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              <p><font color="#0000FF"><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#0000CC">volume 
                1, issue 41</font></b></font></p>
              <p><font color="#0000FF"><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#0000CC"> 
                </font></b></font></p>
              <p>  <p><font face="Courier New, Courier, mono"><b><font color="#339900" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Today 
                in loonygames:</font></b></font></p>

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        <p align="LEFT"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#0022A8"><b><a target="" href="../../corner/index.html"><font size="-1">Beaker's 
          Bent</font></a><font size="-1">:</font></b></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="+3" color="#0022A8"><br>
          The Baldur's Gate Rant</font></p>
        <p align="RIGHT"><font color="#804000"><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">By 
          Rich &quot;<a target="_self" href="mailto:rich@loonygames.com">Beaker</a>&quot; 
          Wyckoff</font></b></font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">At last I felt like I was 
          truly exploring a fantasy world as I roamed seemingly endless forests, 
          feretting out bits of magical equipment or treasure as I opened and 
          moved around stacks of cobwebby crates in forgotten caves. Every NPC 
          in every town had their own name, schedule, and jobs, and almost all 
          had unique and interesting dialogue, and the true dungeons were full 
          of intricate traps to bypass and puzzles to solve, all of course capped 
          by the occasional taunting, in still new-fangled digitized speech, from 
          the Guardian, who was there to undo all the hard work the Avatar had 
          put into the world over the past several games.</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">There were so many great 
          features of the <b>Ultima</b> VII-engine games - the seamless engine 
          which only switched to a different map when you went between the surface 
          and the underworld; the also-seamless multi-story buildings; the usable 
          objects like candles and braziers you could light or extinguish (and 
          if you didn't have a burning torch, a fireball spell would do in a pinch); 
          the cool things you would find if you looked around like haunted wrecked 
          ships full of dead pirate's treasure or Shamino's castle which had disappeared 
          from the land in some earlier game. The world made sense and always 
          felt alive - you never felt like you were travelling through some static 
          rendered image.</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Then, all of a sudden, the 

          RPGs started to suck. You might even mark <b>Ultima</b> VIII as the 
          start and perhaps cause of the death of RPGs - the incredibly misguided 
          decision to abandon the party just to have a few hundred frames of pre-rendered 
          Avatar animation (most of which was actually used just to enable the 
          ridiculous Super Mario Avatar jumping puzzles which made the game nearly 
          unplayable), the abandonment of the traditional and familiar world of 
          Sosaria - I don't know many people besides myself who ever finished 
          the game, certainly not before the patch came out which made jumping 
          somewhat less than impossible.</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">I got into the industry not 
          long after this, and although I still loved and mostly preferred the 
          traditional top-down RPGs to any other kind of game, I had found the 
          type of game that I wanted to make, and that was <b>Ultima</b> <b>Underworld</b>. 
          The traditional RPGs weren't being made anymore, not ones of any quality, 
          and thus crap like Daggerfall could come out mixing a sub-par clone 
          of Underworld-style first person gameplay with aggravating, buggy, and 
          ultimately boring randomized questing, and the diehard fans and even 
          the RPG wannabes fell on it for lack of anything better to do.</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">By this point, I knew that 
          what I was striving for in my job was to make first person games which 
          had the level of world and object interactivity which Underworld did, 
          mixed with the plot, size, and characterization of the last good <b>Ultima</b> 
          games. Of course Doom came along to derail the promising course which 
          Underworld had set, sticking us with years of games consisting of collecting 
          ten weapons as you wandered through mazes of empty rooms or nailed-down 
          items, always looking for the exit and that one last boss. The few RPGs 
          like <b>Daggerfall</b> which attempted the first person style totally 
          missed the point of Underworld and made their environments as empty 
          and non-interactive as those in Doom. I started to lose hope that I 
          would ever find another game to play which satisfied my RPG cravings 
          as well as <b>Ultima</b> VII or fulfilled my forward-looking yearnings 
          as well as <b>Ultima</b> Underworld.</font></p>
        <p align="right"><i><font size="-1" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">(<a href="index3.php">Continued 
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    <td><i><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-2"><b>Credits:</b> 
      Beaker's Bent logo illustrated by and is &copy; 1999 Dan Zalkus. Beaker's 
      Bent is &copy; 1999 Rich Wyckoff. All other content is &copy; 1998 <a target="_self" href="http://www.loonyboi.com">loonyboi 
      productions</a>. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited, so don't 
      do it. We have ways of making you talk.</font></i></td>
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