Nice spread of CRPG's. I have to say, though, that my favorite Ultima was U7.5, Serpent Isle. I remember staying up all night playing that one.
I think one element that's often overlooked with older games is the manuals. In the 8-bit days, computers didn't have enough RAM to store a lot of text. Even with disks, you tended to have terse or direct statements, not the colorful meandering conversations of later games, such as Planescape: Torment. So to fill in the gap, the game manuals tended to be works of art, in both style, visual artwork, and prose. A lot of the games would try and keep the "tech" stuff in one area of the book, or even in a separate book entirely, in order to preserve a sense of realism. And of course, Ultima upped the stakes even more by adding trinkets and cloth maps. Consider that the Oblivion special edition included both a map, a faux-leather manual, and an imperial coin trinket... someone at least remembers what a real CRPG was like.
Nice spread of CRPG's. I have to say, though, that my favorite Ultima was U7.5, Serpent Isle. I remember staying up all night playing that one.
I think one element that's often overlooked with older games is the manuals. In the 8-bit days, computers didn't have enough RAM to store a lot of text. Even with disks, you tended to have terse or direct statements, not the colorful meandering conversations of later games, such as Planescape: Torment. So to fill in the gap, the game manuals tended to be works of art, in both style, visual artwork, and prose. A lot of the games would try and keep the "tech" stuff in one area of the book, or even in a separate book entirely, in order to preserve a sense of realism. And of course, Ultima upped the stakes even more by adding trinkets and cloth maps. Consider that the Oblivion special edition included both a map, a faux-leather manual, and an imperial coin trinket... someone at least remembers what a real CRPG was like.