Anyone else really upset about Ultima 9: Ascension when you finally got a chance to play it? I was one of the fools who ordered the collector's edition.
If not U9, what other game nearly drove you to tears when you found out that it really is not a great game.
For me, and i would take a guess many others, the game that was so bad, when i waited for it for so long that it saddened me was Master of Orion 3. How could a good game franchise go so bad
There is no problem so large that it cannot be solved by a liberal dosage of explosives.
I agree that it wasn't a bad game. It wasn't really a terrible Ultima game either, it just was no where near as good as U4-7. In fact, I've played through 9 twice just enjoying the world and exploring every nook. There are some cool hidden things in the game well off the beaten path that are not part of the main quest. For example, there is a village of giants, some cool crystal caves in the mountains, other random weapons, etc. hidden here and there. Even the dungeons are pretty good.
I didn't have too many technical problems playing it, and now on better hardware it's painless for me. Download the dialogue/story update and turn off the speech. This replaces the original dialogue with a better written script more in line with Ultima history. Also check out the economy update and monster ai fix.
I found 8 to be tons more disapointing then 9... Of course if 8 hadn't come first I think I would have been more disapointed.. Once you got 9 running though it was a decent game. The one conversation where he turns into pimp master with the chick will always be with me.
Capitalism tries for a delicate balance: It attempts to work things out so that everyone gets just enough stuff to keep them from getting violent and trying to take other people’s stuff.
Dunno bout U9.... Suppose I caught a lucky break by not buying that one.
One games release that really upset me way back when though was 'Elite Frontier'.
I'd been looking forwards to this for so long that the day of it's release I travelled by train to a town that had it in stock that day. Hey, not all of us had rich parents who bought our spoiled arse's a shiny new car on our 16th birthday! (Envy Alert).
Got home and loaded it into my Amiga 500, only to be greeted to a slide show in space, backed by 'The Blue Danube'! Fine I says to meself, so it runs at 3 frames a second? .... But seeing as how I took a train for this thing let's persevere. So I goes through the agony of learning how to pilot a spacecraft in an environment of Pseudo Newtonian Physics and slow motion graphics. Nice. Despite all this I'm starting to enjoy myself. Until the wonderous deeps of Space start to unravel in all their bugged code riddled glory....
The sad thing is, that underneath all the bugs and poor performance, a beautiful and brilliant game that was way ahead of it's time lay buried just out of reach.
What a wasted opportunity and total cock-up by the Publisher. Released way too early. I think this was the first game I ever patched (later on the PC version).
Bit of a taste of things to come I suppose. I mean that kinda thing is pretty normal these days.... But back then in my gaming virginity I was kinda pissed to put it mildly.
I loved Elite:Frontier when I got it for the PC, although the depth of the gameplay got lacking after a while. U9 was ok for the looks, not so much in the gameplay department. HOMM IV was my big disappointment (Mainly because HOMM I-III were so good).
U9's demo or whatever it was that came out ran at 5fps for me so I did'nt buy it. When I could run it I got it cheap and tried it. Played the first town and quit. I could'nt take getting stuck on doorframes when I was nowhere near touch one. Did'nt want to think what the rest of the game was like.
--------------------------------------------
I am Dyslexic of Borg, prepare to have your ass laminated.
I guess Ray Butts has ate his last pancake. http://steamcommunity.com/id/daehawk
"Has high IQ. Refuses to apply it"
When in doubt, skewer it out...I don't know.
I thought 9 wasn't bad and, as mentioned, I've heard it's downright playable with the right mods in place. I actually really loved Ultima 8. There was just something so cool to me about the avatar being stuck somewhere where people weren't in awe of him simply for being the avatar. It had it's quirks, but once you dove into it it was a spectacular game.
Ultima 9 had a playable, decent game buried under all its bugs and problems. Same with WW2 Online.
Black and White sucked ass, but admit it, it *was* fun to throw boulders at enemy towns and watch them crush buildings.
Doom 3's pretty damn bad too, but it's being salvaged by some cool mods.
HOMMIV was saved to a degree by multiplayer and the Equilibrius mod.
Pool of Radiance is a good contender in toppling MOO3 in terms of pure shit, but it falls short because after HEAVY modding, you can dredge up some semblance of a game from it.
I'll throw in Dung(eon) Lords. Awful, awful game.
But Master of Orion 3, for me, at least, still reigns supreme as the King of Crap. Not only is it the sequel to one of the best 4X games in history, which itself was a sequel to one of the best 4X games in history, it's also butt-ugly, braindead in terms of AI, and appears to be programmed in Microsoft Excel '98. It was only interactive in the sense that you had to sacrifice your sanity to 'interact' with it -- if you played as recommended, which meant assigning the 'governor' AI to do all the number crunching (which was the only thing to do in the game), all you got to do was press the "NEXT TURN" button. It was coathanger abortion of a game, so atrocious that Amazon.com actually had trouble PAYING PEOPLE TO TAKE THE GAME FROM THEM.
Guild Wars Characters: Sup In Hear, 20 E/R || Beefcake Supremacy, 20 W/Mo || Nesmer Mecromancer, 11 Me/N || What The Hoof, PvP Character (build varies)
Since this topic seems to be about about games which looked pretty on the outside but contained a steaming pile of crap on the inside, I'm moving it over to PC Gaming in General and you can follow the smell to that forum.
"Who's going to tell him that the job he's currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?"
-Michelle Obama 2024 Democratic Convention
Wise words of warning from Smoove B: Oh, how you all laughed when I warned you about the semen. Well, who's laughing now?
The "newer" Pool of Radiance. It could erase your freaking hard drive unpatched. I have no idea why I waited for reviews on that one but I'm so very glad I did.
morlac wrote:The "newer" Pool of Radiance. It could erase your freaking hard drive unpatched. I have no idea why I waited for reviews on that one but I'm so very glad I did.
So could Myth 2's initial release, and that was a really good game. Fortunately Bungie recalled it pretty quickly and got a patched version out right away.
Guild Wars Characters: Sup In Hear, 20 E/R || Beefcake Supremacy, 20 W/Mo || Nesmer Mecromancer, 11 Me/N || What The Hoof, PvP Character (build varies)
I picked up Ultima 9 right after it came out, not more than a year or so after I started gaming. Since I hadn't played the rest of the series, didn't know of the series' reputation, and wasn't already set on the existing storylines. I didn't go in expecting anything amazing. I had quite a bit of fun with it (although it really was a hassle, bug-wise, before the third patch.)
I was disappointed in Ultima IX probably because I really enjoyed VII, skipped VIII after hearing the backlash, but was excited about Ascension. It was unplayable at first. The patches helped, but eventually it took a new rig to make it playable. By that time the luster was gone and I was never drawn into the game or story. The exploration was fun for a time. The thing I remember most about it though was the brilliant jumping system. Put the cursor where you wanted your feet to land, if it was yellow or green, hit jump and that's exactly where you landed. You always knew if you could make a jump or not and never died on an easy, but mistimed jump.
If I had to add one, I'd put up Star Wars: Force Commander. That's a bitter, bitter taste in the mouth. If I was a bigger Star Wars geek, I could probably put an obscure name to that taste. I even enjoyed Rebellion, but Force Commander made me give up Star Wars games for years. In fact, I'm still waiting for reviews on Empire at War even though I love the concept.
morlac wrote:The "newer" Pool of Radiance. It could erase your freaking hard drive unpatched. I have no idea why I waited for reviews on that one but I'm so very glad I did.
As far as hype to quality ratio this one has to be near the top of my list. I bought it day one and regretted it more than any other day one purchase I've made. Great concept for an rpg, unforgivable execution.
My blog (mostly photos): Fort Ephemera - My Flickr Photostream
“You only get one sunrise and one sunset a day, and you only get so many days on the planet. A good photographer does the math and doesn’t waste either.” ―Galen Rowell
OMGHI2U
"I guess we're all retarded except you Gellar." - Kobra
"I'm already doomed to the seventh level of hell. If you think I wouldn't kill a person of my choosing for $50 mil, you obviously have no clue just how expensive my taste in shoes really is." - setaside
#gonegold brutesquad
I had no problems with Ultima 9's framerates. I've since read that this was because I was using a VooDoo 2 card. I found it to be completely playable right out of the box. I registered the game and thus received the second disk in the mail, but never installed that, since I was afraid it would mess up a game that was already running quite smoothly.
"I've been fighting with reality for over thirty-five years, and I'm happy to say that I finally won out over it." -- Elwood P. Dowd
