I thought I would be careful, I thought I was in control, but soon it didn’t even make me feel better, I just needed it to function.

You laugh but this is the exact thought process that goes into smoking. “I’ll quit before I get addicted” – and they say teenagers’ brains aren’t fully developed.

Food is one of those annoying mechanics in the Ultima games also. Remember when I said if your HP goes over 9999 in Ultima 2 it rolls over to zero and you instantly die? That’s because you buy HP in that game, just like food but cheaper. In the first game (and Akalabeth) you gain HP upon leaving dungeons depending on how well you do, and I actually kind of like this mechanic. It feels earned rather than just spending money at an inn, and the game is very generous and forgiving with it. I don’t remember whether there are any healing items or spells in the two games. Starting with Ultima 3 your HP regularly increases when you gain levels, and obviously that’s how it stayed.

(You raise attributes in Ultima 2 by, you guessed it, buying it from a trainer. You need a ton of money in that game, which you can tediously grind by sailing around and firing cannonballs at helpless monsters on the shore. In Ultima I you visit signposts that increase attributes by reading them – there are levels that you gain every thousand XP, but all that does is make spawned enemies tougher to keep the game moving along.)

I kind of like these road-not-taken mechanics from old ’80s games (modern gamers add ’90s to that list, and they have a point – look how long it took to develop WASD-and-mouse controls – but they were current for me, dammit. WASD is now the industry standard but I had never used it until Morrowind (2002) and although I beat that game I still can’t quite get used to it and default to the arrow keys.

In Ultima 3, the first Ultima game with more than one character, each character has their own food supply and can individually die of starvation. On the one hand, it adds an element of strategy in that you can reallot food from a weaker character to a stronger one so certain characters can survive longer than others, but on the other, that’s fixing a problem caused by the very resource-micromanagement mechanic that causes it. The remake of Wizardry I is on my GOG wishlist but I’ve never played a Wizardry game and I haven’t played Might & Magic since the ’90s and I forget how food works in that; still, Ultima III has a ton of janky broken elements from being one of the first third-person RPGs with multiple player-characters, if not the first. These road-not-taken features aren’t universally interesting or good. (Ultima 3 solves the major problem of multiple characters – combat on a limited number of tiles with terrain – by the grid-based combat on a separate screen, thus being the spiritual forebear to FF Tactics. With first-person dungeon crawlers without sprites like Wizardry and Might and Magic, of course, this isn’t a problem in logistics or coding so they were party-based from the beginning.)

Speaking of alchemy and broken mechanics, a certain potion in Morrowind is more lucrative than the ingredients are expensive, and the shop that buys things and sells ingredients is in the first town. Not only is it basically a license to print money at the very beginning of a fairly tough game, but it levels up your alchemy skill spamming them out, and you gain levels (and attribute increases) by increasing skills so you can make the game much, much less difficult. SaGa Frontier for PlayStation has an infinite-money trick too, but that one’s a bug in the programming.

It’s possible to run out of money buying ingredients and having mixes fail, but once your alchemy skill gets to critical mass the sky’s the limit, just like in real life you can live off compound interest.

I completed the quest with the goblin lair east of Krizsan and got a ton of coin to go towards spells or training. The game is moving much better now. My party is level 9, enough to easily wipe out a swarm of goblins or wolves, so I’m going to try my hand at the null bug battle again. Update: success, just barely – only my sword user survived the fight, but I completed the quest for… nothing except XP and reputation. I went on the quest to get the commander at New Formello to give the slith laborers some heat but she just says she’ll get around to it. Maybe there’s something else I need to do (no new quest issuee though – this one waa “Help the Sliths”) or maybe I just need to come back later. I’ve got a feeling you can get an item or something from them.