Ask Paul: February 27 ⭐

Happy Friday! After a huge week for Xbox, it's not surprising that we're all wondering about the future. Speaking of which...
? Back to the future
christianwilson asks:

Have you ever played any of the Ultima games? I’ve been thinking about the series lately because I used to play Ultima Online and looking to unofficially revisit that world in tabletop form by running some games in Brittania. It’s a series that was very influential for its time but sadly seems to be left in the past.

Yes, but these were the very earliest Ultima games and so this was over 40 years ago. The last one I had was Ultima IV for the Commodore 64, which came with a little metal ankh (that vaguely resembled a Monopoly game piece) and a cloth map of the world that I ended up using as a printer dust cover. A friend and I would play that one pretty regularly, but I can barely remember it now.

But this kind of thing was a big deal in that era, generally and for me personally. I was an avid reader of Tolkien and related fantasy/sci-fi. I played Dungeons & Dragons (and a few similar games, like Traveler) with a group of friends regularly. We all spent time with physical board games and early computer games. One of my first Commodore 64 games was a dungeon crawler-type game that came on cassette and I was able to break out of it and into its source code, amazingly it was written in BASIC, and that fascinated me. But there was this progression from the Adventure/Zork text-based games to kind of static graphic games that were still text-based or maybe had text choices to pick from, and then on to truly graphical games like Bard's Tale and so on.

Thinking about this now, the big thing that happened right after this was 16-bit computers like the Amiga and Atari ST, and then 16-bit game consoles. And the former could play the Sierra adventure games like King's Quest, and that was what I wanted at the time. I had an Apple IIGS and then an Amiga 500 and went through any number of Sierra games and similar games like Maniac Mansion from Lucasfilm Games and The Pawn (which I had to look up), and things just got more sophisticated. Or at least more beautiful: Defender of the Crown is in the upper echelon of Amiga games because it looks so good, and it was fun to play, but it was very simple too.

Anyway, it's been a while. For me, growing up or whatever, there were these amazing Amiga side scrollers as well as the fantasy/adventure games, and then we got into the first-person era with Wolfenstein 3D and then DOOM and that was all she wrote. I do have this vague memory that Richard Garriott (I believe) was hosting a live event in what I assume was Ultima Online and someone showed up and assassinated his in-game character, which is hilarious. But I have no idea where this game series is at right now, if anywhere. EA, I guess? It looks like the latter Ultima games have a Diablo-style look and feel. Speaking of which, Diablo was a big deal for a while there, despite all...