Wow, I missed these posts until I looked at recent.

Joe got me into the Avernum games from a discussion on CRPGs in which I brought up the Ultima series regarding a stable game world across several games (the Anglophilia is cloying for me, and between English, Scottish, and Welsh I’m of majority Great British extraction; I can’t imagine what it must be like for you – Richard Garriott’s alter ego, and the king of the realm, is named Lord British, the world is called Britannia, “Rule Britannia” is the main overworld music in Ultima VII in all its MIDI glory, and the world resembles Great Britain mirrored and rotated 90 degrees/laid on its side, and Serpent Isle, the setting of Ultima VII, Part 2, resembles Ireland (ironically, given the St. Patrick legend.) Garriott was born and raised in California.)

For Windows/games downloaded from AOL (2.5, when they charged by the hour and a 28.8 modem could actually save you money over a 14.4kbps, an unimaginably slow speed in the era of gigabit Internet – they changed to flat rate with AOL 3.0), there was also the Ultizurk trilogy, to its very title a ripoff of Ultima (the first two rip off 1-5; the third, Ultima VI, and The Great Ultizurkian Underland (which believe it or not actually doesn’t rip off Ultima Underworld) though I didn’t know it at the time: I didn’t play Ultima until Garriott released IV into the public domain, or at least made it free, which it still is on GOG, in 1998? I want to say). I heard that the Ultizurk games have been lost but I think I also saw that copies have since been found? Not sure. Castle of the Winds was optimized for Windows 3.1 and probably Mac. I remember it being good, but like Exile II, the shareware version gives away too much of the game and IIRC the dungeons are procedurally generated, too, so there’s no incentive to register.

(I looked it up and the Ultizurk series was indeed thought lost for years before the games turned up in the 2010s and were released for free, though you need a DOS emulator to play them. Pics – top is Ultizurk 3, bottom two are either 1 or 2 – yowtch with the third one, just a little “problematic” even for the time, although there are no explicitly black characters in Ultima, partially because the graphics wouldn’t allow it in the first five games. The picture is a one-way ticket to Cancelville nowadays. I’ll cut them a little slack; I didn’t know the Mammy archetype was considered offensive until the 2000s. Until then it just came across as “an old-timey Black woman”, though the “Uncle Remus” phonetic dialect was always frowned upon, though accepted just as the old way of doing things, not career-ending like it is now, though it would have raised an eyebrow. If I made a game or movie today I wouldn’t include any specifically Black or Indian characters at all, just too radioactive – no matter how well-intentioned, politically correct culture evolves so quickly that in 30 years something will have aged poorly and you’d be pilloried – say, if a game leaned into American Indian culture and in 2050 any depictions of cultural differences were highly taboo “othering,” and it will be have been “wrong then, and wrong now”. Barret from FF7’s “Mr. T” dialect (1997), and the mid-’90s “Tatanka, the Native American,” WWF character – practically designed to be PC unobjectionable – are pretty cringe nowadays:

I downloaded a pack of all six Avernum games for like $6.99 but it turns out they were remaking the series, so I haven’t actually played any of the originals. I loved the remake (of the remake of Exile I) of the first one but petered out in the second when I forgot where I parked my boat and eventually didn’t finish either one or two of the main quests, I forget. But I’ve eaten up the third one.

It’s been pretty easy for me to the point where I can one- or two-hit most enemies. But I’m playing on Casual difficulty while save scumming.

Jeff Vogel has also remade at least the first two Geneforge games, but also Avernum IV so that takes priority.

I’ve also attempted Nethergate: Resurrection, a Spiderweb RPG set in Roman Britain, but I couldn’t get over your party being in the dead center of the screen and you having to hold down the mouse button around them to move. Oddly, this is the mechanic in the Ultima games and I had no problem with it there – it helps that the first six games are tile-based, and the first five keyboard-only – so maybe I’ll give it another try. Dragon Quest VII first, though.

(I’m still stuck in the golem factory in Avernum 3. It’s weird that nobody else seems to have had trouble here – even in a save before reaching the control panel the beams blocking my path appear. I’m about to ask if I can send my save file to someone on the Spiderweb forum and have them finish the floor for me. I don’t want to drop this game out of inertia like I did the second – although it’s pretty obvious what to do in this one if I shelve it for six months. There’s only one thing left, go to Blackcrag.

I know the factory is optional but I want to finish it, dammit. It has a Vahnatai cloak and waveblade in one of the chests. I think there’s a debug code to take you back to Fort Emergence; that doesn’t solve the core problem, but I can give the evidence to Berra.