Ultima World Map

Ultima is a huge motherfucker of a game. Sure, a lot of the towns are carbon copies of other towns, but because space was saved in this way the world itself feels vast and open when you're in the grit and the shit. Notice how they took continents and just spun them 90 degrees to further save space. Overall it was a brilliant tactic. 

However, Ultima II on PC is still my favorite for some inexplicable reason.

Ultima II Box and World Map

I beat Ultima today after playing constantly for three days. It's an epic journey which I'm editing and getting ready to be posted soon, but in the meantime I thought I would kick off the Ultima fun with these Ultima II box scans and world map.

Attempting to get Ultima II to run on a Windows 95 machine presented it's own set of challenges--it took me over 2 hours to get the game running properly and patched correctly. In the end I was successful, and maybe I can package my files together to make it easier for others to play this classic.

The early Ultima games blend fantasy with 20th-century technology in a way that wasn't really done again until Final Fantasy 7. It's certainly unique; nothing else feels quite like Ultima.