What did you do during the EA wars, Mommy?

Note: I just found my really expensive mandolin pick. It was on my desk, underneath some stuff. My desk will make a future archaeologist famous some day.

Okay. EA has certainly been in the news; they were bought out by a Saudi-led coalition, the same one that is now trying to buy out the Unity game development engine. That’s the one that is going all in on AI. Folks on BlueSky are calling it the best reason to start using the Godot game engine.

Unrelated to all that, probably, EA has for the first time dropped the entire Wing Commander and Ultima series into Steam. I spent a lot of time with Wing Commander back in the day, and also played Ultima III. I never did play any of the others.

While I had my credit card out for the EA games, I also may have bought some other games…

Underkeep

The header picture is of new blobber Underkeep. I wrote about the demo during last winter’s Steam Next Fest and came away really enjoying it, though I felt it didn’t really have the depth of the best of the genre (imho), Legend of Grimrock. Nonetheless, it was just released, it’s a fun, casual crawler, and you’re not going to regret your time with it.

The characters are extremely stripped-down. There’s very few stats and few abilities. There’s not going to be a lot of agonizing over the perfect build, and you can reroll the few stats as often as you like to get the good numbers.

My party consists of Stonk, the human Warrior; Tipa, the Raven Thief; Grphlx, the Slugman Voidcaller; and Kasul, the Elk Ranger. Warrior and Thief in the front line and dealing with most of the attacks; the Voidcaller heals and casts auras; all the other classes do pretty much what you’d expect.

Other classes include Paladin, Wizard and Blood Mage. Blood Mages do blood magic, using bones or their own health as components. I’d wanted to add a Blood Mage to the party but was concerned there would not be enough bones to use for their magic. Update: there are a lot of bones. I’ve collected so many bones that real-life Kasul is getting concerned for me.

The other available races are Dwarf and Stoneborn. Stoneborn are your basic stone golem and they can’t wear armor (their armor is built-in). So that was a non-starter. I want my warriors to get all the best armor.

Wing Commander: Privateer

The Wing Commander series tells a tale of an endless war against the implacable feline foe, the Kzinti. I mean, the Kilrathi. Privateer tells the story of a lone space trader that must live in that universe without the resources of a carrier group and able wingmen to help them.

This game has not been upgraded or remade; it comes as the original game and runs via DOS Box.

Wing Commander: Privateer 2

I never played this sequel. It has a lot of FMV (full motion video) in it, which was the style at the time. The movies have been upgraded and uprezzed and all that. I was enticed into buying it because it apparently has support for the HOTAS gear I bought to play Elite: Dangerous and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 back in the day. I don’t have it currently setup because I don’t have space on my desk (see: the prospective future archaeological dig, above). But I’ll drag them out for this.

Truth is, I suck at space combat games.

Related jaunt: I bought Wing Commander for the SNES a couple months back and played it and eventually figured out the maneuvers necessary to actually get the enemy in your sights. (That is to say, I read the manual that comes with it). I had a lot more luck with it then. I had even more luck when I turned on the cheat that made my ship

I’d also bought and played Rogue Eclipse, a modern take on the space fighter combat game, and I may write about that at some point.

Privateer 2 comes in many editions, depending on how different from the original you want to be, re: FMV. They also have the DOS Box’d original game if you want to get super old school.

Ultima VII

I mentioned above that, of this series, I’d only played Ultima III, a game I largely remember because it came with a cloth map. That I no longer have.

Naturally, I’d followed the franchise as it expanded its world with each new release, but I was playing the SSI D&D gold box games and some other dungeon crawlers (like the Phantasie series), and when Ultima Online came… online, I opted to wait for EverQuest to come out because the early reports out of UO described a punishing hellscape of roving player-killer bands and fighting over limited resources and I didn’t want any part of that.

I’ve been told that Ultima VII is the best of the games (though Kasul prefers Ultima VIII), so I figured I should pick it up. It comes as released, played through DOS Box. The Steam community guide shows how to bypass the copy protection so I guess, like the early dump of all those old gold box games, the copy protection is still active and the games are unplayable without outside help.

They could at least have given us a cracked copy.

Will I play these?

Sure, just as soon as I finish all the other games in my queue. There’s only a couple hundred.

Kasul bought all the Wing Commander and Ultima games. Hoping he plays through them so I can watch him play. Underkeep I will play, though. I’ll give Privateer 2 a try and hope it supports my HOTAS and that I don’t suck at space combat. If it’s just me being blown up all the time, I’ll probably stop playing. If I can make my ship invincible, well, that would be a point in its favor for sure.