Subject: REVIEW: Ultima 6
From: Kai Hortmann <[email-masked]>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews

[ Ultima 6 is a role-plating graphical adventure game that uses a top-down
world view and sports a large amount of character interaction. - JLT3 ]

I give Ultima 6 a rating of 8.5 out of 10. If you don't mind having to find
out everything by yourself that should be in the manual and maybe have a
faster machine, you would probably rate it even higher.

Game: Ultima 6
Platform: Amiga (1 Meg required)
Also available on: IBM PCs (and compatibles)
Company: Mindscape/Origin (US: Phone 1-800-999-4939)

Here is my review of Ultima 6 for the Amiga. I have seen the game a
year ago on a friends 386, so there are some references to that version.

Fun: Ultima 6 is great fun and kept me glued to my Amiga every spare
       hour I had in the last week since I got it. Its more like an
       interactive picture book than a role-playing game, you can watch
       the non-player characters (NPCs) get up in the morning, go to
       work, have lunch, and so on. This leads to realistic situations
       like having to wait for a shop to open or waking up a healer in
       the middle of the night to heal a group member.

Graphics: The graphics are good. You see everything in pseudo-3D
       from above. There is much detail, many things that move or
       can be handled.

Sound: After some hours of game play the background music tends to
       be a nuisance. I haven't found a way to switch it off, except
       for turning the volume down. But as there are no sound effects,
       one doesn't miss anything when doing so.

Speed: The game is faster than I had feared it would be with
       7 MHz. But it slows down visibly when monsters are around
       sometimes even before you can actually see them. Sea
       travel seems to take forever, especially because you won't
       move when you keep a cursor key pressed, it only moves you
       two spaces and then stops. Keeping your mouse key pressed
       does work, but I haven't found a way to keep my mouse key
       pressed without using my hand yet. :)

User Interface: This hasn't changed from the IBM version, only
       the response is sometimes very slow. A short mouse click
       usually doesn't suffice, I have to click at the object or
       icon longer or several times to make it work. I started to
       use keyboard commands instead of the icons. There are only
       5 things one can do with an object: Get, Drop, Use, Move
       and Ready. The other icons are Talk, Look, Cast and the
       combat On/Off toggler. Sometimes its not that obvious how
       to get things working, but up to now I got everything
       working except the horseshoes. (Please respond if you know
       how to use them. :) )

Manual etc. : This is the games weakest point. There are absolutely
       no explanations about the user interface. While the icons
       are pretty obvious, I had to TRY every key and key combination
       to find out about the keyboard commands. Why keyboard commands,
       you ask, in a icon driven game? Well, not all commands are
       available as icons. Especially saving and exiting the game are
       done by keyboard, as are solo/party mode and possibly some other
       things that I haven't found out yet.
       Hints: Ctrl-S saves your game, while Ctrl-Q exits WITHOUT saving.
       (Guess which one I pressed first.)

Saving: You can only save one game at a time. If you need more, you
       have to DOS-copy all the files in the SAVEGAME directory to
       somewhere else. I would advise you to do so, because it is
       very easy to make a mistake that keeps you from ending the
       game without noticing it at once. I had to restart the game
       because I USED a moonstone and was unable to recover it
       afterwards. Also, if you DROP items outside the castle, they
       are usually gone when you come back, so thats another way to
       lose key items that you would have needed later.

Bugs: I haven't found a bug that crashes the game yet. The game is
       absolutely NOT multitasking and won't even start if you have
       a CLI-window open. There are no programs running in the
       background once you have started the game, neither SETMAP
       nor mouse-accelerators, screen-blankers nor anything else.

HD-Install: Yes, you can install Ultima 6 on a hard disk. I was
       even able to install it on my HD having ROM 1.2, although
       a label on the box says that you can't do so. It just
       works a bit different from the procedure in the manual.

Copy-Protection: The game is copy-protected by manual-lookup. But
       don't worry, you don't have to look into the manual every
       time you play, just when you talk to two of the main NPCs
       for the first time.

Cheating: The game has a Cheat Mode and several ALT-key combinations
       that could be called cheating as well. If you want to know
       more about this, you can download two cheat-files via FTP from
       risc.ua.edu (130.160.4.7) from the /pub/games/solutions
       directory. The files are called hints.ultima6 and sol.ultima6.

Summary: I give Ultima 6 a rating of 8.5 out of 10. If you don't mind
       having to find out everything by yourself that should be in the
       manual and maybe have a faster machine, you would probably rate
       it even higher.

<*     Kai Hortmann - University of Konstanz - Germany      *>
<* [email-masked]  or  [email-masked] *>