Rating: 
Summary: Complete Disappointment
Review: I don't know why people would give this game a good review. It is the buggiest piece of crap I have ever played. Who cares if the graphics are stunning ... the game isn't even playable! Bugs prevented me from going farther in the game at several points, forcing me to go back to old saved games. After the fourth or fifth time, I quit playing. After an hour of playing, the game slows to a crawl and needs a reboot. It crashes quite often. DO NOT BUY THIS GAME UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. YOU WILL BE DISAPPOINTED.
Rating: 
Summary: *** PII 250 or lower need not bother ***
Review: This game is so advanced graphically that anyone without a mega powerful system AND graphics card shouldnt even bother..the frame rate on my pIII 400 is only bareable if i scale down the graphical settings to bare minimum...these settings include everything from the texture level to how far u can see, so if u can cope with being able to only see blocks at point blank range by all means try the game...other than the technical difficulties the game itself doesnt even feel like a normal ultima game, it borrows heavily from other titles such as hexen (which was mediocre in itself). In my opinion dont even bother if u r a die hard ultima fan with a normal to slower range computer.
Rating: 
Summary: Great RPG! Should be game of the year!
Review: I was very excited when I first got this game. I played it every day. I have already beaten the game and I still play it. The graphics are great and it works perfect on my computer. I have a Dell 500 mhz with a voodoo 3. To get the great graphics it is highly reccomended you have a voodoo. Overall I think the game was worth the money.
Rating: 
Summary: Look people....
Review: of course U9 doesnt work on your computers, it doesnt matter what kind of cpu you have if you dont have a 3dfx card it will run like crap...guaranteed. but the latest patch which most of you probably didnt think or know how to do download, fixes most of the problems. so calm down, u9 is a great game...awesome graphics, huge world, and great story, although dialogue is cheesy and the voices suck. not as great as many of the other ultimas, but then nothing is. it is still in my opinion the best rpg since baldur's gate.
Rating:
Summary: If there was a ZERO star rating,I would use it.
Review: This game is a joke.Let me tell you why.It took me 4 tries to install it on my computer.It crashed 3 times in ONE day.I am `running` it on a 800mhz athlon with 256megs of ram and a geforce ddr,and it is a TOTAL S-L-I-D-E S-H-O-W.If I had a intel 1.5 gigahertz,512 megs of ram,and a next gen 3d card,i might get 30 frames per second.I hear all this stuff about how good of a rpg this is if you look under the `bugs` {these are not mere `bugs`,these are supa` bugs of the worst kind,i.e.crappy programmers and rushing pr people dont mix} I cannot see past the bugs,because i dont work at intel and i do not have access to a prototype gig plus CPU. I keep my system in top shape,so I know its not my cpu.if you have anything less than a athlon 800,256 ram,geforce,forget it.wait for some miracle patches,hope they work,and wish you saved the money for Diablo 2. A BIG BIGG BIGGG U-P-S-E-T.I am quite upset to see this series go to the dogs. {mouse64 cries] :[ REVIEWER: Mouse64.look for my Quake 3 and asheron`s call reviews! look for me in the THISTLEDOWN server in asherons call! I am mouse the sick,and i will hook you up with weapons! DIABLO 2 DIABLO 2 DIABLO 2 DIABLO 2....
Rating:
Summary: $60 coasters in some pretty packaging.
Review: However, Gamespot had the foresight to see through this act with their"What Happened to Ultima IX?" exclusive a couple of yearsago, interviewing one of the key disgruntled dissenters from the Ultima dev team. It would seem that Origin's glory day had long passed us on the wayside, and we had been listening to a charismatic apparition insist otherwise.No introduction need be made for the myriad of technical migraines that await the intrepid gamer attempting to run this beast on his machine, courtesy of other exasperated reader reviews here. However, if you do get it to run quasi-decent, probably due to something along the lines of a Pentium III chip, 256 megs of SDRAM, and a Voodoo III card, still brace yourself for clipping issues, swimming snags, and progressively boggy performance due to a pathetic inability of the program to unload its own cache. Ah, and now on to the review of the game's artistic merits! Or lack thereof! The bugs make Ultima Ascension an atrocity as it is without adding aesthetic insult to injury, which this game's design unabashedly indulges in. If you're a long-time fan as I am, prepare to return to your beloved Brittania and witness it bastardized and twisted into a grotesque tourist attraction for the Action/Adventure gaming crowd. Except that no respectable Action or Adventure gamer would waste their time or money on such a half-assed pile of code as Ultima Ascension, not with a laughably simplistic combat system with bogus "progressive tier" skill levels, idiotic enemy AI, and blatantly derivative Tomb Raider mechanics in its multitude of dungeon crawls, except not nearly as fun as the Lara Croft romps. Outside of that, the game's design is definitely Ultima-lite. There will be no camaraderie of one's party as in past Ultima's, thanks to its "new and improved" lone wolf approach. There will be no sense of personal identity with the Avatar, due to male-aryan typecasting and the inclusion of impersonal and histrionic voice-acting. There are also no pure prose descriptions of your adventures to simply read since everything has to be voiced off to you, giving the meat of the script a very eviscerated feel. Lastly, there is not nearly as much of an expansive landscape to explore, thanks to the "new and improved" 3D engine, which compared to its isometric ancestry, scales back everything enormously. To sum it up, it's a painfully small world after all. Ultima Ascension introduces its own unique faults in its present incarnation. An inferior inventory system based on slot allocation is used instead of the more realistic and welcome weight and volume system of before. I spent more time worrying about what to carry than what dangers I might have faced on the road. There is a belt pouch, ala Diablo, but it's little reprieve. The interactive cursor undergoes some equally unwelcome changes from its previous version in past Ultimas, for no good reason. Be prepared to irrevocably use potions and scrolls before making the negative transition. The plot consists of a linear itinerary of shrine-cleansing in order to purge the land of its anathemas, with some rote moralizing thrown in, as opposed to the complex sociology of past Ultimas. It's the worst type of RPG advancement cliché that wouldn't be out of place in the 8-bit Nintendo's Dragon Warrior. So much for those shades of grey Garriot supposedly professed his love of in storytelling. During the game, I felt like some character actor dragged in to reprise the Avatar role one last time, take my cues, affect heroism where needed, and basically act like the stalwart hero needed for OSI's marketing machine, with none of the soul of my past adventures. Shortly into the game I started regularly consulting a walkthrough, because in my apathy I couldn't be bothered to solve the game's contrived puzzles on my own. I never had to resort to such measures in past Ultimas, not even with Pagan, my enthusiasm for the advancement of the plot speaking for itself. All hail Beast British and his tyrannical virtues, the Sosarian Sell-Out Extraordinare. The real king-of-the-hill in the CRPG world is Interplay, their Fallout, Baldur's Gate, and Planescape: Torment franchises speaking for themselves. Interplay is the gaming company today that Origin never aspired to me; let its epics speak to you, and leave Origin's Ultima ruination in the dust.
Rating:
Summary: This game had good potential to be awesome...
Review: I was looking forward to U9 for quite some time and when i finally got my hands on it i uninstalled it the same night i installed it. For one this game is the biggest resource hog i have ever seen, its about 700MB for minimum install and about 1.2GB maximum. Another thing is i have a AMD K6 2 400MHz w/ a TNT card and this game looked like a friggin slide show, the frame rates were terrible even when i turned down detail and sight distance. The bugs.. ahh the dreaded bugs! I'm not even going to get into that subject, theres too many! This game had some awesome potential to be the Game of the Year but OSI just had to rush it out for the holiday shopping spree insted of keeping it in development for another month or so. If they gave this game another month or so it would have been awesome, i would have rather waited longer than play this buggy piece of junk.
Rating:
Summary: I really wanted to like this game.....
Review: I've been a big fan of the Ultima Series ever since Ultima III on my C64. Pre-release publicity for U9 sounded great, so I was eager to get my copy. Unfortunately, there are many technical barriers, and a few gameplay barriers, that stopped me from playing this for very long. First on the technical side: I have a PII 400, 128M memory and a Diamond Viper V770 Ultra (which uses Riva's TNT 2 Ultra processor.) The game ran more like a Powerpoint presentation than anything else. Even with the more recent patches improving speed, it still drags. If you have a Voodoo card, you may get better results, because Origin designed it around Glide. The graphics would be gorgeous, if only the frame rate weren't abysmal! As far as gameplay, the world feels very alive and vivid, tho it feels a lot smaller than previous Ultima's. Being able to stand inside a building and get a real view of what's outside is stunning though. The interface is simple and well done. However the second and final killer to my enjoyment of this game was the voice acting. The Avatar sounds like he took ten too many quaaludes, and most other voices are poorly done as well. Someday if Origin puts out another performance-improving patch, I may try again, because the world is beautifully rendered, and I want my last experience in Sosaria/Britannia to be a good one. In the meantime, after reading other reviews, I've just started playing 'Planescape: Torment', and it looks like that one's going to be a winner.
Rating:
Summary: Awesome, with reservations
Review: I'm playing this game for the 3rd time, and I still love it. Patience is required, because as others have said, 3D accelleration is a must to get anywhere in the game. I also found that the patches cause more trouble than they're worth (i.e. some monsters you're required to kill to progress in the game suddenly become invincible), so I run it straight out of the box. Load time is slow, particularly in cities, but underground scenes run great (don't worry--you have to conquer 8 dungeons. You'll be underground A LOT). The graphics are second to none I've seen. The lengthy load times are more than compensated by the visual treat you receive after the wait. I'm running a 400 Mhz PC with 128 Megs of RAM, and experience hanging periodically, along with choppy movement. But again, for the quest-hungry gamer, it's a great adventure!
Rating:
Summary: neither longtime fans nor action gamers will care for this
Review: I've been playing Ultima games for several years. Played u7(both), u6, u4, uw1,uw2, and the dismal U8:Pagan and UO. This is not a bad game, but it is a bad Ultima IMO. It's clear that Lord British went the way of u8 and forgot about the promises made in fans.txt in the u8 patch. The problem is that we were led to believe that it would be something that it is not. No party, no female avatar, chase camera view like Tomb Raider, no npc schedules, very tiny towns with a few npcs a la Diablo, very few side quests not part of the main plot.....you get the picture. This should have been called "An Avatar Adventure," or something like that rather than the grand finale to this series. Read the Horizons bulletin board. As for the game itself, the graphics and vistas and such are suitably spectacular, though not really any better than Drakan. Some,but not much world interactivity. It has graphic glitches and clipping problems all over the place. It is more bug-infested than a garbage can in summer; random crashes, corrupted save games, you get the picture. It is clear that this was rushed out the door just before Christmas to make some extra gold pieces for OSI. Plus, ridiculously high system requirements. Gamers with pIIIs and even Riva Geforce and tnt2 cards are getting lousy framerates making play quite a bit of drudgery. It's clear that the D3D support here is very poor. Those with voodoo3 cards apparently do the best. Whether that changes with patch3 I dunno, I haven't downloaded it yet. Play was marginally acceptable on my 128 meg system with a voodoo2. I could say more, much more. Don't buy from anywhere where you can't return it, please. Gamespot.com said it best...most disappointing game of the year. The game world is very small. Regardless of what anybody says, this game is quite linear, forcing you to go where the game wants you to go next. Not what I expected in an Ultima. Indeed, doing stuff out of order has been reported to 'break' the game and is not recommended. Definitely has the feel of an action/adventure and not a CRPG.
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