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Ultima 7 IBM PC MS-DOS 1992 Origin Systems


Ultima VII: The Black Gate



Origin Systems released Ultima 7: The Black Gate for IBM PC MS-DOS 3.3 in April of 1992. Ultima 7 is a cRPG that features icon-driven mouse control, a multi-layered GUI, close-up detail and a high degree of environmental interaction.

Ultima 7 is the predecessor of Ultima 8 Pagan of 1994.

In Ultima 7 windows can be dragged about and moved over each other. However, in comparison to cRPGs with snappy full-screen UI modes the sluggish "pop-up UI" of Ultima 7 is a downgrade; a gimmick. In addition, Ultima 7's oblique projection is awful; the worst you will ever see in a top-down game. And its screen-scrolling is almost unbearably choppy. And there is no visible grid or tiling for precise movement and positioning.

Ultima 7 was coded by 19 programmers. Why did they need 19 programmers to code this garbage? Oh, that's right: it's Origin Systems. Who laid out one million bucks to make Ultima 7. Don't know about you, but I don't see a million bucks worth of design, data and art assets in this turd. What I see is a wasted opportunity.

Ultima 7 displays in 256-color VGA 320x200. And while Ultima 7 features seamless transition and its graphics are well-drawn and colorful, such aesthetics are utterly ruined by the oblique perspective and choppy scrolling. It is clear to me that Origin Systems could not code 2D VGA well: two years before Ultima 7 came out there were MS-DOS games that featured super-smooth per-pixel hardware scrolling.

Why didn't Origin Systems code Ultima 7 to display in non-standard square-pixel VGA 320x240 (for per-pixel hardware scrolling). And why did they employ oblique perspective when Ultimate Play the Game had shown that isometric was best perspective eight years before Ultima 7 came out?

Ultima 7 requires an i80386SX-16 MHz CPU, 561,144 bytes of free conventional RAM and 1 meg of XMS RAM. Ultima 7 employs its own memory manager, known as Voodoo.

Distributed on 6x 3.5" 1.44MB HD diskettes, Ultima 7 extracts and installs to hard disk drive via PKUNZIP archive extraction utility v.1.1 by PKWARE Inc. The install size is 21 megs.

Overall, I give Ultima 7 4½/10.

cf. 


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