Ultima? Nooooooo!

Let me give you a brief explanation behind this post's tile first... for practically as long as I can remember, I've always liked computer and video games, but they were always brief distractions, to be played for a while, set aside, maybe come back to later to be played from the beginning. Then, in the mid-80's, a friend of mine who actually owned a computer (now that's aging me, innit?) showed me Ultima III. We played that game for hours on end, the same game, and had a blast... to this day, we can still crack each other up with a properly-delivered "Oh no! Orcs!" line.

That experience molded me more than I would often care to admit... first, showing me that a computer-based role-playing game was feasible, and that games, in general, could be worth spending more than a single play session on... to put it bluntly, I was hooked. When I got my first computer, fresh out of boot camp, one of the first titles I bought for it was that self-same Ultima III. Then, Ultima IV came out, and introduced me to the concepts of games with deeper interaction with their characters (you actually had something resembling conversations with characters in IV, instead of the canned replies in III) and an ethical component in games (I had to restart my game after cheating a blind shopkeeper too often/thoroughly, because games, up to that point, didn't enforce any penalties for such actions). And so on through Ultima V, VI, and VII, each expanding the story of Ultima's world, improving the technology used to tell the story, and so forth.

Of course, nothing good lasts forever... I don't recall whether Electronic Arts had gobbled up Origin Systems by that time, or completed their mutation from art-house publisher to soulless corporate monolith, but Ultima VIII was a severe disappointment, mixing platform-game mechanics with Ultima's RPG roots, and placing it in a separate world entirely (I was overseas at the time, and got the game from a local shop in the Arab lands for something like $5, and still felt overcharged). But it takes more than one game to break a franchise... so Ultima IX put the nails in the coffin. IX could have been passable, but they attempted to make it a 3d game, and never really got the glitches worked out of their engine... I kept the box for that game on my shelf for a long, long time, as a reminder to let reviewers and others take the plunge on brand new games first. Finally, the main creator behind the Ultima games, Richard Gariott, left EA for another company, but wasn't able to take his games with him... there have been a few other "side-games", and abortive attempts to create something new, but Ultima has been effectively "done" as a brand since the end of the '90s, with only Ultima Online still kicking around... and that as more of a footnote of the evolution of MMORPGs than anything else.

Apparently, EA just can't leave Ultima to rest in peace, though. They've snagged the name for a free, web-based strategy game they're ginning up, trying to cash in on the casual/free-to-play craze of the day by melding it with a mostly-forgotten franchise from the ancient past (well, ancient in Internet terms, at any rate). Here's a link to their closed-beta game... I'd like to believe that they're going to do something interesting or worthwhile with the franchise, but I'm getting the vibe that they just needed a name to toss on their medieval-styled game, and, hey, we own this one. As my brother would put it, they're probably raping my childhood... but then, I expect no less from EA.