Ultimate RPG Archives - PC

.com The Bard's Tale Trilogy and Construction Set . You are challenged to assemble a band of inexperienced adventurers and lead them into an environment that is overrun with evil minions. It is up to you to build your party's strength, for they will need to push farther into the clutches of evil to complete their quests. Included for the first time in one compilation is the entire Bard's Tale series on CD-ROM-- The Bard's Tale: Tales of the , The Bard's Tale 2: Destiny Knight, The Bard's Tale 3: The Thief of Fate, and The Bard's Tale Construction Set . Might and Magic: World of Xeen . Included are two complete games-- Clouds of Xeen and Darkside of Xeen . This special version allows your characters to travel from one game to the other and also includes new digitized speech. Stonekeep . Step into the mystery of Stonekeep and begin a quest through dark corridors treacherous sewers and subterranean realms of fairies, magic, and the living dead. You'll discover a world where darkness reigns and where you become part of a detailed story line that unfolds at your command. Ultima Underworld: 1 and . In this first continuous-movement, first-person 3-D dungeon action fantasies in the Ultima series, you'll walk, run, swim, and jump through miles of sheer terror, casting spells, vanquishing foes, and solving puzzles as you race through the magical Ultima setting known as Britannia. Included are Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss and Ultima Underworld 2: The Labyrinth of Worlds . Dragon Wars . Dragon Wars are the most destructive forces in the world, and are threatening to destroy the paradise of Dilmun. Magic is your only salvation. But magic is illegal and you are already imprisoned. Wasteland . It's 2087, World War III has come and gone, leaving the world a veritable Wasteland. As a Desert Ranger, you've vowed to help rebuild humanity... but first you have to survive. Surprising subplots twist and turn toward a final conflict with mankind's greatest threat in this futuristic multicharacter RPG. Wizardry: Gold . D.W. Bradley's award-winning and critically acclaimed classic epic, Crusaders of the Dark Savant, is now totally re-engineered and includes full speech new cinematic sequences new sound and music and an entire suite of add-ons, tools, and utilities. From the Manufacturer The Ultimate RPG s is the most impressive collection of award-winning computer role-playing games ever assembled in one box. The biggest and most successful brands and developers in the RPG genre are all here--it is a diehard RPG gamers' dream and a great place for RPG novices to begin. The Ultimate RPG s is a must-have for every gamers collection. In The Bard's Tale Trilogy and Construction Set you are challenged to assemble a band of inexperienced adventurers and lead them into an environment that is overrun with evil minions. It is up to you to build your adventurers' strength, for they will need to push farther into the clutches of evil to complete their quests. Included for the first time in one compilation is the entire Bard's Tale series on CD-ROM-- The Bards Tale: Tales of the , The Bards Tale 2: Destiny Knight , The Bards Tale 3: The Thief of Fate , and The Bard's Tale Construction Set . Might & Magic World of Xeen includes two complete games-- Clouds of Xeen and Darkside of Xeen . This special version allows your characters to travel from one game to the other and also includes new digitized speech. P.when('A').execute(function(A) { A.on('a:expander:toggle_description:toggle:collapse', function(data) { window.scroll(0, data.expander.$expander[0].offsetTop-100) }) }) Review The Ultimate RPG s is an important package not only because it contains an even dozen of the best computer role-playing games in history, but also because it's the first such collection where every single game within is still worth playing. Usually when a company throws together some of its older products and puts them back on the shelves, you get a decent game or two along with a bunch of fluff, which makes you realize just how much better games are now than they used to be. Not so in the Ultimate RPG s all 12 games in the package remain enjoyable to this day, each in turn a testament to the timelessness of the genre. Its contents represent over a decade's worth of top-tier computer role-playing games, more than half of which Interplay originally developed. The Bard's Tale series appears in its entirety: The trilogy composed of Tales of the , The Destiny Knight, and The Thief of Fate is present along with the full-featured Bard's Tale Construction Set. The Bard's Tale pioneered the first-person step-by-step computer RPG format, which would later appear again in Interplay's Dragon Wars, another solid entry in the s, which adopts the Bard's Tale formula to a grittier, more hostile game world. The only top-down RPG in the package is Interplay's Wasteland, which inspired the highly acclaimed 1997 post-nuclear RPG, Fallout (Fallout sold separately!). The last of Interplay's own additions to the s is Stonekeep, a pretty-looking dungeon hack, which was hammered on by critics and consumers alike when its lengthy development period culminated in its lukewarm 1995 release. Even if Interplay were to go ahead and publish a package composed solely of its own role-playing games, the end result would be pretty solid. But it also secured the rights to five third-party RPGs, which make the s a truly superior value. New World Computing's Might & Magic: World of Xeen - which is M&M four and five seamlessly connected together - remains a creative, humorous, and exciting game. Sirtech's Wizardry Gold, a high-resolution remake of Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant, is deep and very challenging, with advanced NPC interaction and character development. But perhaps the greatest surprise in the package is Origin's Ultima Underworld I and II, both true-3D role-playing masterpieces and unparalleled to date in terms of scale and scope. At first glance, Interplay does a commendable job of making the games accessible even on today's advanced hardware by supplying a helpful boot disk maker and a utility to temporarily slow your machine so the older games won't run too fast. On top of that, you get a massive volume of over 500 pages containing the original documentation of all 12 RPGs. However, all maps and reference materials originally included with these games are nowhere to be found, despite repeated reference to them throughout the documentation. This frustrating oversight won't affect your enjoyment of the majority of games in this package, but a few - namely the Bard's Tale trilogy - demand the use of these materials to answer copy protection questions in order to advance. The magic of the World Wide Web lets lucky gamers like you download the appropriate maps and wheels from Interplay's web site, but those looking for a complete product out of the box will be out of luck. None of these games is aesthetically competitive against the current standards. The Bard's Tale series and Wasteland look downright archaic. Even the once revolutionary Underworld games look well worn. But each and every game in the s has a distinctive personality about it, an attractive appearance, and a stylistic element that make you understand instantly why the game is still held in high esteem. Even Stonekeep fits right into this collection, as its old-style gameplay feels more appropriate among the similar genre pioneers than it did when the game was first released not too long ago. Eleven of the 12 games in this set are played in the first-person perspective. Nonetheless they are all different and unique, and between their ranks they offer high adventure, great challenge, difficult puzzles, sly wit, all manner of monster and villain, and ultimately hundreds upon hundreds of hours of top-quality computer role-playing. Even with the missing reference materials, this is a compilation of the utmost quality and value, and it's certain to be one of the best purchases for your role-playing dollar this year. --Greg Kasavin -- Copyright ??1998 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of GameSpot is prohibited. -- GameSpot Review See more