Now Playing: Ultima V Lazarus

I distinctly remember playing Dungeon Siege multiplayer at the Legend offices and exclaiming “Oh my god, could you imagine an Ultima game with this engine? It would be so amazing!” The forest environments in DS looked very good, and the relative disappointment of Ultima IX was still weighing heavy at that time. And now, after almost 5 years, it is here: Lazarus, the complete port of Ultima V to the Dungeon Siege engine. The first of its kind that ever got finished. For that alone I give kudos to the team.

Before we go any further, you have to understand that Ultima V was my first ever Ultima game. I must have been 14 or 15 at the time, and was playing the Amiga version that I had bought(!) at Karstadt in Essen from my hard-earned allowance. My English wasn’t nearly as good as it is now and I didn’t understand everything perfectly, the graphics were bad even for that time, and Ultima VI was already out for the PC (showing me what the series promised for the future). Still, I was enchanted. Had the cloth map spread over the chair next to me to trace my progress through Britannia. Kept a journal of all the information I had gathered and kept a list of where every character in the game lived (you never know when you had to find somebody again). And played for days and months without end.

It is with this background that I reinstalled Dungeon Siege on the computer and added Lazarus. And it is with this nostalgia that I am giving Lazarus an extended try. Because quite frankly, if it wasn’t for all the memories and the knowledge what this mod could possibly be I would probably have dismissed it as Yet Another Mod(tm) and moved on. I mean, who has time to play all this stuff, anyway?

Ultima V Lazarus is definitely good, and I’ll upgrade that assessment to “Great” if I get sucked into playing for a fair amount of time. So far I’ve only managed to leave Iolo’s hut and make it to Britannia, and reactions have been mixed. The nostalgia and the atmosphere that goes along with it are still there. I love the music, I love visiting the old towns. All NPCs are there and have expanded conversation trees. The introduction with the Shadowlords is still evocative. But the graphics, which seemed so great when Dungeon Siege came out, look dated now. And I still can’t see the sky, which was a complaint in the original game. The new artwork created by the mod team is serviceable and never destroys the mood, but it doesn’t hold up to commercial games. It’s telling when I can spot the Poser model in the opening sequence as soon as it appears on screen.

Maybe it is because I have played this game several times before that I don’t quite get sucked into it anymore. Instead of exploring a new, exciting world I feel like I’m on vacation in some part of the country that I lived in years ago. It’s fun to revisit all the old places and memories, but it’s not the same as back then. I also notice that I lost a lot of patience since the first time I played games like these. I tire of the conversations rather quickly and just want to “see stuff and kill things”. I know that’s a terrible thing to say and kind of misses the whole point of playing an Ultima game. But what can I say, I’m older now and have less time for this stuff Of course I’ll still keep playing.

You can download Lazarus on the official Lazarus homepage. If you ever played an Ultima game in your life you should definitely give it a try. The music alone (which is available as a separate download) is worth the visit. So, once again, a big congrats to the team that made this possible as a hobby project. Let’s hope for more finished conversions in the future, especially the Ultima VI project.

North Bay Floods

What better way to celebrate the last day of the year than with some good, old-fashioned water damage? It’s been raining all day and night in the North Bay, driving the Napa and Russian rivers to record highs. And Victoria’s apartment is right next to the Napa river. Like, right smack next to the river, only separated by a bike path.

Watching the water rise from 8 1/2 feet to currently 28(!) feet has been an interesting experience. We might be in luck, I don’t think the water will quite reach the doors. We still have a few feet of buffer zone, but downtown Napa is already flooding, the streets are impassable (forget getting back to Marin right now) and the King Kong matinee we wanted to catch has gotten a bit more difficult since the entrance to the movie theater is blocked by 2 feet of streaming water.

We’ll see what we get to do for new year’s eve tonight – I have the feeling that we’ll crawl into bed at 12:01. I only got 2 hours of sleep tonight watching the water. No, this night did not help us get over our jetlag

I Am Not Dead Yet, I Can Dance and I Can Sing…

I finally fixed my laptop! A couple of months ago, my Dell XPS started slowing down considerably, to the point where I couldn’t even stream simple video anymore, let alone play any games or do 3D work. At first I thought that some video/audio codecs had gotten screwed and eventually reinstalled Windows. When that didn’t work and I started getting BIOS errors about it I ordered a new power supply from Dell, thinking that maybe the CPU wasn’t getting enough power anymore and was throttling. That didn’t work, either. Then I found a thread in the Dell forums that talked about a well-known throttling problem that affects a significant number of Inspiron XPS Gen 1 laptops. Ouch! I was all set on replacing the Prescott processor on my mainboard, but as I started disassembling the computer I found a much simpler solution.
Turns out that the problem was caused by two completely clogged system fans, where the dust buildup didn’t let through any air at all. The computer was overheating just a few minutes after bootup, and the CPU throttled down immideately. I cleaned the fans and everything is back to normal – yay! Same thing worked for Jamie’s overly loud Inspiron 9300.

Victoria and I head back to the US in a few hours, and come the new year I’ll try to get a steady stream of updates going again. In the meantime, I redid the formatting of my Downloads page in glorious Notepad code, since I was getting a lot of hits for the dotXSI4Maya plugins. I’ll add a quick post to the Blog page, as well.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

I’m Not Dead

Nope, I’m not dead. I’ve just been busy. More importantly, I reinstalled my laptop a little while ago and still don’t have a decent HTML editor back up and running. More when I get this thing fully operational again, the Windows reinstall did not fix my problems. Seems to be something with the hardware

TTP file_id.diz

“SPECTRAL”? I don’t remember that for the life of me… Anyway, fixed the link to Arma3.zip, which incorrectly went to the Beyond Belief download instead. I guess a few people have been trying to download it lately, maybe I should convert it to Q4 sometime?

BTW, FILE_ID.DIZ files were little info files you’d add to your BBS uploads, so that the BBS could display the info its interested users. Ah, the time before the Internets…

Updates to Downlads Page

I’ve updated the Downloads page with links to the GDC material and some other stuff (dotXSI4Maya Plugins, Toggle Component Mode script etc.)
Desktop computer died on me the other day while playing Quake 4. It’s up and running again, but I haven’t made as much progress on Arma6 as I could have. Ah well, no rush…