Ultima 7 IBM PC MS-DOS 1992 Origin Systems

Ultima 7 IBM PC MS-DOS 1992

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, multi-layered GUI and a high degree of environmental interaction.

In U7 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 U7 is a downgrade; a gimmick. And U7's oblique projection is awful; the worst you will ever see in a top-down game. And its screen-scrolling is choppy. And there is no visible grid or tiling for precise movement and positioning.

Ultima was programmed 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 U7. 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.

U7 displays in 256-color VGA 320x200. And while U7 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 VGA well: two years before U7 came out there were MS-DOS games that featured super-smooth per-pixel hardware scrolling. 

Why didn't Origin Systems code U7 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 eight years before U7 came out?

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

Distributed on 6x 3.5" 1.44MB HD diskettes, U7 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 U7 4½/10.

cf. Ultima Underworld 1992.

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