sorry!Īnyway, Jon had what looked like a bunch of pieces of 8x10 sized paper, taped together at the edges, and the whole thing folded many times. and he came bearing gifts! Wizardry V, no less, which I'd never played, so I was stoked.Ĭaveat: I'm telling this to the best of my memory, which ain't what it used to be lol, so if there are mistakes. My freshman year of college, spring of 1986, a close friend from high-school (named Jon) and one of his school buds stopped by my dorm to visit. Others I just load up in Paint.Net and annontate with text boxes and crudely drawn arrows. Nowadays, when I use scanned maps I print the ones that are really useful and annotate them with a pencil, to help with the old-school mood. I assumed that this meant that Times of Lore didn't require 'map-notes', and finished it without them. I know becasue I tried the same thing on my glossy 'Times of Lore' map and some of the printing came off with the tape.

The cellophane tape would have damaged paper maps, especially those that used glossy magazine-like paper and inks. For my 11-year old mind this was the obvious reason that Garriott packed cloth maps with his software. Really shows you're playing these games with a 'modern' mind-set.īack in the day, I did something similar when playing Ultima V in my C64 : I remember preparing little paper labels (same scale as the existing map text) and taping them to the cloth map. Gee, what you did with the map scan is quite awesome. In my endeavor to finally build a game from the ground up (in C++ of course) I find myself asking the immortal question of 'What made CRPG's great?' Today, with the genre being flooded with the same micro-transaction piles of dung and WoW-clones, it's difficult to see what is so great about CRPG's today unless you're an old fogey like myself that still has memories of the THAC0-driven 'Good 'Ole Days' to cling onto. I think, however, it may be time to revisit this old gem, as I'm looking a bit more objectively at really what made old RPG's great. I think the game was just simply too advanced for me at that time, and the non-linear progression was quite contradictory in contrast to the other RPG's that I was used to at the time, such as Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy, and, one of my all-time favorites, Phantasy Star (one and two). I must admit though, that it was a bit before my time (I was quite the young lad back then) so I rented it numerous times, and I believe that I eventually bought it, but never seemed to make any headway.

Seriously though, Ultima:Exodus (as it was called on the NES I don't believe it carried the III moniker) was my first introduction to the Ultima series. Oh wait, dangitall, I'm late by a good week. I then created a vector layer to draw on top of the map, so I can note the locations of towns and their names. One word on the mapping: the game isn't conducive to graph paper, so I imported the cloth map as a raster image into a geographic information system (GIS) program called MapInfo Professional. I haven't gotten a ship yet, and I can see towns and dungeons off shore, so I need to find a frigate next. Other clues-and I'm not sure how they relate yet-tell me to seek a place called Ambrosia, seek the Shrines of Truth, journey through a whirlpool (I have a feeling these are all related), seek the jester in the Castle of Fire, and to find 'marks' and 'cards.' There are apparently four of the latter, and I need to use the command to stick them into panels somewhere. From those that have something original to say, I've learned that Exodus lies beyond the silver snake, and I'll need to find exotic arms to defeat him, as only they will protect me from great evil. As with Ultima II, each person gives you exactly one line of dialog and most of them offer stock responds (although not as dumb or annoying as in Ultima II). In the early stages of the game, I've been exploring and mapping Sosaria-which isn't all that large-visiting towns, and getting clues from the locals.

Exodus ultima iii commands