Spoony Plays Ultima VI: The False Prophet, Part 3

We free the last two shrines then set out to get the Book of Prophecies translated.



And to get you caught up on what I was doing off-camera:

The quickest way I've found to earn gold (without massive Karma losses) is to venture into the dungeon beneath LB's castle.  You can get there via the ladder near Nystul's room and unlock the door via the "A" key found elsewhere in the castle.

Down here, you can kill swarms of Headlesses and Cyclopes to earn spears, leather armor and gold, as well as the occasional iron helmet or bow.  These things can be sold at Britannia's provisioner for a good bit of cash (especially spears, since enemies tend to carry several of them).

Once the Avatar reaches Level 6, you can then purchase the Animate and Clone spells from Xiao, who lives north of the Lycaeum.  These two spells are the key to completely breaking the game's economy.

(Be sure to grab Dispel Field too, as you'll need it later)

For you see, the Animate spell lets you bring life to any inanimate piece of equipment.  Since it's now considered "alive" by the game, you can then cast Clone on it to create duplicates.  Said duplicates can then be "killed" and will turn back into a normal item, which you can then sell.

Doing this, you can buy a single Magic Armor or Magic Helmet, then duplicate it to completely deck out your party.  Any spares you create can then be sold off for a mountain of cash.  If you ever need more money, just clone a few more armors!

I also went ahead and recruited three more party members, namely Seggallion and Sentri in Serpent's Hold (two very powerful fighters) and Gwenno in Minoc (has good dexterity and is quite deadly with a bow).  Having her close at hand also means we don't have to go searching for her later...

Be sure to keep at least one spare Magic Armor, Magic Helmet and weapon around, and keep at least one party slot open.  We'll need those for a particular party member we'll pick up in our travels.  I would also recommend buying some swamp boots for every member of your party from Utomo in Yew so that you don't have to waste reagents dealing with the many poisonous patches throughout the land and in the dungeons...

Spoony Plays Soul Blazer, Part 3

The underwater city of St. Elles is delivered from evil.



As it turns out, the lair you can't reach from the last area is the same lair I skipped over in the area with the current; they're both on the same map.  It just makes some foliage disappear on the other section of the map...

Spoony Plays Ultima VI: The False Prophet, Part 2

We do some more traveling and free some more shrines to weaken the Gargoyles' hold on Britannia.



I may do a bit of grinding off-camera to get my party better equipped, because those gargoyles are pretty brutal.  To say nothing of when I get to go venturing around the world and through dungeons later...

Spoony Plays Soul Blazer, Part 2

We restore Greenwood to its former glory by smiting evil.



Ah yes, and I didn't show it on camera, but there was one layer I missed and spent an inordinate amount of time searching for.  Turns out it was the last room in the first temple:

Two of these statues are actually teleporting statue enemies and can be killed.  I missed it because the darkness of the room makes it difficult to tell them apart from the inanimate ones...

This easily-missed lair is essential to restoring the third mole hole and getting both the Ice Armor and the Shield Bracelet (the latter of which is one of the best items in the game), so be sure not to miss it!

Spoony Plays Ultima VI: The False Prophet, Part 1

Our journey begins as we set out to liberate the eight Shrines (and make a note to visit the Lycaeum later in order to decipher the Gargoyles' holy text).



Also note that, bafflingly, the game's sound is disabled by default.  More bafflingly, the music from the title screen and introductory segments plays regardless of whether it is currently toggled on or off.  Press CTRL+Z in-game to enable it.

Ah yes, and here's how you level up your characters:

Once you've freed a shrine and taken its moonstone (by using the proper Rune and Mantra), return to it and Talk to it.  If you have enough experience, you'll advance a level and gain stat points depending upon the shrine you visit:

Honesty	Int +3
Compassion	Dex +3
Valor	Str +3
Justice	Int/Dex +1
Sacrifice	Dex/Str +1
Honor	Int/Str +1
Spirituality	Int/Dex/Str +1+1
Humility	Nothing

Spoony Plays Soul Blazer, Part 1

The first in the "Resurrection Trilogy" of legendary SNES action-rpgs by vastly under-appreciated studio Quintet.  Soul Blazer was a pretty dark tale for its era, putting the player in the role of an angel tasked with restoring the world from its destruction at the hands of the evil spirit "Deathtoll."  But more than that, it features quite a bit of heartfelt personal drama as well, which we'll see as we go.

A Silent Hill 2 review saved for posterity

 (I did not write this, but it's since vanished from the internet.  Luckily I had a backup...)

Silent Hill 2
Computer Gaming World,  April, 2003  by Erik Wolpaw

The Silent Hill 2 box cover folds open to reveal small, dark screenshots amid enthusiastic quotes from reviews of the original PS2 version. Stuff magazine warns, “Don’t play this terrifying action game alone,” while Maxim calls it “hands-down the creepiest videogame ever.” It’s possible that America’s men’s lifestyle magazines somehow mistook confusion for terror, because Silent Hill 2 doesn’t make much sense even when judged against the already lax sense-making standards of the survival-horror genre. Which might be excusable if it was scary—which it isn’t—or if it featured decent combat—which it doesn’t.

As the game starts, you’ve received a letter from your dead wife asking you to meet her in a town called Silent Hill. The search for her unfolds with a sort of dream logic—the logic that leads people to believe you’d be interested in hearing their boring dreams. Every character you run across appears to have one foot in a plot from some other game. Most of the dialogue and character actions make no sense, especially considering that the streets of Silent Hill are filled with monsters on a killing rampage. People go from being sarcastic to fearful to your best pal to your worst enemy, all within the span of a sentence. Virtually every word from the characters’ mouths is as senseless as the puzzles. And it’s all accompanied by a hugely inappropriate light-jazz soundtrack. Silent Hill 2 may be the world’s first survival-Dada game.

Your main enemy is a beefy guy in a butcher’s smock wearing what looks like a rusty sink on his head. To be fair, Pyramid Head (as he’s called) is a weirdly creepy invention. Other than that, though, Silent Hill 2 is all hackneyed atmosphere and no payoff. The city is blanketed in thick fog (later replaced by thick inky blackness). For fog to inspire terror, however, it needs to obscure something terrifying. Instead, it merely obscures the places you need to go and the crazy objects you need to find to solve the harebrained puzzles, making the fog significantly more aggravating than scary.

The graphics engine is fully 3D, but the camera isn’t really under your control. This might have made sense if the camera had been used to generate sudden shocks, but there isn’t a single startling moment in the game. The camera’s tendency to face you so that you can’t see what’s in front of you seems to have been engineered for maximum annoyance. There’s a command that rotates the camera behind you, but it only works sporadically. These camera problems, combined with stiff, awkward controls and a lack of monster variety, make combat very unsatisfying.

With its lackadaisical pace, clumsy action sequences, and surreal atmosphere that’s more disjointed than disturbing, Silent Hill 2 is a nightmare, but only to play.

PUBLISHER: KONAMI

DEVELOPER: KONAMI

GENRE: SURVIVAL DADAISM

ESRB RATING: MATURE; BLOOD, GORE, VIOLENCE

PRICE: $39.99 REQUIREMENTS: PENTIUM III 700, 64MB RAM, 1.8GB HARD DRIVE SPACE RECOMMENDED REQUIREMENTS: PENTIUM III 1GHZ, 128MB RAM

MULTIPLAYER SUPPORT: NONE

Copyright © 2003 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in Computer Gaming World.

Spoony Plays Ultima VI: The False Prophet, Part 0 (Introduction and character import)

After the Ultima franchise had launched itself into the realm of legendary PC RPGs with Ultima 4 and 5 before it, Ultima 6 had a tough act to follow.  Origin upped their game once again to build a world of unprecedented detail, interactivity and realism compared to any RPG before it, and they succeeded admirably.  This world not only featured NPC schedules, a day-night cycle, and an immersive dialog system, but it actually featured a world full of living, breathing characters with their own jobs, lifestyles and personalities to match.  The world itself also took on a more realistic edge, being composed of one contiguous, unbroken map instead of a world map dotted with small town maps to enter, and virtually every object in it can be interacted with to some degree - cows can be milked, cloth can be cut into bandages and characters' pockets and chests can all be rifled through for items, just to name a few.

Don't think the gameplay lost anything in the transition, though, as this is still a very deep and involved adventure that will require a lot of forethought, legwork and combat strategy to complete...



Importing your character from the previous game is a considerably simpler task this time.  Just copy your SAVED.GAM and SAVED.OOL files into a folder called ULTIMA on the root directory of your hard drive, then click the letter of that drive once the prompt comes up.  Bingo, you're done.

Also note that, unlike last time, you don't lose any of your core stats in the transition.  That should make it very easy to get yourself maxed out, if you're not already there at the start...

Manual/Box Scans

Spoony Plays One-Shot: Silhouette Mirage: Reprogrammed Hope (Japanese PSX version)

A playthrough I've been meaning to do for a while.  This is the Japanese PSX version of Silhouette Mirage, which adds in two new bosses but also suffers from a graphical downgrade and some occasional slowdown.  Still, any version of the game is guaranteed fun.



NOTE: This video is edited; you can only face Cherub after fighting Seraphim.  Instead of fighting Seraphim on-camera (as I did in my Saturn playthrough), I show Za-Zohar in this video.

While I use a boot disc to play the game on my NA system, I do have a legit copy of the Japanese version of the game.  Proof:

For a list of all the version differences, see my previous page on the Saturn version.