http://spoonyexperiment.com/2012/05/29/ultima-9-ascension/

Now I'm sure there are those who will come in and say "oh he is being hard on the game, it's not that bad" yes it is. Understand you can like a game and it can still be a terrible game, are there worse games then 9? sure I could probably fill the majority of this post with the names of the ones I played first hand. But the fact is it is at best a mediocre game and a horrendous Ultima. If you like it then fine but don't try and say it's a good game.

Sorry about that I am just getting tired of people saying bad games aren't really bad (see: Deus ex: IW, Masters of orion 3, Wing commander prophecy, and so on) because they liked them.

i LOVE u9. its the only ultima i was ever able to finish playing. BUT i still laugh my butt off at the review. very funny.

i hope it gets on gog soon! i wanna play it again

While I completely disagree with your view about Spoony and the reviewers at TGWTG, I do respect it. I found the review actually could have gone on for an hour and I wouldn't have been bothered personally. I am not sure if you noticed but it is a 2 or more parter, so he probably will get into the technical issues of the game.

As for the problems with the story I can see his point with it's problems and to not dedicate time to said problems would probably deminish the review of the game itself. Also, to be fair, it is part of an Ultima Retrospective series he is doing, so the amount of time he dedicates to each review probably is partially due to the increased content he wishes to discuss.

While that is the case, it was once said "you can't please all of the people even half of the time." As such, this is just not your type of review show, and that's perfectly fine. I enjoy it, many others enjoy it, and that's fine as well. Again while I completely disagree with your opinion, it's nice to see it voiced in a calm manner with openly admitting it IS your opinion. I was happy to see someone who didn't resort to slinging petty insults which is nice to see I must say.

That though is purely my opinion. :)

Thanks, I try my best to show any differing views of mine in a rational manner and I thank you for being a rational Spoony/TGWTG fan yourself, I have witnessed some fans get a little too out of hand when they hear differing opinions and it is nice to see someone respect differing views. Keep being awesome like that! :)

Really awful... and I don't even mean the game. I usually like Spoony's "reviews" (these TGWTG people aren't actual critics, they are entertainers in the first place), bu tthis turned into fullblown nerd rage. I mean, I get it, the story sucks, fine, but this was 40 minues of a grown up man raging into a camera making the the same point over and over again. On his other reviews he rages as well, which is part of what makes his videos, but he doesn't keep repeating the same thing over and over again for 40 minutes.

Besides, this video is much different from the rest of the Ultima retrospective. Thse videos have been very informative and even made interested in the Ultima series (just bought the first two trilogies from the promo). This video has none of it, I mean as far as we have seen this game might be amazing aside from some stupid plotholes.

Still, I'm looking forward to part two, maybe it will be better.

For me at least the actual game if you ignore the story and that it's a Ultima, is pretty meh all around the combat while better then Ultima 8's it's still not that great but it is a improvement, the world of Britannia is small as hell and feels very confined there also doesn't seem to be as much to it either especially when compared with Ultima 6 and 7but given that this was a another rush job since the original Ultima 9 was scrapped due to as Spoony said because EA had the entire team stop working on 9 and finish up Online instead is to be expected.

It's just really not that impressive of a game, is it god awful not really but it's not that great either I'm sure if the majority of the people who worked on most of the other Ultimas didn't get fed up and quit and get replaced by people who didn't have the first clue what made Ultima special and were given a decent amount of time to work on it it probably would off been good of course the same could be said about Ultima 8 well time constraint wise anyway.

It doesn't help that the final iteration of the game (the one we got) had a strict deadline by EA, so they had to take a hatchet to it to get it out the door. And the bugginess is because everyone plays it on the wrong system (the game was made for computers with Voodoo graphics cards with Glide API....at a time when everyone was using the superior DirectX ones...)

I personally like the game. It's utter crap, but fun crap.

Spoony's review kinda sucked. The worst was the "betrayal counter," since several things were changes past Ultima's made, others were just minor grievances (starting with things like weak for strength rather than just a low number), and he counted multiple times for one "wrong" thing (three times for the stat thing).

While things changed in the Ultima series such as the stranger being the hero in Exodus and then later the Stranger became the Avatar these changes were really minor and done because the story in the next game needed it(Ultima 6 was a great example of that as it made sense to have the Stranger be the Avatar since Minax, Modain, and Exodus "return" as the pillars/shrines of the Garish virtues,same with him being the one taking the codex) and were not really drastic changes and still didn't screw with the cannon and the events themselves overall. For example while say by Ultima 6 the stranger was changed so that he became the Avatar and it was him not Lord British that removed the Codex from the "abyss" the events still happened, Modain, Minax and Exodus were still defeated, a hero from another world became the avatar, he defeated the shadow lords and exiled Lord Blackthorn and so on.

While damn near everything that was changed and retcannoned in Ultima IX completely ignored the history or made little to no sense. Even things that shouldn't be are there for example in 4 the Avatar tossed the skull of Modain into a volcano destroying the vile artifact and by Ultima 5 the Isle of Terifin formed over that spot yet that same skull somehow resurfaces and is in the Museum, also a dagger from Pagan somehow also appears. So yeah.

For longtime players I think the disappointments stem from the fact the developers just haphazardly linked and placed objects & imagery from past ultima games in U9 in order to tell new players about what happened in past games. There is no grand *continuity* in the story and antagonists etc as expected from an institution with as many sequels as Ultima.

New players as in 'never played an ultima game before' new.

Same goes with the stupid dialog questions eg "what is the Codex, what is a Paladin" etc, the dev were just too lazy/busy to make it sensical, they just put those questions there for the new players and they thought : oh well, the old guard already knows the answers, they can just move on with the game. It didn't help also that the answers contradict past games ... maybe the dev just don't know the history of that universe.

re: Spoony's reviews : keenly waiting for Part 2!

I always hate that "it's not bad if your not a fan of the game" or it's good if your new argument I heard that so many times that it's not funny, I heard it from people defending King's Quest 8/Mask of eternity, Metroid: other M, Banjo-Kazooie nuts and bolts, Goldeneye: Rouge Agent, Deus Ex: Invisible war hell even Sonic Unleashed and so on.

But the point is there not good games, there for the most part not god awful but mediocre to just slightly below average at best and given that there tied to some beloved series or game makes them worse and the majority of people who say differently or use that argument are people who like the game and feel a need to justify their like of a crappy or mediocre game by saying that it's some kind of decent game that just has a bad rep. but there is a reason why it has a bad rep, it was just bad by the series standards then the majority of people, most fans included, wouldn't be as harsh on it especially after all these years.

I only played U8 out of all of them and from what I've seen I don't think U9 is a good game. Im just saying a lot of the badness of U9 appear to be because the dev don't know jack about Ultima universe or just lazy to link up the game properly with the previous ones.

I agree on that but honestly the cannon being completly pissed on in 9 was due to the fact that by this point all the long time Origin guys and Ultima team had left the company for greener pastures and all was left were half wits. But for me alot of the badness also came from the mediocre combat, the small and limited feeling game world, the bland gameplay, having some god awful voice acting, just so much of the game was just sub par to below average.

Part 2 of the review came out a few days ago...if anyone hasn't seen it or is interested...

http://spoonyexperiment.com/2012/07/09/ultima-9-ascension-part-2/

Whether you agree with/like Spoony, you still have to remember that some things are emphasized more for entertainment purposes...I did enjoy the Betrayal meter, even if it wasn't completely accurate (it does jump a few numbers)...

While I won't judge anyone for liking any game (saying you suck or are a bad person because you like this game or that game), i'm still baffled at how anyone can like Pagan or even Ascension (I think I saw someone on this thread saying they liked Ascension)...

...I guess Nostalgia is just too powerful...

I'm a pretty big fan of another classic RPG series, Might and Magic...but even i'm not going to try and defend Might and Magic IX (without fan patches, it's pitiful and almost unplayable)...

I played through Pagan not too long ago...and it was garbage...I only got through it because I wanted to see how it was for myself, rather than going off someone else's view of the game. The story was dumb, but the idea of the Avatar having to do some "not so good" things to get back to Britannia to stop the Guardian isn't that bad, just very poorly executed. The combat was laughable and like Spoony says, you can almost completely avoid most of the enemies. The jumping is unnecessary and the isometric angle doesn't help either. The graphics are uninspired to say the least. Overall, it's a poor adventure hack n slash...

"Ultima VIII Pagan is good if you don't think of it as an Ultima game" isn't a very good argument to make...

I TRIED to play Ascension, but I got frustrated from all the crashing and quit, not that I was having any fun to begin with...

Ascension pretty much almost goes out of it's way to completely write off Pagan, like it never happened...I mean, did the ending of Pagan just not happen or what? Why did you wake up in Texas? Wasn't I back in britannia? Why were there giant rats and pirates in the park?!? Where'd everything Pagan related go? It didn't seem like anything from Pagan made it into Ascension (as far as I know). Hell, even Ultima VII (the best in the series in my opinion) seems to have just disappeared. Sure, the guardian is in VII and IX, but it's almost like he's not even the same villain...and since when could he raise giant evil pillars out of the ground?

And yeah, there's the thing in the museum that tells about the Avatar's previous adventures...but that was like they needed to put that in to remind people how good Ultima used to be...or to remind players they were playing an Ultima game...

I can understand what happened to these games...it happens ALL THE TIME in the industry...something is rushed because they know it will sell from name recognition...or the bigger publisher doesn't like what the smaller developer they own is doing and they force them to start over, slapping a strict deadline on them, forcing the developer to rush through...

Ultima IX: Ascension isn't one of those games that's "So bad, it's good"...it's one of those that's "So bad, it's painful"...

That's just my opinion anyways...

Play them and see for yourself whether or not you like them, don't let anyone else make you think anything unless you've played it yourself...

...except Ascension...don't play that one...just take everyone's word for it...it sux and is bad... :P

It seemed there were a lot of people who didn't like the first review. I don't know why. I for one thought it was hilarious. I did have many of the same reactions as Spoony when I first played the game (though not with as much angst). And the Benny Hill moment in the second one was just priceless. :)

I suppose it doesn't quite hit folks if U9 was the first Ultima game they played. But if you started earlier in the series and first witnessed the magnificence that was U4 through U7, you really felt like someone kicked you in the nuts when you played U9.

The characters were paper thin, the plot was needlessly repetitive, the outcome was predictable, Ultima history was completely discarded, the world was incredibly small, and the virtues became a black-and-white good-or-bad issue. U9 presented such a hallowed out shell of what Britannia used to be that in my mind it cannot be considered cannon.

Yes, U8 was disappointing, but at least there was a non-repetitive plot, compelling characters, a haunting atmosphere, and a feeling of desperation to get home. The endless catacombs, jumping puzzles, and click-oriented combat were certainly painful though, so I'm not trying to downplay it's faults.

I'll never understand why anyone thought this was a good idea. The Earth sequence could have made sense if they used it as a U4 intro flashback (sorta like U6 did when you created your character). But otherwise it really served no purpose. Stonegate was originally supposed to serve as the tutorial and it would have been fine if they left it that way.

Really, we should have seen the writing on the wall when the entire U9 team was transferred to UO. And by the time they went back to U9 they decided the graphics were out of date and they HAD to have 3D. Really, they sacrificed what U9 could have been to the MMO and 3D gods. It may have paid off for UO, but it did not pay off for U9.