No half-measures for Ultima

I bought a laser printer this week. I had one specific purpose in mind for it: printing out manuals for old 8- and 16-bit home computer games that are impractical or unfeasibly expensive to acquire "real" copies of, and giving those games the time and attention they deserve.

You see, although many games on classic home computer platforms fall into the "simple arcadey fun" category, there are also lots that are enormously ambitious and which take full advantage of the fact their host platform is a computer, not a games console. This is great, because there are lots of really interesting experiences to be had on these platforms, particularly if you explore the genesis of a whole genre. However, the downside is that more often than not, you very much need to read the manuals for these more complex games before you'll have the slightest clue what you're doing.

For me, the Ultima series of role-playing games had always fallen into this category, even though a few brief forays into them on the Atari A to Z series had revealed them (and games like them, such as SSI's Questron) to be a lot more manageable and straightforward than I had previously assumed. And so I'd always been holding off exploring them in any great depth until I had a manual by my side that I could refer to easily — and by "refer to easily" I do not mean "call up a tiny PDF on my phone and squint at", because as technologically marvellous as that might be, it's not convenient, practical or indeed enjoyable.

So, with my recent acquisition of the A500 Mini and the C64 Maxi, I thought I'd print out some manuals. We already had an inkjet printer, but as anyone who has owned a cheap inkjet printer made within the last 20 years will be able to tell you, inkjet printers have several major flaws in them that make them less than desirable to use. Firstly is the fact that their ink cartridges inevitably have an absolutely miniscule supply available to you. Secondly is the fact that replacing said cartridges is unnecessarily expensive. Thirdly is how if you don't use said cartridges for a while, they dry up, meaning you need to replace them regardless of if you've been using them or not. Fourthly, they're a bit slow. And fifthly, most of them don't do double-sided printing.

So I did a little bit of research and came upon a Brother laser printer that was about £150. It was only mono, but we print colour stuff so rarely that we can just continue to sink money into the old inkjet any time we actually need colour. The Brother printer, meanwhile, offered double-sided printing, a speed of up to 30 pages per minute, wireless connectivity plus scanning and copying capabilities. All in all, it sounded pretty ideal.

And indeed, so far it appears to have been. I printed out a bunch of Commodore 64 manuals last night and put them nicely in a ring binder. I consumed the entire "starter" toner cartridge that came with the printer in the space of a single evening and replaced it with a £12.99 third party job today that seems to work just fine. And now I have the manuals for Ultima I-VI all nicely printed out and ready to refer to. And so, I have finally begun playing the Ultima series.

Yes, that means starting with the first Ultima — specifically, the Commodore 64 version, which I'm playing on the C64 Maxi. And I've been surprised what a genuinely good time I've been having with the game so far. It's very simple and quite different in structure compared to today's role-playing games — but I actually rather like this. There's an enjoyable "sandbox" feel to it where you explore an open world, poke at various things to see what happens and gradually beef yourself up. Then there's some sort of eventual objective that you need to accomplish, but there's no real rush to achieve that — right now I'm just enjoying wandering around this world.

Ultima's most peculiar element — and something which it doesn't really explain at all in the manual, after I went to the trouble of printing it out — is its progression system. You have experience points and an experience level, and apparently you need to be level 8 to beat the game. But aside from that, progression is handled in a variety of rather peculiar ways, with "levelling up" actually not appearing to be all that important in terms of actually powering yourself up.

Firstly, like many other early RPGs of this type, you have no maximum hit points. If you "heal", your HP keeps rising and rising and rising, so it's in your interest to get them as high as you possibly can. This can be achieved in two main ways: donating money to the Kings of the realm, or by dungeon-crawling. The latter is especially effective, as it also means you'll acquire money at a good rate, which you'll need to keep supplying yourself with provisions, and to equip yourself with good armour and weapons.

How does dungeon crawling help you gain rather than lose HP? Well, any time you leave a dungeon, you get a bunch of HP back according to the number and type of monsters you splattered during that particular delve. The more you kill in a single expedition — and the stronger those monsters are — the more HP you get back upon making it safely back to the surface. So a simple means of beefing yourself up a bit for more significant challenges is mapping out a few levels of dungeon (which are, apparently, randomly generated each time you start a new game) and doing a few "laps" while bashing monsters along the way. After your workout, you'll have a bunch more money, some more experience and, assuming you make it back to the surface alive, a chunk more HP to play with.

Aside from this, you can boost your stats in a couple of ways. Firstly, the Kings of the realm offer you quests to find or kill particular things, and upon completing them and reporting in, they'll give you a bonus to a stat (usually Strength, it seems). Secondly, there are landmarks around the world that simply boost your stats when you visit them — although you can't visit the same landmark twice in succession to just repeatedly get the stat bonuses, you can zip back and forth between two nearby ones, alternating their bonuses until you get your stats up to the desired level.

This is all exceedingly odd by modern standards, but it also feels like the game is rewarding you for just wandering around and taking it all in. Although the game, its world and the core mechanics are all pretty simple, the fact there are lots of different incentives to explore makes it very enjoyable to play; it feels like you're always making some sort of progress. And while death is a fairly major inconvenience — while there's no permadeath, dying causes you to lose your weapon, your gold and all but 99 of your HP and food while being teleported somewhere random — it's by no means impossible to recover from. Indeed, on my own adventures so far I've died multiple times, and it's only after this most recent death that I've found myself absolutely armed to the teeth and ready for pretty much anything the realm of Sosaria would care to throw at me from hereon!

And if all that wasn't peculiar enough, there's also space combat. But I haven't got that far yet. I'm certainly intrigued, though, and I'm planning to continue my adventures for sure!