http://pentagram.sourceforge.net/

While I was surfing the Abandonia forums I found out that some people are working on a client that will let Ultima 8 run on current OSes.

I actually said, "WHY!??!!" aloud when I first looked at the above page since Ultima 8 was horrible. Now, I'm a person who really likes abandonware and I play old games intently to really suck the marrow out of the history of gaming; I once went over to a friend's house and we battled to beat Night Trap on the original Sega CD system for hours one time and that should give you an idea of my dedication.

I remember, though, playing Ultima 8 on my old 486 machine as a kid when Ultima 8 was value bundled with some Soundblaster software and equipment. I didn't own any of the earlier Ultima games and I was eager to see what was all the fuss was about so I installed it and played it.

It was horribly broken. Besides for the fact that Ultima 8 had a documented plot bug I would have found it impossible to progress in the game if I hadn't been operating out of a walkthrough. There were loads of invincible NPCs and lots of situations which would trigger instant unavoidable death, such as if you so much as picked up an item off of a shopkeeper's table. (A magician would actually teleport in and detonate you, no shit. You were forced to stand there and let him do it, also; your controls locked up so you couldn't fight back. To make matters worse there were certain spells that made you immortal in various ways and as I recall it was possible to crash the game big time by managing to survive events that were supposed to automatically kill you.) The clues leading you through the game were so ridiculously tenuous that I enjoyed the game playing as I read from a walkthrough but if I didn't have a walkthrough I probably would have quit playing in frustration after a few days. What an epic combination of a giant armored plot wagon with spiked wheels which drives over your skull and pops it and total lack of directions and clues about how to get on that plot wagon.

Wow, just thinking about it makes me smirk and snicker. The goal of the game is to kill all of the gods of the world so that you can return to Britiannia, but god forbid that you pick a mace off the blacksmith's table. That spells immediate doom for the god-slayer.

Anyway, the FAQ for that site says that the engine is similar to the one used for Crusader and that they hope to eventually have a nice Crusader client. I suppose that that's a reasonable reason to work on that project. I haven't been able to play Crusader but it's got a good reputation. But, good god, without Crusader, I think that the idea of someone making a client so that you could play Pagan again on your current machine would have made me lose SAN points.

EDIT: I would rather play Night Trap than Pagan. Seriously. At least Night Trap has some marginal entertainment value. Pagan doesn't really have entertainment value. Instead, it has something I might describe as "it makes me want to stab myself in the groin with a rusty steak knife" value.

Sorry that your first encounter with the Ultima series was Pagan. You should give the others a try though, especially 7 and 7-2, they can be run with a program called Exult. It was those two games that got me into crpgs and combined with the SR game for Sega into pnp gaming.

With Pagan they went off into a (sucky) new direction. In the old ones you could steal to your hearts content. You have to make sure the shopkeeper isn't looking though or the guards will get called, but you have a fighting chance against them.

Ultima 7 was, like, the only game I played for like 4 years when I was a kid. That game was just so awesome at the time.

Sadly I never got to experience any of the mmorpg ultima's. I would have liked to i think lol. Anyways my favorite Ultima was Quest of the Avatar for NES, maybe pc too??

That game was awesome. I never finished the damn thing or even came close lol. Awhile back i tried to play it illegally through ROM's along with some other games and its probably the reason my old ocmputer's brain got turned to mush, ie overrun with virus's and errors.

Wasn't night trap the one with boobies, or something?

Quest for the Avatar was a remake of ultima 4, iirc.

Night Trap did not have boobies, just lingerie and generic vampires dressed like Foot Ninjas.

Night trap was actually a prety good FMV game, better than many others.

Besides, vampires attacking a girls' slumber party is just classic

Yes, Crusher's is a common misconception. There were no (bare) boobies in Night Trap.