Still Coming

It's Monday again, so it's time for the latest page of Untrue Tales:

Karen Comes Clean page 5


And here's a simple sketch:

























So this weekend I culminated a journey that began in 1982 when I was a merely a wee lad. I finally finished playing Ultima 9, the final game in the Ultima series.
























These were my favorite games when I was a kid and I have fond memories of banging through Ultima 1 through 4 on my old Apple II+. These were Dungeons and Dragons-style roleplaying games where you played a hero called the Avatar and wandered around a fantasy world called Britannia (well, Sosaria first, Britannia later) with a group of warrior/wizard companions fighting orcs and various other nasty D&D type beasties. I sure did love 'em.

But time moved on and I didn't play much videogames as a teenager and I never even had another computer until about 1996 when my wife finally bought one for school. At the time, I told her I had no interest in a computer and would probably never use it. Duh.

But lo and behold, I was browsing through the Virgin Megastore and came across Ultima 8. So I picked it up on a whim thinking I'd spend a few hours revisiting my childhood fantasy world. Well, I was blown away by this new game. It was miles ahead of the last game I'd played over a decade before. So then I picked up a collection of the entire Ultima Series up to that point and played through the whole shamoley again - 1 through 7. Ultima 7 was just about the coolest thing I'd ever seen. There was an entire world to get lost in. I was hooked.

So then, Ultima 9 came out. But it didn't work on my computer. I couldn't really justify an upgrade to play one dumb computer game so that was that. When it finally came time to get a new computer, I wound up with a mac and unfortunately the Ultima series stopped being mac compatible after the first 4 or 5 games. So I was shit out of luck.

Until last year, when my wife came home with an old laptop PC she bought at work for 100 bucks. At last, I could finally complete my quest.

So now I've been playing Ultima 9 off and on for a few months (I don't really have much time for videogames). It's a great game. The thing is like ten years old, but it holds up pretty well against what little I've seen of the current stuff. An entire seamless world that you can run around in without load screens or anything. And I mean an ENTIRE fully rendered round world that you can sail a ship on from pole to pole. And last night, I finished the game. So now I'm done. The world of Britannia is saved at last and somewhere an eleven year old me is happy as a clam.

Now I'm gonna play Fallout 3.

Geek out.