| ULTIMA II: REVENGE OF THE ENCHANTRESS |
 
The next year, 1982, Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress would be released. This was the first Ultima game programmed in assembly language, and has kind of an interesting history. Between Ultima I and II, Richard Garriot got into the movie "Time Bandits" and it became somewhat of an influence on this game, as now, instead of being based in Sosaria, it's based in the real world over multiple time periods, with Sorsaria rolled in somewhere.
The plot is after killing her lover - Minax - in the previous game, Mondain seeks out to destroy the space time continuum and the universe in revenge for what you have done. So her minions travel over varioust time periods, screwing up earth's timeline. Basically, it was pulled from the movie Time Bandits. The entire game is in CGA, runs way to fast on all but the slowest of 8088s, and has that sort of murky vibe that feels like I Should be listening to Bauhaus while playing this on an IBM XT in a abandoned warehouse in a top hat with a monocle and a Dave Stewart facial hair setup like a "proper Englishman" while speaking in a "beyond collegate" vocabulary. The game itself tends to pride itself on being the "sequel of the #1 best selling RPG". Okay, but Ultima II is one of the more maligned entries due to speed, graphics, and overall, story issues. Compared to Origin System's later work, it's a bit derivative, but still not a bad game at all. It's just an early effort, before I feel Richard Garriot and co really got their ducks in a row from Ultima IV onward.Top Hat Englishman Plays Ultima I got this game with the Ultima collection in 2002 when I bought a big box copy from a thirft store. My first impressions is 1.) IT's too damn fast - even Ultima I ran at acceptable speed on my 486 DX4-100, but this, you need a real IBM PC XT to play it in it's original, unpatched format. Secondly, compared to I, which actually came out for PC much later as in 1980, there was NO IBM PC, Ultima II seems more like it came out closer to the actual release of the IBM PC. The assembly language programming really shows the true speediness and power of assembly language, but it also shows that once you get something to scream along on a 4.77MHz 8088, anything newer is going to have problems. Howver, I've only dabbled in it a little bit, and it's even more cryptic than the third in the series or even the first game was. The first game was more like Akalabeth but with better graphics and less of a glutton for your character, vs. Ultima III: Exodus which had a very strange leveling system and up to 4 characters in your party. VIDEOS
Ultima II Comparison - CGA vs. EGA Upgrade (2007, DOSbox) |
