… my doctor said to relax, soon AI will build me a home, and have a place in my heart.
First week of December! Here are a few interesting news/topics I came across this week:
- Robots Invade the Construction Site (Wired) – pretty soon the 3 little piggies can all be lazy coz the robots are building them solid homes.
- This Squishy 3D-Printed Human Heart Feels Like the Real Thing (Wired) – pretty soon, we can get 3D-printed hearts that’s even better than our current ones. Oh, maybe it’s time to watch Crank movies 🙂
- The US Government Will Pay Doctors to Use These AI Algorithms (Wired) – pretty soon AI algorithms will need their own CV, portfolio websites to apply for jobs with the doctors.
The game for this week’s Nostalgic Game Review goes to…
Ultima VI “The False Prophet”
OK, I now realized where my time went in 90’s 🙂 This is yet another game released in 1990 that I enjoyed on my first PC, a 286 with a monochrome monitor.
What it is?
It’s the RPG that ruled them all… ok, maybe not to that level. But Ultima series definitely had a long run. Ultima I ~ V featured more simplistic graphics, where as VI, and then VII pivoted into more modern graphics like most of the isometric pixel/tile-based games nowadays. VIII had 2.5D graphic (spoiler alert: I will talk more about this with another game later on), then IX was complete 3D and eventually, along with Ultima Online, moved the whole series into the chaotic world of MMORPG… (where it met its demise)
The player plays the role of Avatar, who’s actually a guy who lives in our world and gets summoned through a portal into the world of Britannia, where he embarked on the quests to return peace and prosperity.
The real appeal of the game is that you get a lot of freedom to roam around the vast wold of Britannia. It’s vast and detailed with interesting people to talk to (yes, like texting a chat-bot, except back then there were no chat, nor bots yet…), mini-quests to partake, items and dungeons to interact with.
The level of details was incredible for its time, e.g. it had its own character system so when you run into a road sign or found a rune text, you will have to translate it to English first.
What’s in it?
The devil is in the detail. The game is packaged with a lot of materials to help learn of the fantastic world it has to offer. It has a detailed manual, a ‘Compendium‘ about the world lore, and cloth map. The US version also had a ‘moonrock’ (the rock that created the portal and summoned the Avatar) which I am sure plenty of kids would keep around in case of a sudden summoning for a quest to Britannia 🙂
My impression
I learned English with this game. (Mandarin was my mother’s tongue) 🙂
While it is not the primary method of learning, this game definitely served as an important supplement. It enticed me into learning all the vocabularies. While you can click around things, sometimes it requires you to type in the right action/converstaions to progress in game. I still remember being pretty proud of knowing the words ‘codex’, ‘vortex’, ‘gargoyle’…etc.
Here is a youtube video of its full glory:
And… yes, it is playable on Internet Archive!