I figured that I would throw some stuff out there and see how many REALLY old time Ultima fans respond. I started the series with Ultima IV - fell in love with it - but I never finished the game because of some critical errors and I never did figure out if it was just my floppy disk or everyone's, lol. I couldn't get anything out of Iolo; when I talked to him he just replied with a bunch of nonsense characters. And there were a couple of other NPCs that seemed like they should have had key quest dialogue that would do the same thing and then attack. I think I tried about 400 times hoping for a different result before I finally gave up, haha.

And then recently I decided it would be pretty cool to play all the Ultima games from the beginning in order. It still sounds cool. But I dl/ed an Akalabeth ROM and I literally CAN NOT figure out how to play the game. I mean, I'm old school - took BASIC in grade school and played the first Rogue and Hack - and this game still makes no sense. I move around a few times, die of starvation, game over, please insert 25 cents to continue. Then I dl/ed an Ultima II ROM and coudn't even get far enough to die of starvation, lol. The ROM came in several parts - well, when I fire up the regular game ROM it says "Please insert Player Disc". But you can't, because there is no disc, there's just another ROM file called "Player Disc" that I can't access. And trying to start the game with the "Player Disc" file accomplishes nothing at all. So I guess I'm really going to have to wait until I can afford a vintage computer and buy some old discs and REALLY get the full experience.

If anyone has some old Ultima PC stories or any insight into why I might never finish ANY Ultima game, please share!

I tried Counter Strike with Darkened Sky last night on a constant loop and it was so fast and devastating I felt like I was cheating, lol. Thanks again! I still have some tweaking of it to do but my god, the potential....  I play on a free server where we can add properties to items (up to a max of 5) and I tacked on Hit Fireball, not sure about what I want for the last prop.

I read through your very thorough guide and I get what you're saying about DCI... funny thing is my character's is only 5 at the moment. I feel like it should be higher than that because I can't handle all the incoming damage from the 4th tier of some champs but yeah I don't intend to max it out b/c I get it - if you do that, then you're missing most of the value in Counter Strike and might as well just loop Evasion for full damage mitigation. I also feel like Darkened Sky might never be able to generate enough damage to drop high hp monsters like hiryu and rotting corpses before they start running away, so I might swap out for Blaze of Death or some such when I hit 4th tier.

Thanks Crisis. I think if it's just some tiny bonus the benefit of utilizing the shield slot for extra properties will offset the loss of the bonus. Especially with Evasion to make up for it.

I'll look into the low/no sulfite wine market, thanks for the suggestion! It seems like a natural idea but somehow it hadn't even occurred to me that anyone would accomodate the allergy. And no, oddly enough, I get no allergic reaction from lunchmeat or much of anything else except pollen.

I hear you! A lot of movies these days are either obvious remakes or the sneakier kind that don't actually give credit to the original they've stolen from. I watch a lot of films with my wife that I can identify as stolen from an older film but they're often ones she never heard of or watched. And new films for a variety of reasons don't often please me, though the details of that statement are too long to discuss here.

When I read what you said about older movies (and you're spot on about poor dialogue being rampant) I first thought of some Vincent Price films as good classics. Have you ever seen Diary of a Madman? It's an excellent horror movie based on the short story "The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant.

For newer movies (and by newer I only mean not silver screen, because my concept and tracking of time is very bad ) let me recommend Once Were Warriors to you. It's a foreign film, offbeat for an American audience but very powerful.

I'm not certain how much our taste in movies align, TrailMyx, so I'll leave my recommendations at that for now. Hopefully we can revive that lost love of films, haha

Lol... that IS funny Must have been hysterical in the first minutes afterwards watching them run around trying to figure out what just happened lol

I played the best thief nobody ever heard of back in 1999. I wasn't interested in committing crazy antics and taking screenies or getting famous. Keeping a low profile made a lot more sense to me and I just really wanted to be the best thief there was. I stealthed into and looted a whole lot of houses - which only years later did I consider the impact of doing that and feel really bad about - and I enjoyed it as an art. Literally 85% of my game time would consist of me stealthing around, checking house signs, taking notes, marking runes, and camping, watching houses for days to learn people's play times and behaviors. No one practiced anything approaching real house security back then either.

But my favorite moment ever was on my thief but didn't have to do with stealing. I was lucky enough to catch an impromptu GM monster bash in Vesper GY. I was carrying around GM Tinker trapped wooden chests, like always, and as I stealthed about through immense chaos and dead bodies I dropped crates onto the corpses of higher-level undead. Now I was just enjoying watching people blow up left and right but when someone said "Did you see that? A GM smited them with one shot!" I busted out laughing and about fell out of my chair irl.