decided to download this tonight, remember getting the boxed collection 10 years ago. Well, it was an awkward mess then and an awkward mess now. I was digging up until I accidentally restarted my save file several times (WTF), and then of course the brain-grating screen stuttering that occurs. I was about to go talk to Bentic and my avatar does some sort of olympic long jump into a lake of doom. Seriously talking like a 50 foot jump into death here. $6 is nothing to be hurt about, but damn, I was hoping I could look past all these insanely horrible quirks.

I'm one of the few who enjoyed U8. I did NOT enjoy the jumping. Everybody hated the jumping aspect of the game. Fans complained so much that the devs released a patch to fix the jumping so that you didn't spend three hours real time trying to cross a fucking twenty foot wide river.

I don't have a GOG copy so I don't know what patch they have, but you should check the net to make sure that you have the game version that fixes the jumping issue.

U8 had a lot of bad points, but it also had some good ones: the magic systems were quite creative (especially for the time - the fact that there were several systems was itself rather unusual); some of the subplots were well-written, and the overall atmosphere/mood was conveyed well.

I actually feel that U8 is one of the few that could really benefit from an out-and-out remake if this included a change of design away from the obnoxious platforming and oops-yer-dead gimmickry. There are also plenty of elements that could be further developed to give it a more proper Ultima feel.

Are the mac versions using dosbox? Never tried one.

I don't run the GoG version (still have the old U9 ultima 1-8 collector's ed. bonus disc) so I'm not sure what dosbox settings they have going by default. That said, the last time I loaded up Ultima 8 I was using a fixed cycles of 25000.
Basically, cycles=25000 in the .conf file. That lead to reasonably comfortable gameplay for me, but, I think the some of the issues are simply game engine related. If I went much higher than that things ran too fast and felt unnatural. Too much lower and performance again felt off. There's probably room for tweaking, though.

More reading on fine tuning dosbox here:
http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Dosbox.conf

I loved playing Ultima 8: Pagan. Yes even the jumping part. The atmosphere and action RPG feel of game and storyline was interesting and different than anything else out at the time. As well as the spellcasting and puzzles. I bought this on Gog and I'm happyly playing it again. Im reading some of the books in this game, and laughing at one of the clever jokes in it. Very well written game. I can live with any bugs. I never encountered any the first time I played through it, and I think its worth playing this game, bugs or no bugs. Knock on wood, i hope i didn't just jinx myself. hehe.