique balance of adventurous risk-taking and creature comforts.

This is perhaps how Ultima most embodies the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, who Garett considered himself to be a student of. There's always a link to the comfort of home, a hearth to warm your tired bones beside. But comfort is born of contrast. It's easier to appreciate the crackling of a fire or a warm mug of Irish coffee while a blizzard rages on the other side of your living room window. Only the thin veneer of home separates you from death, and you can't help but cherish home as a result. Ultima had always had one foot in the predictable and the contented, with another in bold, dark, and uncertain territory. Too much of the former, and you begin taking the world for granted. Perhaps even worse, you risk making it mundane, which is the cardinal sin of a CRPG. Too much of the latter, and you lose what makes Ultima Ultima. If your companions didn't return time after time, if the Codex was just some book, the significance of Britannia, its history, and its inhabitants, painstakingly built over the course of a decade at this point, would be undermined.

The Worlds of Ultima games are fun, but they don't embody this ethos. There was a risk in setting a new and undesirable precedent in Ultima, one in which the series would constantly prioritize novelty and quirkiness above all else, chasing a new audience and potentially losing its heart in the process. Would this once challenging, philosophical, and boundary-pushing game be reduced to an anthology series wearing a new costume with each entry? In hindsight, it's easy to see that this wasn't the case, but it very well could have been.

Origin was growing larger with these games. The Ultima series wasn't strictly Richard Garret's baby anymore; it was now a communal effort with a large group of employees, each with their own creative ideas and business priorities. It could have been the case that Worlds of Ultima became a bi-yearly release. Wing Commander sales were titillating, and Ultima, now second banana, could only chase that kind of success. Thankfully, the Worlds of Ultima games never compromised the series' dignity. They remain a pair of flawed but fun games, spinning enjoyable "what if" yarns that briefly took Ultima back to its pulpy roots, and that brevity was for the best.

As a proving ground for the potential of reusing Ultima's engines, the Worlds of Ultima series didn't do much to move the needle. Savage Empire significantly underperformed, even considering that it was a spin-off and less likely to generate enthusiasm. While they tried to reach new customers with these games as an entry point, it seemed only hardcore Ultima fans were interested. Savage Empire sold a fraction of False Prophet's numbers, an estimated 40,000 copies, certainly not shameful, but it was the first time in quite a while that a new Ultima release couldn't be considered a hit. This was especially noticeable standing in the shadow of Wing Commander.

Despite the lackluster sales, Savage Empire was getting reasonably positive feedback from players and critics. With the low cost of development, Origin allowed Martian Dreams to go ahead. The financials of this second game were even more disappointing than Savage Empire, and it was agreed that the spin-off series was just not long for this world. It was just as well. Martian Dreams, although seen by many in hindsight as the superior game of the two, received even more tepid critical reception than Savage Empire. Some felt that these games carried the Ultima banner successfully; others felt that they carelessly staked the series' reputation on ideas and gameplay systems that simply didn't work.

The Worlds of Ultima series was discontinued, along with a spin-off that would have been based on Arthurian Legend. The Avatar would have interacted with King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. The game was fairly far along in production, even having its own set of design documents, before it was ultimately cancelled. As fun as the idea sounds, I can understand why. Slaying dragons, rescuing maidens, and enjoying the company of a tight-knit group of knights; it's not that different than Ultima's existing setting and likely would have felt redundant.

Despite the cancellation, there was another Ultima spin-off released around this time. Ultima: Runes of Virtue was developed internally at Origin for the Nintendo Game Boy, published by Pony Canyon, with whom Origin had established a business relationship. Runes of Virtue made its first appearance in Japan on its release date of December 14th, 1991. Beginning the game, you're prompted to choose one of four characters: YOLO, Shamino, Dupre, or Mariah. No Avatar? Well, of course I'm going to go for Dupre. Sorry, Richard, but his mustache is twice as testoster-fueled as yours.

After selecting a character, you're dropped into a very different-looking Britannia. Here, you must retrieve the eight runes and bring justice to the Black Knight who took them. The resulting game is something that's once again much closer to The Legend of Zelda than Ultima. You have to navigate these dungeons, dealing with enemies, opening secret doors, and finding key items to help you progress. The combat is real-time and action-based, again, like The Legend of Zelda. The difference here is that the animations are stiff, one or two frames at the most, sometimes non-existent. Hitting an enemy with your sword just feels bad, lacking the kineticism of, say, Link's Awakening. There are trapped rooms full of enemies, and dealing with them is almost impossible. You've got so few frames of invincibility. Movement and reorientation also feel really stiff and clunky, leading to the game being punishingly difficult at points. Their idea of challenge here was just to overwhelm you with enemies, giving you no quarter.

Another major difference from the mainline Ultima titles is the focus on puzzles. Here, they're largely quite simple: moving blocks into the right place, finding keys to unlock doors, and using teleporting pads to move around. As a matter of fact, the puzzles in Runes of Virtue aren't actually all that bad. There's nothing quite as well-designed as Link's Awakening, but it's important to note that Runes of Virtue predates that game. It uses the original Zelda formula but introduces a few of its own twists. The RPG elements are very light, but I guess they are still present. You raise your own stats by finishing dungeons and can find gold to purchase food and better equipment. The story is the definition of unremarkable, featuring a veritable who's who of Ultima's greatest rejects. The NPCs here don't really serve a purpose beyond giving you vague hints. Even Lord British himself doesn't have that much to say. The game seems to be geared towards the younger audiences that Nintendo was aiming for at the time, but the difficulty tells a very different story. I'm just not exactly sure who Runes of Virtue was for.

For a relatively early Game Boy RPG, Runes of Virtue was okay for what it is. It's no hidden gem, but it's also not a rote copy of Zelda like you might expect. It's an earnest attempt to do something totally different. The game was designed by David Shapiro, aka Dr. Cat, and as a largely solo endeavor, it's passable. Not a bad little bite-sized Ultima adventure, but outclassed by many of its peers. Interestingly enough, Richard Garett claims that Runes of Virtue is his favorite non-PC Ultima game.

Most of Ultima's console appearances had been victims of over-ambition, attempting to bring PC complexity to platforms that weren't built for it. Many of these ports were noble in their aims but awkwardly straddled the line between PC and console RPGs. Runes of Virtue understands and works within the heavy limitations of the Game Boy, a competently constructed, if run-of-the-mill, game that bears little similarity to its namesake.

Not long after, Origin would release Runes of Virtue 2, also for the Game Boy. The second game expands on its predecessor with better graphics, better controls, and more complex puzzles. The story is still pretty childish, with the Black Knight now kidnapping the mayors of Britannia to annoy Lord British. However, the cutscenes are quite nice for the system, and the graphics overall are an improvement over the original. The world here is actually based on Britannia, rather than whatever this was supposed to be. You can visit the shrines and speak to NPCs. The puzzles are better, the writing is better, and you can even interact with the environment like some of the earlier Ultima games, opening cupboards and firing cannons just for the hell of it. It's a straight improvement over the original game, and for a kid in the early '90s, there'd be worse ways to kill some time on a road trip.

Like the Worlds of Ultima, the portable Runes of Virtue games were not critical darlings, per se, and sales were unremarkable. However, they are not without virtue. These releases hardly mattered in the grand scheme of things. Wing Commander could have carried the company by itself, and there was no shortage of promising new projects being worked on. Since Origin's return to Austin, Texas, they'd moved to new company digs at 110 Wild Basin Road. Origin Systems was young and promising, seemingly hitting an endless stride. The number of employees they had was also ever-growing. They began distributing an internal company newsletter around this time, titled "Point of Origin." Here, they'd print articles about current projects, the state of the industry, and company news, often turning a spotlight on the talent of individual developers or even just celebrating staff birthdays. The newsletters are a fascinating peek into an energetic and optimistic company culture. With Wing Commander 2 now on store shelves, the company was sitting pretty, and they were convinced that the best was yet to come.

With three subsequent Ultima games having used the same engine, the seventh game would have a lot to prove. It would need to be a substantial leap over its predecessor, the way that False Prophet was over Warriors of Destiny, and that was taking time. Before that game would see the light of day, Origin would publish just one more Ultima spin-off, but unlike the Worlds of Ultima games, this one would be kind of a big deal.

Next time on the Ultima retrospective.

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Till I see you next time, stay healthy, wealthy, and wise. Cheers, everyone.