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Review PC Gamer Retrospective Review - Worlds of Ultima: Martian Dreams

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Tags: Origin Systems; Worlds of Ultima: Martian Dreams

PC Gamer's Richard Cobbett writes a weekly feature called Saturday Crapshoot, where he profiles various older games, with an emphasis on "quirky" titles from the 1990s. Last month, he dedicated a column to a game that certainly fits that description - the Ultima spinoff Worlds of Ultima: Martian Dreams. Here's the introduction:

Richard “Lord British” Garriott’s Ultima is, was, and always shall be one the western world’s great RPG series. They were the games that brought a sense of morality to a genre that’s so often simply about killing anything that’s green or has gold, where each new game was both a new quest, and a return to a familiar world whose dawn featured space travel and TIE Fighters and golden era waseth stilleth ableth to get away with talketh liketh thiseth. Also, at one point all your long-term friends from previous games got turned into evil chaos demons and you got to compensate by dressing automatons up in their clothes and leading a robot army against them. This was Ultima. Ultima was very special. Still is.

Then there was Worlds of Ultima, a short-lived experiment that asked “But what if we did something else instead?” A fine question, and two fine answers – the first, The Savage Empire, sending the Avatar to a Doc Savage type world for a change. And Martian Dreams? It’s Victorian. It’s sci-fi. And its character creation system is run by Sigmund Freud. Then things really start to get interesting…

The year is… well, that’s a bit of a funny one. As with the other Ultima games, the hero is the Avatar – a hero from our world who regularly heads into the land of Britannia to solve its problems, from giving the people a symbol to look up to, to preventing justice being perverted and turned to evil, to ending a race war, to finding each and every person responsible for the new iOS game Ultima Forever and kicking them hard in the nearest available genitals. (If you haven’t played that F2P abomination, consider my review less a series of specific criticisms as the taste and sensation of sick. It’s one thing to know a classic series you once loved is dead, quite another to see its corpse being used as a piñata. Playing it is to wish they’d taken the license and done something more respectful with it. Like Ultima Kart.)

Worlds of Ultima also has the Avatar heading into adventure from the modern world, only this time it’s via time travel rather than jumping between dimensions. It’s also a rare chance to see what he (you can have a lady Avatar, but he’s a he for the intro) gets up to during his downtime, which turns out to be hanging with Deus Ex creator Warren Spector. Technically, he’s actually ‘Johann’ Spector, but we’ll be having none of that nonsense, thank you very much. The two are sitting around by his PC, decorated with an Ultima VI poster, when a strange woman shows up with a package containing a photo of them both recreating their favourite scene from Back To The Future 3, and a warning that “The greatest minds of your world and my own depend on you.” So, no pressure. Needless to say though, the Avatar has no questions about this. That might sound like he’s been spending a little too much time tripping through magic moongates, but six and a bit games in, he probably just shrugs it all off as “Wednesday.”

What’s going on is that back at the Columbian Exposition of 1893, shortly before Rosalind Lutece attached the hot air balloons and it went sailing on its merry racist way, just about every celebrity of the era was having a tour of Percival Lowell’s new Space Cannon. This turned out to be exactly as bad an idea as it sounds, with the whole lot of them being shot to Mars. It’s now two years later, and in what’s unofficially dubbed Operation: Really Bad Idea, Sigmund Freud and Nikola Tesla have teamed up with a cowboy, a doctor, and lady journalist Nellie Bly to head to Mars and find out what the hell happened.

I shall repeat that. Sigmund Freud and Nikola Tesla have teamed up with a cowboy, a doctor, and Nellie Bly, to go to Mars. And via time-travel and a signed note from Tesla to himself, the Avatar and Warren Spector have a seat. “Suck on my Epic Mickey, Mike Dawson,” mutters Spector to himself, as he belts himself in for one of the greatest game premises of all goddamn time.

This game was so fucking cool. I hope NUVIE is finished someday so I can play it again without the limitations of Ultima VI's crappy engine.
 

Tramboi

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I love this game, I think this might be one of the best Origin games.
Then I'm a story/adventure fag.
 

wesmo

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Just noticed in nuvie 0.4, you can now complete ultima 6 from start to finish.
 

CappenVarra

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Hey, this was actually fun to read :)

Certainly, ‘wise’ Lord British has done much worse, including knocking up his chamber maid and keeping it a secret, having to be forced into a peaceful relationship with a whole race of people whose home was destroyed by his obsession with finding a hero, and of course, making Ultima IX.
spec.jpg
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” “No, Warren. A Spector.”

:lol:
 

Junmarko

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Loved the minor details. Like making sure you had enough oxygen crystals (I think that's how it worked) whenever you were wandering across the surface. Wish the Nuvie guys would hurry the fuck up!
 

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Loved the minor details. Like making sure you had enough oxygen crystals (I think that's how it worked) whenever you were wandering across the surface.

Yeah, I remember those. Though I also remember finding out that the consequences weren't that harsh if you didn't have any. IIRC it was some kind of stat penalty?

It's really been a long time since I played this, but I think you could only buy them in one place in the game, and it was kind of a PITA to return there every time you ran out. Sometimes you'd find them as loot, but it wasn't that often.

Wish the Nuvie guys would hurry the fuck up!

I think I'll try to find out how they're doing.
 

Junmarko

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Yeah, I remember those. Though I also remember finding out that the consequences weren't that harsh if you didn't have any. IIRC it was some kind of stat penalty?
I can't remember, I think it was a stat penalty - it's been a while for me too. I have such fond memories of that game. It was just so obscure and out of place, and really reflects the developers making something from the heart.
I was also a kid when I played it, so it peaked an early interest into who Tesla & Freud actually were etc.
I think I'll try to find out how they're doing.
Yeah that would be good, it's been a year since their last official update. I don't want them to pull a 'Deus Ex HDTP' on us ;)
 
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taxalot

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Just noticed in nuvie 0.4, you can now complete ultima 6 from start to finish.

So what is left to implement ? I have not really paid much mind to Nuvie, just looking at the occasional screenshot here and then, but it looked pretty functional. Of course, that's just looks.
 

Junmarko

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I tried it a few months back. I couldn't get the game to save my progress, so I gave up. They are still working on optimizing the engine it seems.

It's so awesome though, just having the inventory system completely re-worked to be like U7, and using more of the screen space, made it feel like an entirely new game.

nuvie_gui.png
 
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Since Nuvie 0.4
  • Eric has finished the ending cutscene.
  • I've expanded the game resolution to support virtually unlimited size (monster and item spawning will have popups at large sizes).
  • There are quite a few bug fixes like fullscreen_map1 mode should be completable (some text is still annoying though and keyboard support for it is a work in progress)
  • More artwork by Daniel c. Wurl and UI improvements for fullscreen_map mode
  • There's a new popup command bar if you press the comma (,) key
  • I added lots of key bindings for things like lock picks, orb of moons, toggling cheats, and toggling sound on and off.
  • Support for gamepads has been added like being able to press the arrow keys to type. (The save menu is the main thing that's unfinished when not using fullscreen_map mode besides needing an external application to map gamepad buttons)
  • The number of temporary actors in Ultima 6 has increased by 21
  • I'm curently working on setting menus for a lot of settings (with a bit of help from WJP for toggling buttons)
The latest Nuvie SVN snapshots are available here. You can see more up to date key bindings and cfg settings in your browser if you download this file and change the file extension to html (The web page likely won't be updated until the next release).

Unfortunately, it's pretty much Eric and me doing all the coding. He's a relatively new father and hasn't even been on irc for a month and no code commits for longer than that. I've done hardly anything on Nuvie in the last 6 months. SE and MD need Eric to spend a ton of time to get all the stats for items and actors. Quite a bit more stuff needs reverse engineered for them too. Eric was talked about improving the interface some more and possibly adding SDL 2 support before the next release. A recently added bug with FM Towns will likely need to be fixed as well.

1. unlimited game resolution with no menus taking up the screen all the time like this screenshot and the one above

 
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I tried it a few months back. I couldn't get the game to save my progress, so I gave up.

Do you still have this problem? What OS are you using? The Windows version of Nuvie hasn't been updated for the Vista+ changes and tries to write to the program files folder if installed there (I think later Wndows should move the saves to the user account automatically. when it tries to write but would likely be a pain if you need to edit the cfg file) If you still have problems, and are on Windows, you can try installing to something like c:\nuvie instead.
 
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