Robber Goblins

Goblins robbing a town guard.

Alien

An alien. 

Fat Warrior and Skeleton

Pixel art. Orange and green remind me of CGA graphics.

Download Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar for FREE (Legally!!!)

The Ultima IV tileset is enjoying surprising amounts of traffic, so I thought I'd follow up with another cool download. This came as a nice surprise, but you can actually grab Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar on gog.com 100% for free. It's hard to complain about free. They've also got deals on the other Ultima games as well, so check those out if interested. Don't listen to any haters talking about the games "not aging well." Those people can gtfo my internet.

The PC version is much better than the somewhat-butchered NES port, but I like the NES box art (pictured above) a little more. I suppose the NES version has it's charm, but it's still more of a curiosity than anything else. Thankfully I've had the PC version since the days of AOL, so I never bothered with the NES port.

The NES port of Ultima III: Exodus, on the other hand, is quite brilliant.

Ultima IV Quest of the Avatar Tileset

Last week I finally finished Ultima II, which allowed me to return to my 7-months-in-progress game of Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar. Tonight, all I have to do is reach the depths of hell and recover the lost codex of the Avatar.

So in honor of this historic event I'm posting the Ultima IV tileset in all its glory. More posts on various Ultima-related escapades forthcoming.

Overall it's an amazing tileset that can teach new pixel artists a lot about economy and representation (particularly of environments). My only criticism of the graphics is the decision to use 4 frames of animation for the enemies. 2 frames per monster would have been plenty. Sorry it's slightly messed up at the bottom, that was a mistake I made when adjusting the colors to more-accurately reflect how they appear on a very old but brilliant 14-inch CRT monitor.