On holiday this week, so here’s the second of my recent excursions into Bullfrog’s glory days.

My love for Syndicate is something that I find difficult to express in words. It’s a game expressly calculated to appeal to both the 10 year-old version of me and the current gnarled oak of a man I have become. It’s all about trenchcoat-clad cyborgs fighting gang wars with weaponry ranging from Uzis to rocket launchers, all in the middle of a living city where innocent bystanders are routinely incinerated in the crossfire from your obscenely powerful guns — and if that idea doesn’t at least catch a glimmer of your interest then I don’t know what to tell you. Probably you’re not going to be very interested in Syndicate. Probably you’ve also had the joy surgically removed from every other aspect of your life, but I try not to judge.

For the rest of us, Syndicate is possibly the landmark Bullfrog title. People still rave about Syndicate, even today, and it’s pretty easy to see why: it’s the first thing¹ they made that was expressly designed as a game first rather than a system. Populous made the mistake of the system being the game, which is why the reaction to it today is… well, it’s pretty much the one I had when I wrote the last one of these; it’s acknowledged as a remarkable technological achievement but there’s a rather lukewarm reaction towards actually playing the thing. Syndicate still has the open world, autonomous system that all the Bullfrog games are known for, but it stands in stark contrast to Populous by making this system — the city environment — a backdrop for the player’s actions within it rather than the be-all and end-all of Syndicate itself. Sitting on top of the city is something that is very explicitly game-y: a squad of four cyborg agents ordered around the streets with the left mouse button and who will gun down anyone sitting under the mouse cursor given a cue from the right mouse button. Each mission in Syndicate has a concrete objective — assassinate this target, persuade that target, eliminate all rival syndicate agents in the city — but doesn’t tell you how you should be going about it; instead it just dumps your agents into the mission city, gives you a target marker and leaves you to get on with it.

These days this seems like a pretty token amount of structure for a game, but it did wonders for Syndicate’s coherency when compared to Populous. Syndicate isn’t anywhere near as open or sprawling a game as Populous, but that’s a good thing; the bits it cut were fairly flabby and abstract anyway, and what’s left is a pretty focused experience that plays very well to its theme, rather than the theme being an ill-fitting mask for an already-existing system. For example, rather than having Syndicate’s fifty levels be a simple linear progression from one to another, Bullfrog made the effort of contextualising each level by presenting it as a region on the world map. By completing the missions you gradually spread the stain of your syndicate’s colour across the globe, and — importantly — there’s a limited degree of choice given to the player as to which mission they attempt next, as any region that’s adjacent to territory you control will be open for a takeover. There’s also a point to doing the missions that goes beyond “You have to in order to finish the game,” since each region you take over pays tax that funds your R&D labs’ efforts to develop new and better ways of killing people.

The R&D portion of Syndicate would probably be considered pretty basic today – aside from improved body modifications for your agents there’s maybe twelve things to research, half of which are pretty useless — but it nevertheless provides an invaluable sense of progression to Syndicate. The body mods are expensive as hell to both research and install, but they provide your agents with dramatic performance boosts, making them faster, more resilient and more accurate. An agent with only Level 1 arms will spray lead all over the place when firing his Minigun, wasting ammo and increasing Time to Kill², but the same agent with Level 3 arms will fire every single bullet dead-on to the spot where you point your mouse cursor. As for the weapons, the blind research in Syndicate (you can only direct your efforts into one of four very vague research areas) allows you to work your way from basic pistols and shotguns to Uzis, and then to Miniguns, and then to lasers and the infamous Gauss Gun — these days we take the term “Gauss gun” to refer to magnetically accelerated weaponry, but in Syndicate it’s just a fancy name for an immensely destructive rocket launcher. Like most games there’s a point where you have so much money that it ceases to mean anything, but for the first two thirds of Syndicate fully outfitting an agent with the cutting edge in weapons and cyborg implants is ruinously expensive, which in turn makes your otherwise faceless stooges investments to be protected.

They’re still expendable, mind. Replacing dead agents is a setback, but it’s a price you might end up paying given how violent Syndicate’s combat is. I’m actually a little surprised there wasn’t more of a GTA-esque outcry over it at the time since it inevitably involves the wholesale slaughter of civilians by the dozens. It might be entirely inadvertent, but unless you’ve upgraded your agents with the maximum Arms tech the spread on their weapons means they’re going to catch passers-by in the hail of lead they unleash when they return fire on enemy agents. Because the weapons do include flamethrowers and rocket launchers it’s kind of hard to discriminate when hordes of trenchcoated cyborgs are throwing themselves at your beleaguered team; the wandering-around-on-fire-screaming animations seem a little tame today, but 10 year-old me was very impressed with them at the time. And that’s without even getting into the thing most people remember Syndicate for: using the Persuadertron to press-gang the city’s population into your own private army.

The Persuadertron seems like one of the leftovers from Populous that went very, very right. It’s a magic doodad that brainwashes anybody standing near your agents to your side; basic civilians are converted instantly, while guards, police and enemy agents require a successively greater critical mass of already-converted personnel, but if you have the Persuadertron equipped sooner or later you’re going to be trailing a crowd of converted citizens behind you. These citizens are unswervingly loyal: armed citizens such as the police will fire their weapons at targets when you do, while unarmed civilians will go so far as to arm themselves with weapons dropped by fallen enemies so that they can join in the shooting. They’ll suffer terrible losses if you get into any kind of serious battle, but each bullet they stop is one less that hits your agents. It feels almost like an afterthought that Bullfrog chucked in because it was a shame to have this living city environment that you could only really interact with by killing the population, but it’s one that reinforces the central theme of Syndicate: that life is cheap, and any amount of collateral damage is acceptable as long as you get the job done for your corporate pa ymasters.

Syndicate is a great example of Bullfrog’s imaginative system design being properly harnessed into an actual game; by focusing down the gameplay from influencing an entire tribe to control of just four agents while compensating the player with a degree of choice on the strategic layer it comes across as a much more coherent experience than Populous, even today. It’s creaking a little bit these days – the UI, vehicles and inventory are all pretty painful to use– but I found it was still perfectly playable, and more than that, it was still enjoyable.

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After being harangued by the Voice of God for taking the wrong exit out of Trinsic, I get Cate’s map of Britannia out to try and find out where she should be going. The map isn’t immediately helpful but, operating on the assumptions that the big built up area is Britain, that it’s reachable without having to get on a boat, and that Trinsic doesn’t appear to be in the middle of the desert, I conclude that she is currently somewhere to the south of Britain and that she should start heading northwards. This is a skill called orienteering long thought lost in this age of dynamic map markers and fast travel.

Unfortunately by the time I’ve figured this out the sun has started to set, and unlike most games I discover that you cannot see a goddamn thing at nighttime in Ultima VII. To make matters worse Iolo and Spark are both constantly complaining that they’re hungry. After some fiddling I manage to get Iolo’s inventory open to see if he’s got any food on him.

MOTHER OF GOD. Those are the creepiest eyes I have ever seen. Or maybe it’s just the way I have the two equipment screens arranged so that he appears to be making a squicky come-hither expression at Cate. Whatever. The inventory system in Ultima VII is quite comically bad in that it functions exactly like a real bag: fill it with too much stuff and you have to go digging through it to uncover whatever’s languishing at the bottom. After some preliminary excavations Iolo turns out to have some mutton and a loaf of bread, while Spark is carting around some grapes and sausages. I shove the meat-based products down their gullets before heading to the local inn to stock up on provisions. The innkeeper sells food as expected but attempts to gouge me horribly on the local delicacy. Cate does not fall for her ploy and instead buy fives legs of mutton at three gold each. We’re on a budget here, people.

Sadly she is unable to avoid forking out twenty more gold pieces for a room for the night as I don’t really want her to be blundering around in the dark with only a creepy old man and a street urchin for company, and I also want to see what the shops of Trinsic have to offer now that Cate’s actually got some money to spend. Iolo promises to watch Cate while she sleeps, which does no favours for his creepiness factor. In the morning I am somewhat dismayed to learn that the shops sell equipment which is no better than what Cate & co. stole from the various houses around Trinsic. It seems there’s nothing else to spend my vast fortune on except more combat training. That is, until I talk to the stablekeeper.

Who sells me a horse. A horse. It’s barely quicker than walking but who cares, I’m on a horse. This is travelling in style.

Leaving Trinsic from the north gate this time, and the Voice seems pleased. “YES, AVATAR, THAT IS THE PROPER DIRECTION!” it booms. You just wait till I find you, pushy narrator guy. We’ll see if you can still offer patronising commentary with a dagger rammed down your gullet. A couple of minutes hard riding brings Cate to what I assume is Britain from the way a very tinny rendition of “Rule Brittania” starts playing as soon as she enters the city limits.

Iolo and Spark immediately start grumbling that they’re hungry again after going all of six hours without food. Honestly, they’re worse than my cats; I’m starting to dislike the game for lumbering me with an old man and a small child as my first companions. Cate shows them some tough love by keeping a tight grip on the party’s food supply, and the group starts casting around in search of the two murderers from Trinsic. First stop, something called the “National Branch”. Sounds like a bank. If we don’t find the murderers in here we can at least rob the place, I guess.

Everyone remember where we parked!

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For a game set in a pastoral medieval fantasy idyll Ultima VII sure doesn’t pull any punches. Cate the Avatar travels to Britannia from our world (long story, best not to think about how stupid it is) and immediately upon popping out of the dimensional portal is accosted by some guy called Iolo, who apparently knows her of old. Iolo is talking to a cringing, cap-wringing peasant about a gruesome murder that has taken place in the stables. Ha, “gruesome”. This is a 1992 game and everything is so clean and pleasant! What could possibly qualify as gruesome in a place like thi-

Oh.

I have to say I wasn’t exactly expecting the game to start off with Cate being tasked by the town mayor of Trinsic to investigate a horrific ritual double murder – the guy staked out on the floor is Christopher, the town blacksmith, while a gargoyle called Inamo has been affixed to the back wall of the stables by way of a pitchfork inserted through his thorax. The only clue to be found at the crime scene is a key lying next to the body. Since he’s a massive cock the mayor won’t even give Cate the password to leave the town until she turns up some evidence as to who did it. This involves wandering around town talking to all and sundry about their names, occupations, Trinsic, dismembered corpses and the weather.

Sarcasm aside, this is actually a fairly neat way of letting the player learn the game in a safe environment — there is nothing which threatens them in Trinsic, and they cannot leave until they’ve completed the murder investigation, so they’re free to wander around getting to grips with the control system (and boy does it need some grip) and getting their first introduction to the game world. Cate visits shops and inns, does a little combat training, and then goes into the church-like structure in the centre of town.

Which is where she finds the first hint that Ultima VII might actually deviate from the usual RPG plot tropes we’ve become accustomed to after thirteen years of Bioware games. The church is the local headquarters of an organisation called the Fellowship. On the surface they’ve got this pleasant, saccharine façade, but also they have this definite creepy, Scientology-esque cult undertone. The Fellowship seems to be very, very entrenched in Brittania society with many of the ordinary townsfolk also being members — including Christopher, the murder victim. All of a sudden the ritual nature of the killing is starting to make a lot more sense, especially since the one useful piece of information Cate gets out of the Fellowship representatives is that Christopher had a falling out with the Fellowship shortly before his death.

Long story short, Cate solves the mystery of who did it by talking to the blacksmith’s son, who says he had a dream about a man with a hook for a hand and a gargoyle without wings fleeing the scene.  Dreams apparently having the same provenence as CCTV evidence in Britannia, Cate makes her report to the mayor, who continues in his cockitude by asking Cate a bunch of copy protection questions that I’d normally have to sift through the manual for. Happily GoG have thoughtfully included a .pdf file with the game download that has all the answers, and the mayor rewards Cate with one! hundred! gold pieces. I’m not sure if it’s the currency inflation seen so often in modern games, but that doesn’t seem like a very large quantity of money. The mayor promises another one! hundred! gold pieces (yippee) once she’s tracked down the murderers (who have fled to Britain, the capital city) and gives her the password she needs to get past the guards and out of this rural hell-hole.

I suppose it wasn’t a complete waste of time. Cate’s meanderings around Trinsic allowed her to steal literally everything that wasn’t nailed down without any complaints from the townsfolk, with the sole exception being when she tried to pilfer a cake from one of the houses. A disembodied voice boomed out “THOU SHOULD NOT BE DOING THAT, AVATAR!” Cate ate the cake anyway. Now, as Cate attempts to leave Trinsic by the south gate the same disembodied voice speaks once again.

“THOU ART GOING THE WRONG WAY, AVATAR!”

I hate backseat drivers.

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The news that GoG are going to be adding the original Syndicate to their store on Thursday caused many parts of the internet to explode in an orgy of fangasmic joy. Syndicate is rightfully regarded as one of the all-time classics of gaming, which is one of the reasons why the news of the FPS reboot has gone down like a cold cup of sick with most of the gaming community. It’s a fairly simple top-down shooter at heart, but its masterstroke was putting the shooter bits into context by setting them as individual missions on a vast, world-spanning strategic map. This strategic layer let you tax your captured territories and plow the resulting funds into researching ever more lethal weapons and bionic body parts for your team of drugged-up cyborgs, providing the sort of wholesome family entertainment that led to entirely-predictable calls for it to be banned¹.

Adding this sort of overall meaning to a game that otherwise remains limited in its scope is almost always a good idea – the Mercenaries games are the most fondly-remembered of the Mechwarrior series, while the Total War series built its entire reputation on detailed battlefields littered with hundreds of corpses that nevertheless represented only a single clash of armies in the wider struggle for control of a vast empire. We’re more invested in a game if we have some say in the direction it takes, and the more freedom the game gives us to choose that direction the better – which is why an FPS reboot that will no doubt end up being a linear series of scripted missions with a few RPG-lite character upgrades as the sole concession to choice is completely missing the goddamn point. The fans are rightfully up in arms over that one because the original game is so fondly remembered. You will rarely hear them mention the sequel, however, which is odd because I think it’s by far the superior game.

The original Syndicate wasn’t perfect. It suffered from more than a few flaws. Most of them were down to technological limitations inherent in what was a very ambitious game for 1993 technology, but the one I hold it truly accountable for is that it’s more than a little light on world-building. Perhaps it’s too much to ask from a game that’s nearly two decades old at this point, but I remember the manual had a huge amount of background information that never made it into the game proper. While the mission briefings do their best they end up being hamstrung by the necessity of having to devote most of their words to telling the player what they have to do. The missions themselves are all entirely standalone, disposable entities where you’re dropped into a sandbox city that’s visually identical to the other dozen sandbox cities you’ve visited and told to kill a guy/kill a bunch of guys/persuade a guy. And let’s not even get into the game never following up on its amazing intro with an equivalent outro².

Syndicate Wars was released three years after the original in 1996, and it more than makes good on this defect. In fact it does one of the most effective jobs of creating a compelling world and atmosphere that I’ve ever seen. In order to do this it has to be more overtly linear than the original game (although it provides almost the same amount of choice in terms of mission selection) but that’s a worthwhile tradeoff; there are fewer missions, but they have more meaning. The world of Syndicate Wars is directly channelling the dystopian cyberpunk vibe of Blade Runner and early William Gibson novels, and this bleeds through in almost every aspect of its presentation. Like the original game the strategic layer is presented as the holographic interface of a controlling Eurocorp executive mastermind, but thanks to three years of technology development it looks sleeker and far more futuristic.  The game’s story is all about an unexpected assault on the all-powerful Eurocorp Syndicate by a religious organisation called the Church of the New Epoch, which subverts Eurocorp’s control of the global population and brings the syndicate to its knees. The Church makes up the second faction in the game, with the player able to choose between working for Eurocorp or the Church at the start of the campaign. This isn’t just a palette swap either, with the Church campaign being fundamentally distinct from Eurocorp’s; a player who picks the Church will play through the same storyline but they’ll do it from the Church’s perspective – where the first Eurocorp mission is an attempt to salvage something from the wreckage of a once-mighty corporation, the first Church mission involves infecting Eurocorp’s global network with the virus that crippled them in the first place. The differences even show up in subtle things like the tech descriptions, where Eurocorp’s blurb takes a scientific approach that stands in stark contrast to the Church acolytes unquestioningly accepting new technology as a gift from their messianic religious leaders.

Oh yes, the “religious” leaders. The Church of the New Epoch isn’t a church built around God but instead worships technology. They field technology that is many years in advance of what the Syndicate’s scientists are capable of, and the wellspring of this technology is a document called the Codex which was written by the Church’s leaders. Who are these leaders, where did they come from, and how do they have access to such advanced technology? The Eurocorp storyline is all about piecing the syndicate back together while trying to resolve this mystery, and it’s made all the more interesting with the introduction of a third unplayable faction, the Unguided. These are literal cyberpunks– individuals who have broken free of Eurocorp’s control but who also reject the teachings of the Church. Dealing with the Unguided rebellion distracts Eurocorp but also ends up posing problems for the Church given the identity of the Unguided leader.

Gameplay-wise, Syndicate Wars is a little bit Marmite. Most people viewed it as a fine game, but one which was somewhat worse than the original because of some of the changes made. I’m not one of these people, but I can certainly see their argument; some of the changes Bullfrog made in order to address criticisms of the original alter the gameplay in fairly fundamental ways. The most obvious example is the universal ammo system. In the original Syndicate guns had a limited supply of ammo, and once they’d run out of bullets/energy/rockets/whatever the gun was useless. This led to the absurd situation where each of your four agents would be carting around eight miniguns under his trenchcoat, with each minigun essentially acting as an additional magazine. Bullfrog’s solution to this for Syndicate Wars was to introduce some fluff where all guns – even projectile weapons – now fire slugs of energy that are powered by a small fusion reactor contained within the agent’s cyborg body. Since they’re all running off of the same power source they all use the same ammo; exhaust the ammunition supply for your minigun in Syndicate Wars and you can’t just switch to another weapon. Instead you have to wait, defenceless, while the agent’s power plant recharges.

Now, if you ask me this introduces an interesting gameplay challenge in that the player now has to think about the best way to end a fight quickly. Engaging in a protracted gun battle puts you at a disadvantage; you need to strike hard and fast and then back off while your ammo replenishes. I enjoyed this gameplay change, but other people hated it – and I can’t exactly say they were wrong to do so when it was essentially placing an artificial limitation on the way they played the game. Certain of the other alterations are more overtly bad; Syndicate Wars is a fully 3D game which came out at a time when 3D gaming environments were in their infancy. As a result it has all the unwelcome baggage you’d expect an early 3D game to have vis-à-vis the control system (especially for flying vehicles) and the camera³. Finally you can no longer raise money through taxing territories and selling pilfered equipment; instead your main source of income is robbing banks via demolishing them with high explosives and making off with the cash, with the occasional armoured car robbery thrown in for good measure. Pulling off these in-game heists is very entertaining, but if you don’t know where these banks are (and the game doesn’t exactly go out of its way to tell you) you can quickly run out of money for researching and upgrading your agents.

Gameplay-wise, then, Syndicate Wars is a rather flawed beast just like its predecessor. As a game, though, it provides a far more coherent and full-fat experience; the player actively wants to unravel the storyline and beat the Church, which is a big improvement on taking on the hordes of faceless syndicate agents that were the primary foes of the original. This goes back to what I said at the start about giving the individual gameplay elements of a game some wider context that provides them with meaning. Most games opt to do this with a storyline. Some games opt to do it through player choice. A rare few, however, manage to combine the two elements – this is the reason why I find the true RPG classics so damn compelling, and the same is true for Syndicate Wars. As with all old games it might be a little bit painful for somebody to go back and play today, but you should at the very least take a look at this unofficial Syndicate bible (EDIT: link dead, removing) as it’s got most of the world-building bits that didn’t take place in-mission. And if that induces you to track down a copy of the game, then so much the better.

1. If the internet existed in 1993 this is the part where I’d provide some sort of link as documentary evidence. Since it didn’t (at least not in the sense that it does today) you’ll just have to take my word for it.
2. I mean this quite literally. Syndicate doesn’t have an outro, or an ending of any kind. Once you finish the final mission it dumps you straight back to the main menu with no fanfare whatsoever.
3. The plus side is that Syndicate Wars’ city environments are – again – very atmospherically cyberpunk, which is a massive step forward from the original’s identikit brown industrial parks.

The post In Praise Of: Syndicate Wars. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

This is the beginning of (hopefully) a series of posts that detail my experiences with an RPG I have often heard praised but never played: Ultima VII.

One of the hazards of playing older games is that you tend to run into paleolithic design elements that have, for better or worse, disappeared as games have become increasingly streamlined and user-friendly. To our modern gamer sensibilities, coddled as they are by elaborate in-game tutorials that hold our hands as they teach us to play the game — often infuriatingly integrated into the first half-hour of the campaign so that we are unable to avoid them — these design elements can often seem bizarre and unreasonable. We are no longer expected to Read The Manual; instead, a game should set the barrier to entry as low as it can in order to include as many people as possible. And if that results in the loss of some nuance and complexity from the overall design of the game, then so be it.

As a result, carrying out the videogame equivalent of archaeology can end up being a rather trying experience for any would-be Joneses.  Not only do they have to learn the game in the same way as a contemporary player, but they’re also operating under a completely different paradigm. Games have moved on since then and anyone climbing into the time machine is likely to suffer from culture shock. Getting over that shock can be pretty difficult, sometimes. For some people it’s insurmountable and can lead to them wondering why on earth game X is regarded as such a classic. For the rest of us, it’s something we learn to live with.

I like to think that for someone whose family didn’t even own a PC until 1996 (my parents preferred Acorn computers for some reason), I have a reasonably high tolerance for games released before then. Back around 2003-04 I was suffering from a distinct lack of money combined with abundant free time, and so I resorted to trawling abandonware sites for my gaming kicks. I experienced the cliff-like difficulty of Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space, the sprawling complexity of Emperor of Fading Suns, the incredibly primitive Windows graphics of Pirates! Gold, and in each of these cases I managed to make it past their various gameplay foibles to uncover the classic lurking beneath. I even got into Darklands for a time, a game with a stat screen that looks like a multinational corporation’s end of year financial return. I mention all this as a way as emphasising that when it comes to old games I’m fairly accomplished at putting up with hundred-plus page manuals, crappy UIs and dated control mechanisms. But in that two year period I never experienced anything like Ultima VII.

Ah, Ultima VII. It’s a game I have oft heard mentioned as one of the great classics of the RPG genre, but which Home of the Underdogs¹ didn’t have in its database at the time I was carrying out my little expedition into gaming’s past. I always thought this was a shame, since a sprawling open world RPG with an insane level of interactivity is the sort of thing that would have been right up my alley. I mean just listen to this:

The gameworld of both games is renowned for its interactivity: virtually everything not nailed to the ground (and not excessively heavy) can be moved, taken, or interacted with in some fashion. It is possible, for instance, to bake bread, to forge weapons, to milk cows, to play musical instruments, and even to change a baby’s swaddling. The Avatar and his companions will complain of hunger pains and severe thirst, and will even die if these matters are not attended to eventually. If they come across a disgusting or gruesome scene, they may groan and vomit; strong alcoholic beverages may also induce vomiting.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always wanted to play an RPG that let me change a baby’s nappy for no reason other than “Because I can”. So I was very happy when Good Old Games announced last year that they’d acquired the rights to some of the old Origin Software games; games which you could not find for love nor money on abandonware sites back in the day. They started out with Privateer and some of the earlier Ultima games, but I knew that if I waited long enough Ultima VII would crop up on their store page somewhere. And at the end of November my patience was rewarded.

It’s only now that I’ve gotten around to playing it, though, and after dabbling in it for thirty minutes I have discovered something that none of the glowing, nostalgia-laden reviews ever bothered to mention: Ultima VII features the control system from Hell. It’s the sort of control system that would count as revolutionary design when the game was released two decades ago, but since nobody bothered to continue the revolution it’s faded into history as one of gaming’s bizarre curios. The problem isn’t that Ultima VII has a bad UI with confusing buttons like so many older games. No, the problem is that Ultima VII doesn’t have a UI at all.

Everything in Ultima VII can be done via the mouse. Right clicking once moves the Avatar one pace. Right clicking twice causes the Avatar to path to the point where you clicked. Right clicking and dragging (what) moves the Avatar towards the mouse pointer. Left clicking examines an object. Double left clicking interacts with it. Left clicking and dragging picks the item up. Dropping the item on the Avatar moves it to their inventory. Since there’s no UI, how is the inventory accessed? Well, you double left click on the Avatar and a stats screen will pop up through which the inventory can be opened.

But wait. That’s an awful lot of actions to load onto a two-button interface. What if the Avatar is standing next to a door they want to open (by double left clicking) and the player accidentally clicks on the Avatar instead? The stats screen pops open and my blood pressure starts to rise. Same goes for when one of the companions who is constantly trailing the avatar — or even a random passer-by — wanders too close to whatever you’re trying to interact with. Trying to remember all the commands in-game is more than a little confusing, especially when the mouse pointer features no context-sensitive icons and isn’t all that discerning about what it thinks you want to click on. And I haven’t even gotten to the point of having to fight a combat yet, when I’ll have to do all this stuff under pressure. If Origin hadn’t included keyboard shortcuts for some of the actions I think this mouse-based control system would have been like that giant icy wall in HBO’s A Game Of Thrones — dauntingly huge and nigh-on impossible to scale. As it is I think it’s going to take a good couple of hours to get used to a control system that might as well have come from Mars².

The good news is that the rest of the game seems to be exactly as advertised — vast, organic and utterly at the player’s mercy. I spent a few minutes last night just marvelling at the fact that every single NPC had about a dozen conversation topics with unique dialogue for all of them. There’s even a hilariously primitive dynamic weather system which is nonetheless impressive for 1992.  So it looks like Ultima VII may be well worth spending an hour or two clambering over this wall for. I just wish it wasn’t there in the first place, is all.

1. Experimental footnote system go! I could write a whole post about Home of the Underdogs, but these days it’s a sad shadow of its former self. Good Old Games is doing a very good job of offering many of the games that used to be on HOTU’s database for bargain prices, and if you really want to dip your toe into the legal grey area that is the abandonware scene then Abandonia is probably your best shot.
2. If nothing else it’s a good window into what goes on in the head of a non-gamer when they try to play an FPS or a strategy game for the first time, and I promise I’ll be more patient with those people from now on.

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