Genre: RPGDeveloper: Origin SystemsYear: 1991
Rating: 0.00 / 10.00
(based on 0 votes)
[ Download not available ]
Shortly after the release of the instant hit Ultima VI, Origin launched a short series widely known as the Worlds of Ultima, using the excellent Ultima VI engine, and featuring the Avatar as usual, only this time the adventure doesn't take place in Britannia. Both titles were more focused on character interaction rather than on the complex attributes and frequent combats found in most CRPGs. The just-released engine was slightly improved and expanded, with new graphics styles and a few upgrades.
The first title, Savage empire, still features the epic feel of Ultima, with a new great quest to accomplish, but with less puzzles based on combat and more based on brains. The story goes like this: after a series of bad dreams and sleepless nights, an enigmatic nightmare puts the Avatar in a jungle where a dinossaur charges a young savage woman, and then Lord British tells you to solve the mistery of the ruined moonstones. With this puzzle in mind, the avatar goes after his friend the scientist Elliot Rafkin for a few answers about the one and only moonstone he possesses. The mistery widens when Rafkin has a moonstone himself, this one slightly cracked and jagged, sent to him by a curious student. When Rafkin puts this new cracked stone to experimentation, a blackened moongate appears, and sucks Rafkin, a reporter (who was there with Rafkin), the Avatar, and all the lab into another dimension, landing on the land of Eodon, where humans and dinossaurs live together (although not necessarily peacefully). From here the mistery is unveiled, but not without great effort. An epic quest lies ahead!
Like Ultima VI, Savage Empire is an excellent roleplaying game, with funny tribal versions of your britannian companions (Triolo, Shamuru, and others), and a fair challenge, as in other Ultima games.
Martian dreams, my favorite, has a very unique plot and brilliant non-player characters. Dr. Johann Spector, who was rescued from the Savage Empire by the Avatar (he too got trapped there after experimenting with the cracked moonstone), starts to receive misterious contacts from characters that lived in other time and place, or that live in this time but deny having ever contacted him, including the Avatar. He then receives a package with a book -- the concluded work Dr. Spector has just started writing about the teleporting properties of the moonstone! The book reveals a way to use the mystic orb to travel in time, and so, that's what Spector and the Avatar do.
Following the right instructions, they open a timegate and step through it, to land in the year of 1895, and be welcomed by the genius Nikola Tesla himself! Among other things (too much to detail here, as the fact that Tesla knows why the Avatar and Spector are there is paradoxal), Tesla tells them great characters from the victorian era were accidentally sent in some kind of rocket to *Mars*, and he's now organizing an expedition to bring them back to Earth. Easy job, no?
The great atmosphere in this game is crowned by the brilliant novel dialogs, based on what history could gather about each great icon of the victorian era. Sigmund Freud, Thomas Edison, Lenin and Roosevelt are among the personalities you'll find trapped in Mars, and there are many others! The music also highlights the victorian atmosphere, with tones that sound like the original victorian music listened in taverns and balls of that time (according to modern movies, of course).
The documentation included in both games features vibrant novel writing telling the incredible story behind the travels to Eodon and then back in time to the victorian era. I highly recommend that you read the documentation included in both packages, as they are not only informative, but also very interesting. You don't see this kind of work in any games nowadays!
I can only be proud to have these excellent games back here now, and you should keep a copy of them as well.
