Ultima VII

The true beauty of Ultima 7 lies in its amazingly rich game world, both technologically and creatively. The game allows you to do almost anything you wish to do. It has lots of locations, and all the different items in the game world have a function. […] you can actually harvest crops, grind them into wheat, add sugar and water to make flour, and bake that to make edible bread.—Barak Engel

Like Ultima IV, this is one of the classics in the Ultima series. Many consider it the best Ultima ever.

It had the same weird perspective as Ultima VI, but instead of a small map window, maps were fullscreen. System requirements were steep. One magazine recommended a 50MHz 486—back in 1992 when a 25MHz 386 was the gaming standard and many games (Alone in the Dark, Dune II, Wolfenstein 3D are some examples) still ran on a 286.

There was a sequel to Ultima VII which bore the same number and came out a year later: Serpent Isle.

Reviews and Links

• A full and rich RPG that will keep you entertained for several weeks, Michael Thompson says:

  There isn't much I did not like about the Black Gate. If you like the more hack and slash type games, forget it. If you like stats coming out of your earholes (like Crusaders of the Dark Savant) you also may be a little dissapointed. Black Gate manages to strike a balance between both extremes well.

• A fistful of Ultima 7 (The Avatar's Guide to Sin) with lots of screenshots.
• Ron Windeyer has info about Ultima VII and VIII, especially how to run them under Windows.
• Kenn's Map Page has maps for Ultima VII and many other games.
• Ultima VII: Forge of Virtue Walkthrough by Michael Fleming.
• Exult

  Ultima 7, an RPG from the early 1990's, still has a huge following. But, being a DOS game with a very non-standard memory manager, it is difficult to run it on the latest computers. Exult is a project to create an Ultima 7 game engine that runs on modern operating systems, capable of using the data and graphics files that come with the game.