Spoony Plays Illusion of Gaia, Part 3

Two crazy dungeons in the sky and at the bottom of the ocean. With vampires. And angels!



I forgot to start the recording again and missed the latter half of Mu, so I redid it. Oops!  At least I didn't have to redo the entire game.

 Lesson: Cycle your saves!

Spoony Plays Ultima VII: The Black Gate, Part 3

We begin our plan to infiltrate the Fellowship.  As we reach Minoc, we learn that our killer has struck again...



Mysteries to solve

• If Margareta is to be believed, we'll be meeting with the Time Lord.  What role does he have in all this?
• What is the secret of the odd substance known as "Blackrock"?
• What kind of portal does the Fellowship plan on creating?

Mysteries Solved

• There is a definite link between the murder in Trinsic and the Fellowship; this is mentioned in the scroll Batlin has you deliver.  Batlin's scroll also mentions the Crown Jewel, the ship used by the killers.
• The item Christopher was making some manner of pedestal, and a defense mechanism for their "portal".

Stuff done off-camera

A bunch of miscellaneous training, mostly with Sentri, Markus and Zella.  Though I did also stop by Vesper and talk to Zaksam to boost a couple characters' Strength stats as well.  Bought some lockpicks and another spell or two as well.

(I will be covering most of the side-quests here, since they take up a fair amount of extra time to complete).

Minoc's crime scene is supposed to get cleaned up a day or two after you arrive in town, but sometimes it bugs and doesn't show up at all (as it did here).  Still, you can talk to people about a few suspicious things found there; namely, a Fellowship candelabra and a serpentine dagger.  Elynor denies all knowledge of both.

(The dagger at the scene is not a special item, so picking up any Serpentine Dagger will work for this purpose.  Ditto with the candelabra.)

You've probably noticed by now that most people in Minoc don't have kind words about Owen.  One in particular doesn't - a man named Karl who lives outside of town (south of the Moongate, southwest of the Mining Company HQ) visits the tavern occasionally, and claims that one of Owen's faulty ships got his brother killed.

If you take the plans from his house and show them to Julia and then the Mayor, they will confirm Karl's suspicions and cancel Owen's monument.

Owen does not take the news well.

Welp, no sense in letting his stuff go to waste.

Returning Miranda's bill after getting it signed by Heather in Cove will earn you a whopping ten experience.  Not a great reward, but it's not out of our way at all, so whatever.

The Britannian Mining Company's lone worker seems to be a gargoyle who they're forcing to work around the clock by pumping him full of dangerous drugs.  As reparation for this grievous breach of worker's rights, I confiscated all of their drugs (and sold them for a tidy profit back in Britain).

If you have any spare gold bars or nuggets, you can also trade them in at the Mint for a decent bit of cash.  Or if you're feeling really unvirtuous, you can kill Cynthia, loot the back room with her set of keys, have Lord British resurrect her, and then sell the mint's own gold back to her for a tidy profit.  (I didn't do that though.)

You can also talk to Raymundo at the play house, who wants you to audition for the role of the Avatar.  Talk to Gaye at the tailor's shop on commercial row to get a costume made (30 Gold) and come back for a bit of humorous dialogue.

Moreso if Shamino is in the party and you talk to Amber afterward.

And finally, Candice at the Museum will let slip that she's having an illicit relationship with Britannia's mayor. Confront them after they leave the Fellowship's meeting at night and Patterson will agree to break it off, and learn a lesson in both Honesty and Humility.

Bonus video: The Batlin Dupe Glitch



A simple way to get as much experience and gold as you want.  The steps are listed below.

1. Talk to Batlin and go through the questionnaire, then say "no" when he asks you to deliver the box to Elynor.
2. Make sure you have some free space in the Avatar's inventory, drop a stack of coins (or any other stackable object) on the ground, then talk to Batlin again.  Say "Package" to start the dialog about the box again, then accept.  He will hand it over.
3. For some strange reason, this will also create a duplicate of the item stack you dropped and place it in the Avatar's inventory.  You will also get the requisite 100 Experience for accepting the quest.
4. Because of a bug in his dialog, you can also now talk to him and accept the quest again.  Which means that you can also duplicate as much gold and get as much experience as you want from it.

Delivering the box to Elynor closes this loop, though, so be sure to get it all out of your system before you move on with the main plot!

Oddly, magic bolts don't seem to work.  Gold and regular bolts work just fine though, so it's a bit of a moot point - you can always just dupe yourself some gold and buy as many bolts and reagents for Enchant spells as you want...

Spoony Plays Illusion of Gaia, Part 2

We sail the sea, free the slaves and somehow end up miles in the sky, all in the span of a month...

Spoony Plays Ultima VII: The Black Gate, Part 2

Our journey continues to Paws and Britain, where we get a bigger glimpse of what's going on in Britannia.

Oh, and I turned up the speed a bit on DOSBox, so this part should run at a somewhat quicker pace.  Not accounting for game lag, of course.

Mysteries to solve

• What has caused the Moongates and magic in general to malfunction?
• Why has the Isle of Fire risen again?
• Is the Fellowship really as corrupt as it appears?
• Where is the Avatar's impostor, Sullivan?
• Who sent the red Moongate to Earth?

Stuff done off-camera

• Equipped Shamino with that spare Sword of Defense Iolo was carrying.
• Trained Spark in Dexterity and Combat (three points each) by way of Sentri and Markus in Trinsic.  By all rights he is now my most skilled fighter with Dex and Combat stats of 25...

(More info on how training works is found here)

Spoony Plays Illusion of Gaia, Part 1

The second in Quintet's "trilogy" of sorts, Illusion of Gaia is the tale of Will, a young boy from the town of South Cape, and his quest to save the world from a coming evil force.  Along the way he unites with several of his friends and they embark on a world-spanning adventure with some surprisingly dark and emotional moments.  Punctuated by brilliant dialog (occasionally awkward translation aside), fantastic visuals and one of the greatest 16-bit soundtracks ever composed, Illusion of Gaia is a truly unforgettable experience and one of my favorite games of all time.  Definitely in my top five for 16-bit RPGs, at least.

I will be trying to collect all 50 Red Jewels in this playthrough so I can face the optional boss, as I  haven't done that before...

Spoony Plays the Mega Man (Game Boy) Pentalogy Bonus: Mega Man for Game Gear

A definite oddball to the Mega Man franchise, as it was only one of two Mega Man games exclusive to a Sega platform (the other being Wily Wars on the Genesis) and it was developed by Freestyle, a very obscure studio with only four games to their name.

While not directly linked to the Game Boy titles in any way besides the license, Mega Man on the Game Gear shares some traits with the Game Boy line - the game consists of mostly recycled content, and honestly isn't too bad for what it tries to accomplish - it plays reasonably well and is overall a passable adaptation of the Mega Man formula.  However, it is weakened by its stages and sprites not being adjusted for a smaller resolution (resulting in a lot of blind jumps) and lacking a major staple of the franchise in that there are no continues - if you lose all of your lives, you're starting over from your last password!

Played on an emulator for three reasons.

1. The Game Gear has no video output.
2. I don't own a copy of the game, or a Game Gear for that matter.
3. Even if I did own a Game Gear that somehow had video out, I don't feel like shelling out another $80 for a mediocre Mega Man title that nobody cares about!

Spoony Plays the Mega Man (Game Boy) Pentalogy, Part 3: Mega Man III

The one I put off playing because it pissed me off so much.  Then I redoubled my efforts and got it with relatively few deaths.  Persistence is the name of the game, I suppose.

Spoony Plays Ultima VII: The Black Gate, Part 0: Getting the goddamn game to run in the 90s

In lieu of the usual character generation/import thing that usually goes here (a bit pointless since Ultima VII pares it down to a simple name and gender choice), I will instead regail you with a slice of the hell that a 90s gamer had to go through to play Ultima VII!

First of all, you needed a pretty beefy machine for 1994 just to run the thing; 386 + 2 megs of RAM was the stated minimum, but anything under a 486 + 4 MB ram and a decent disk cache ran slow as molasses (assuming it ran at all).  That was a recurring trend for most of the series, but especially evident in Ultima VII since there was a four year gap between it and 6.

If you tried to play the game after 1995, you also faced problems because the game hated - HATED - Microsoft's resident memory manager, EMM386.  Ultima VII would adamantly refuse to load if it spotted EMM386 in memory, insisting on using its own proprietary one instead.  So you either had to create a boot disk and do a clean boot into DOS or find a clever workaround to temporarily suspend the program.

Oh, and woe if you were trying to run it on a newer machine too, as it would run too quickly to be reasonably playable (having no built-in frame limiter like many of its predecessors) and it was incompatible with many newer sound cards as well!

Then you start the game up and - whoa no - there's no mouse cursor.  Instead, you're stuck painstakingly moving the pointer around the screen one pixel at a time via the arrow keys.  It's not because your machine is defective, it's because Origin didn't bother including a driver for it, so you either had to provide your own or just give up playing the game...

But even if you managed to have a decent machine to play it on, jumped through all of its technical hoops and launch the game, your problems were just beginning.  If your sound card wasn't 100% compatible, you'd get tinny or no music and the voice samples wouldn't play right.  In particular, I recall the Guardian's opening speech never playing properly on my machine; he would just belt out "AVA--" followed by a minute of lip-flapping silence.  It wasn't too much of a concern in-game as you could turn off the voices to have them appear on the screen in subtitles, but you were still missing out on part of the experience.

Then came the bugs.  Oh yes, the bugs.  From the game's display shaking off the bottom of the screen due to an improper graphics chip to random lockups in arbitrary spots (I recall one particular tile in Britannia that would always freeze the game if I stepped on it diagonally.  Every single time) to ones that were actually a bit funny, such as walls vanishing from Castle Britannia and leaving tapestries and paintings and doors suspended in midair.  One particularly infamous bug in early releases would also cause keys or other items to vanish from your inventory as you slept, which could potentially leave the game in an unwinnable state.  This was before the Internet was widespread too, making getting ahold of a game-fixing patch a significant issue...

Thankfully we now have a much better alternative in DOSBox, where almost any modern machine can run a full-fledged emulation of a 90s gaming PC to the last detail.  You don't even have to fiddle with IRQs or memory managers or drivers or installing different sound cards anymore; just tweak a few options in the configuration file and you should be up and running in no time.   Ultima VII is still a relatively buggy game, but it is generally a much more pleasant experience when you don't have to worry about arbitrary lock-ups or losing items out of the blue...

Spoony Plays Ultima VII: The Black Gate, Part 1

For my money, the best PC RPG ever made.  It took everything great about Ultima VI and ramped it up tenfold, creating a game universe that was not only expansive and meticulously built to the last detail, but it also sported a revamped real-time engine that made it all fun to interact with as well.  You can literally just wander around for days seeing the sights and finding all sorts of cool stuff..

Oh, and the story is really good, too.



During this playthrough I'm going to attempt to showcase a lot of the hidden secrets in the game, as well as show off some more of the more humorous "unvirtuous" acts one can commit.  With virtual impunity no less, as there is no Karma system in place...

The stealing system is also broken in a rather strange way, in that picking up and dropping items directly into your inventory is not considered "stealing".  Moving items around will cause people to become annoyed and eventually call the guards, and eating unowned food directly off the table will immediately get the lynch mob called.  Your party members will also not take too well to your crimes, with Iolo and Dupre being particularly apt to leave the party or even attack you if you steal too much.  On the other hand, taking a food item off the table, setting it in your backpack, THEN eating it is perfectly fine for all parties involved...

Mysteries to solve

• Is there a connection between the Fellowship and the murders that have occurred?
• What was the item Christopher had made, and was it taken by our killers?
• What is the exact relationship between the Fellowship and the Guardian - unwitting lackeys or co-conspirators?

Ultima VII on GOG (bundled with Serpent Isle!)

Spoony Plays the Mega Man (Game Boy) Pentalogy, Part 5: Mega Man V

Not content to retread two of the NES games and top it with a few original ideas a fifth time, Minakuchi Engineering set out to create one of the most unforgettable Mega Man games of all time with a pretty decent storyline, a set of entirely original bosses and some of the most innovative mechanics in the entire series!  It also marks the first (and so far only) appearance of Mega Man's cat sidekick, Tango...*

*Aside from a cameo appearance in 10 and appearing in the CD database in Mega Man & Bass.