The legendary hero, the Avatar, has fought many a great battle in his time.  But never has he faced such a challenging threat, is the fearsome crates!  Here we find our hero in the dreaded, Warehouse of Crates.  One of the more exciting areas in the game.  :(

Smashed up all of those things fairly well.  But wait, theres more!

A pile of crates!  Now I get to dig through all the pieces, hopeing to find something useful.  Its no easy task since you have to look at it from differant angles, and use the proper view mode to find them.  Also, parts of the crates can not be moved.

See those bloody piles to the right?.... those were giant rats.  When you aren't busy fighting the crates, you occasionally get a big rat to play with.  I must've swung dozens of times before I realized I wasn't hitting the thing.  Got to possition the viewing angle just right, you know.  Rats, wolves, vultures, and other creatures, all carry gold coins with them for some strange reason.

Looking down from the top floor, I can survey all that I have wrought.  Too bad I didn't take a 'before' picture.  That would've made a better presentation.  But sense the game crashed, I'll have to do all of this again anyway.  Just when the last crate and barrel had been smashed, and I had finally finished moving around all the pieces to look beneath, my game crashed.  :(

Now, I know what you're thinking.  Is this game just about running around breaking crates hopeing to find something useful in all that mess?  Oh course not.  There is also serious lag, a crappy interface, lame voice acting, and constant crashes.  Oh joy.  And some annoying bugs, etc.

Origin did make serveral patches.  I installed the final one as soon as I got the game.  Kind of odd how their message board ended.

"We usually allow players to post comments about the patches, and then try to fix problems that still exist, but after months of doing this, we're giving up.  As far as we're concerned, the problems have all been fixed, so quit whinning and be happy.  We are taking down the message boards from our official site immediately, to make sure no one contridicts us.  We wish to give the illusion to any future customers, that there are no more problems."

That wasn't the exact quote of course, but that was how I understood it.  It was so lame.  They admitted that the original released sucked, and told everyone to forget about it, and judge the game by its current state.  Well, the current state still sucks.

Like Ultima Online used to advertise "Come try us again!  We don't suck as badly as we used to!"

Thats the official Ultima slogan now for all their games.  "We suck less badly now, so be happy."

8-6-00 2:32am