The Dragon Gallery - part VI
Samurai Dragon

Parcival, 2004-01-17

The Dragon Gallery is dedicated the Ultima Dragons who contribute(d) to the ultima community. You will get a look at ‘the person behind the dragon' and his love for Ultima. Paulon Dragon passed on the quill to Samurai Dragon.

Personalia

I'm Paul Gilham, a 28 year-old law-student-turned-journalist who lives in the East of England.  I have a fairly happy-go-lucky approach to life, generally taking things in my stride and trying to deal with problems rationally and even-handedly.  I'm reliable in the sense that I'll always fulfil promises -- provided you don't want them done to deadlines.  I see quite enough of those in my job, so punctuality isn't really a feature of my personal life.  <:)

At work, I'm part of a small team that edits articles and lays out pages for three (shortly to be four) weekly newspapers in my area.  The hours are a little strange, with two 12-hour days on Monday and Tuesday, and two normal 9.30am-6pm days on Wednesday and Friday.  Since I get Thursdays off, though, there are some compensations -- which I'll have to leave behind if I follow a career path presenting itself at the moment, into the national press.  We'll see.

Weekends, I'm usually away from home visiting friends, since few of the people I know well still live locally to me.  I manage to squeeze in some pen-and-paper roleplaying games, fencing and a little video gaming during the week, but unfortunately my other main hobbies -- amateur dramatics and jujutsu -- went on hold due to time constraints when I finished my post-grad journalism course and started work.

A friend and I are hoping to take up hiking in a semi-serious way this year, since it'll get us away from his PS2 when I visit him, and give his girlfriend a bit of a break from all the explosion noises.  :)

Ultima

I first came across the Ultima games when I was 12, on a friend's Commodore 64.  Since it came with a (then fairly rare) disk drive and he enjoyed games requiring a bit of thought, his father bought him Ultima V.  Whenever I went to visit him, we ended up exploring Britannia.  Compared to most other games at the time, U5 was not only impressive in its sheer scale, but had quite amazing depth.  I was hooked -- but as my own computer was a lower-spec, British-made ZX Spectrum, there was no chance to buy a copy myself.

I had to wait another three years, until my father brought home an 8086 with VGA graphics, to own an Ultima.  The move to 16-bit was a huge step forward, and coincided nicely with the release of U6.  It remains my favourite to this day, in part because the graphics were simply breathtaking for the time, but also due the intricate story-line and puzzles, and my preference for the mono-scale world of the later Ultimas.

I also feel Ultima VI was a high-point for the series because the conversation and combat engines retained the flexibility of the earlier games, rather than tree-led dialogue and real-time slashing, while still presenting a more organic, living world than the previous instalments.  And Warren Spector was in charge of production, which is a big plus in my book.

I don't get as much time for any sort of computer gaming these days as I'd like, but I still visit Britannia from time to time.  I have versions of all the cardinal games, as well as both Underworlds and Worlds of Ultima games.  At some point, I fully intend to sit down and play them all through sequentially.  It's one for retirement, if nothing else.  :)

Although I get some degree of ribbing about it among the Ultima Dragons, my favourite series character is undoubtedly Smith the horse.  His acerbic manner has always appealed to me, especially since his actual conversation is inevitably of no help whatever to the Avatar -- rather, being a huge in-joke that only fans of the series will get.  I was always quite fond of Sin'Vraal, too, for providing a link between daemons and gargoyles that led to a lot of quite scholarly discussion on the Ultima newsgroups.

As for favourite memories, I do recall buying the Complete U7 when it first came out, because shops near where I lived at the time rarely kept Ultimas in stock.  I wouldn't have a PC capable of running the game properly for another two years, so when I finally installed it on my new P133, I was fairly excited.  Even more so, after I managed to get its infamous memory manager working with Windows 95 and heard the Guardian's first words...

Ultima Internet Community

I joined the UDIC in April 1997, after chancing across the rec.games.computer.ultima-dragons newsgroup during an online search for something entirely different.  I was thrilled to find a community that an hour or two of lurking revealed to be not only like-minded, but interested in the only game from my younger days that I still held in high regard.  I shall always look on RGCUD fondly, since it was the first Internet forum in
which I participated.

I remain an active contributor to the newsgroup, offering help and suggestions to people seeking advice on the games where I can (though with the demise of the single-player series, the need for that has dropped off somewhat).  Latterly, this assistance was formalised when I became the official FAQ maintainer for the rec.games.computer.ultima* newsgroup hierarchy.

Admittedly, the amount of spam I've been receiving has gone up a hundredfold since my e-mail address appeared on faqs.org, but I think it's worth it.  I enjoy supporting the community with a useful resource, though to my shame it's now in need of an overhaul.  Things have moved on quite a bit since the last update, and I haven't set aside a large enough chunk of time to take a good run at it.  It's something I plan to address shortly.

Beyond Ultima

Ultima gave me a love of CRPGs, but because the games' quality is so high, it takes a lot to match them.  I get a little irritated when people call Diablo and its ilk roleplaying games, since there's no interaction to speak of between characters -- and that, for me, is the essence of any RPG.  I do like Diablo a good deal and a similar game, Nox, is one of my favourites -- but they're graphic roguelikes, to my eyes.

For real CRPGs, one need look no further than Planescape: Torment, a really first-rate game and worthy of being in any Ultima fan's possession.  The two Fallout games are of similar calibre, but due to the limited hardware of my PC (which was basically built around a Voodoo 4 card, to run Ultima IX effectively), I haven't tried any of the more modern attempts at the genre like Neverwinter Nights and Gothic.  I've heard some decent reports of both, especially the latter, but now the single-player Ultima series is over, and both Looking Glass and Black Isle are sadly defunct, I'm not really looking forward to anything in the immediate gaming future.

I have plenty of older games I bought because they were the best of the year to work through.  My most recent acquisition, 007: Nightfire, is currently occupying my precious gaming time.  :)

For the Dragon Gallery's next victim^H^H^H^H interviewee, I suggest Gaseous
Dragon, a.k.a. Ron Windeyer.  He maintains what is, to my knowledge, the
best Internet resource for people wanting to play Ultimas on modern machines.