Rating: 
Summary: How can they get away with charging this much for this?
Review: Now, don't get me wrong, I've always been an AVID fan of the Ultima games. In fact, Ultima 8 is what got me into game programming myself. However, at $89.90 for a used copy of this, that's downright highway robbery. I got A FREE copy of it with Ultima 9, which costs $20! At any rate, only fans of the ultima series are likely to jump on this one. If you enjoy Ultima Online, I'd strongly recommend you go back to the origins and see where Ultima sprung up from. My particular favorite was the last in the series, Ultima 8. Keep in mind that some of these games are over 20 years old, so don't be expecting graphics at ALL in some cases. More interestingly is reading the documentation files that come with the CD to see how Lord British (the founder of the series) started with Akalabeth, a game that only incredibly vaguely resembles Ultima, selling copies of it at his college on 5 1/2" floppies in sandwich bags! -Javin
Rating:
Summary: How can they get away with charging this much for this?
Review: Now, don't get me wrong, I've always been an AVID fan of the Ultima games. In fact, Ultima 8 is what got me into game programming myself. However, at $89.90 for a used copy of this, that's downright highway robbery. I got A FREE copy of it with Ultima 9, which costs $20! At any rate, only fans of the ultima series are likely to jump on this one. If you enjoy Ultima Online, I'd strongly recommend you go back to the origins and see where Ultima sprung up from. My particular favorite was the last in the series, Ultima 8. Keep in mind that some of these games are over 20 years old, so don't be expecting graphics at ALL in some cases. More interestingly is reading the documentation files that come with the CD to see how Lord British (the founder of the series) started with Akalabeth, a game that only incredibly vaguely resembles Ultima, selling copies of it at his college on 5 1/2" floppies in sandwich bags! -Javin
Rating: 
Summary: A Finer Role-Playing Series You Will Not Find...
Review: Of all the ways in which Ultima is great, the stories you will experience are by far the best part of this series. You will go places you had never thought possible. These aren't simple hack-n-slash RPGs, or even the somewhat stale, high-polish epics of Final Fantasy. Instead, these are tales of corruption, predjudice, redemption, and virute. Through this series, you can watch an entire world and hundreds of people grow and evolve. The individual games are mostly what you would expect - they get richer and deeper as time goes on, with a fewer gems in the beginning, and a few stinkers at the end. I & II - musuem pieces. Load these up just to see what they were like. Hardly any story. III - the game that taught the japanese everything they know about RPGs. Turn-based party combat. A deep and complicated world. If you enjoy playing Nethack, you'll love U3. IV - The first truly great ultima. Garriot abandons pure hack-n-slash for a quest of virtue and personal excellence. V - A story of political corruption and intrigue. Not my favorite, but not bad. The last black & white ultima. VI - The best story in the series. Play this one, if any. The world is beginning to reach epic proportions now. The graphics are color, but will seem outdated at first. VII - the 2nd best game in the series, behind U6. The world is huge and detailed, and the plot is wonderful. Even the graphics are pretty good, and the game uses a mouse-interface - always a plus. VIIb - a bonus, for when you finish U7 and wish for more. Same basic engine. VIII - a mixed bag. Parts of this game plain stink. You will get frustrated. The basic plot seems like a rehash of U7b. Still, the graphics are the best in the collection, and the story can be good at times. THE ONLY BAD THING ABOUT THIS COLLECTION - The Ultima Worlds games were not included! That stinks!
Rating:
Summary: Ultima VII Reborn - (No) Thanks to EA's Shovelware
Review: Of the included games, the worthwhile one is Ultima VII; the others are too dated or broken, and Ultima 8 is just pointless. Thankfully, Ultima VII has now been ported to most major platforms, so you should be able to run it on any computer with minimal hassle. Maybe I'll try to play the older ones someday, but I'm in no rush. This was certainly not true when it came out. Written for DOS, it required editing the autoexec.bat and config.sys by hand. Designed to run on a 386/33, the game engine included in the box will requires the included 'MoSlo' program, which only lets the game issue a command to the CPU one out of N cycles. However, the Exult game engine, an open-source Ultima 7 interpreter, is freely available. If you google for "exult ultima", it should be the first hit. It has much higher system requirements than the original (about 10x), but given that most people have computers 100x faster than in 1994, this is no problem. And it even runs in different systems, like Macs or handhelds. This package is a bunch of shovelware. Ultima VII, even with its dated graphics and Midi sound, is still fun. This is certainly a niche product; it is only recommended for computer role playing games fans who are feeling nostalgic for the early 90's, back when Origin still created worlds.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Games, but not quite complete
Review: The Ultima Collection contains some of the best role playing games every seen on a computer screen. The games themselves are above reproach(except for the slightly misguided Ultima 8) unfortunately the entire series seems to have been slapped onto a CD without much thought to the gamer. While the installation program seems strait-forward each game must be tweaked before play. Using the slowdown utility moslo is fairly painless for Ultimas 1-6, the problems begin to crop up when running Ultimas 7-8. These games require a system reboot with a bootdisk. I remember the good ol' days of trying to manage multiple configurations and boot disks. An expereinced gamer won't have too much trouble setting this stuff up, but a novice may not be able to play the games at all! Perhaps now that Ultima 9 is finished Origin will give the series the treatment it gave to Wing Commander and tweak the games for speed and allow them to run under windows. The manual is little help dealing with these issues, but does provide copy protection and basic keyboard commands for all the games. The actual manuals to the games are contained in Windows help files on the CD. The manuals attempt to reproduce the design and graphics of the orinal docs. The result is a difficult to navigate and often impossible to read. A set of PDF files that could be easily navigated(such as in Myth:The Total Codex) and pritned would have been very welcome. But the greatest problem with this collection is what isn't here. While the collection does include Alkalabeth (Richard Garriot's precursor to Ultima 1) it lacks some of the other excellent games to bear the Ultima name. The Ultima Underworld series broke new ground in how roleplaying games used 3D, and the Worlds of Ultima games took the Avatar to fascinating places beyond Britannia. Judged on the strength of its games, the Ultima collection deserves a 5. The docs and configuration problems knock this down to a 4. If you have ever had an interest in Ultima, this package is still worth your time and money.
Rating: 
Summary: Serious improvement needed.
Review: The Ultima Collection features some of the greatest role-playing games of all time. Yet many of these games are very old and very difficult to tolerate for people who did not play them on their first release. Certainly, when these games were first published, they probably represented great technological improvement on previous games, but technology, and particularly graphics, has evolved considerably since Ultima VIII was released in 1994. The way it is marketed right now might only appeal to those who originally played the games (not me, I only got my first computer in 1997, but I had already played Ultima IV on 8-bit Nintendo, which was WAY better than the PC version featured on this CD-rom), or to people who consider writing doctoral theses on the history of the development of computer gaming. The rest of the population might simply overlook these games, no matter how significant they were in the development of role-playing games, because of their poor graphics. More important is the question of playability. Poor graphics do not help, but the most annoying thing about these games is that they have retained their basic characteristic of making use of DOS. To me, and to many other people who have begun using computers after the arrival of Windows 95 or 98, DOS means little more than that annoying C:\>. I know very little about DOS myself, and I have been unable to play some games in the collection, including the famous two parts of Ultima VII. "Akalabeth" and the first six "Ultimas" are easily playable through Win 95 or 98, but Ultima VII (both parts) and Ultima VIII require a special DOS configuration, which I have been unable to use, and the information included in the booklet has been of almost no help. Even worse is the question of sound. A paragraph from Origin's booklet included in the Ultima Collection reads, "Akalabeth and Ultima I-V use the PC speaker for sound. Many current multimedia PCs do not include a PC speaker. If you do not have a PC speaker you cannot hear sound effects in these games" (Ultima Collection reference card, p. 15). Origin therefore knew that these games would not be 100% compatible with today's computer systems, yet allowed these games to be re-released in their original format, and this is what annoys me most. If Origin re-released these games, we might assume that it is because the company viewed them as eventually profitable. But if the company saw the previous Ultimas as cash cows, couldn't they have been more profitable had they been completely redesigned, from the graphics to the used interface, and sound as well ? What I fear, however, is that if they had indeed redesigned these games, the result might just have looked like Ultima IX: Ascension...
Rating:
Summary: Great RPGs, but how do you run the programs?
Review: The Ultima Collection include what could possibly be the best RPG games of all time. UC includes all of the Ultima titles from Akalabeth (the game the Ultima series was based on) to Ultima VIII. In order to run these games, you literally have to be a computer expert. You have to run these games from the DOS prompt. Before you get to play any of these games, you have to fix a lot of settings which an average computer user would have no idea how to set them up, or even what they mean (I'm still trying to find out what an "IRQ" is.) Also, many of the new computers do not have a PC Speaker, which all of the games require to play any sound effects and music. By the way, do not expect Ultima I: Exodus to look anything like its NES counterpart. In Ultima I through IV, graphics are very poorly defined; everything consists of plain colored squares. If you can actually manage to setup and execute the programs smoothly, then have at this game. Otherwise, I would recommend playing the NES and SNES Ultima titles.
Rating:
Summary: technical problems don't mar the finest RPG's ever made...
Review: The Ultima Series is older than Pac-Man. All the Ultimas from 0 (Akalabeth) to 8 are here, and no matter what anybody else says, they are, collectively, the most influential works in the history of computer gaming. They inspired every other RPG since 1980, including the ever-popular console RPG's such as Final Fantasy. By way of Warren Specter's Ultima Underwold games (unfortunately not included), they inspired first-person shooters from Wolfenstein 3D onward. The quality of these games shows why their maker Richard Garriot is one of the greatest game designers ever. Be forewarned: Ultima 7 and 8 will probably not work on modern PC's without a significant amount of tweaking by a knowledgeable person. And the animation in the older games will run very fast. Nevertheless, they are well worth every frustration.
Rating:
Summary: Some of the best RPGs of all time
Review: This collection is a mixed bag, but for the price it's a great deal. My impressions on the games herein: Ultima VII - Worth the cost of admission. Even now it is the best game in the series. The plot and the graphics totally immerse you in the world of britannia. Although the graphics are a little dated it still doesn't look too bad today. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. Ultima VII part 2 - This game could have been wonderful. However, there is an extremely violent and unnecessary plot twist near the end that pretty much killed my motivation for continuing to play. I thought the rest of the story was a bit thin as well. The game is also rather linear. Ultima VIII - This game sucks, and the reason why has been adequately explained elsewhere. It does, however, have the best music featured in any Ultima, if you have a General MIDI-compatible sound card. ULTIMA VI - I've just started playing this one. I prefer a point-and-click conversation system, rather than typing my words in, but i'm enjoying myself in any case, and the plot is very good. The world is very detailed, only superseded by Ultima VII. Ultimas 0-5: The games I described previously I played when they came out (except VI). The rest of these depend on whether you're a fan or not; they are REALLY old, and somewhat simple by today's standards. But they represent some of the most important achievements in computer role-playing games. Have a look.
Rating:
Summary: Seeking Update
Review: This may be the wrong place for this, but I can't find another. Do you have, or will you soon have a version for Windows XP?
Thank-you.
Margaret R. Morgan
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