(This entry is mostly for the benefit of my friends who know of this blog through Ultima Online.)

I've been spending time re-playing Ultima IX: Ascension.

I've referenced this game before, both the game and the series from which it comes: it's the lead item in my BOTW 27 "acceptance entry".

The game itself is not very playable right now: one of the major goals of the game is the cleansing of 8 shrines of virtue in the game world. Once the Avatar (you, the player) collects the mantra, town sigil, and corrupted glyph, he can cleanse the shrine, gain a level, and progress to the next shrine. There's a neat animation that happens, too.

But see, the animation is the problem. What is supposed to happen is the sigil "corrects" the glyph, and the shrine is cleansed in the process. At that point, the sigil and former-glyph-now-rune fall from the sky and land on the stone table in the center of the shrine. When operated by most nVidia AND ATI video cards, the sigil and rune do not fall from the sky, and are stuck 30 feet in the air. This is bad because the Avatar needs these 16 total items to finish the game.

Fortunately, I never got rid of the old HP computer that I replaced with the custom rig I built last year.

I can migrate the save game files to the old computer, cleanse the shrine, migrate the files back to the new computer, and not have to build a giant pyramid of staves, bows, and flasks to retrieve these two items all 8 times.

Despite the category in which this entry falls, swapping rigs is not really what this entry is about though.

Halfway through the second dungeon (Hythloth), Richard Garriot used Executive Producer powers and had a teleporter to the end of said dungeon installed so that the upper, more difficult, half could be omitted from the task list. The logic apparently went like this: the Avatar character is relatively weak at this point, and there is little margin for error. Plus, the upper half requires a lot of swimming, something that doesn't lend itself well to tactical retreat.

Well, I'm proud to say that I completed the upper half of Hythloth. All 8 statue keys were used, including the second red and the orange ones.

In other words, I have more skill than the game production crew in 1999 gave the typical player credit.

Yay me.

And the mandrake root made it all worthwhile, too.

-KIE