The Glade 4.0

I never played the Ultima games, but this is pretty funny. Also, I only discovered Spoony a couple weeks ago and his FF X review is hilarious.

http://spoonyexperiment.com/category/ga ... ospective/

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

That was pretty funny, I remember my dad playing that on our apple2. He wouldn't let me play though, I think I was about 8.

Ultima Underworld was one of the best first person RPGs ever.

In Vas Grav Corp!

Ultima 5 or so included an anglo-saxon runic alphabet translation. My friend and I learned this alphabet in elementary school and we'd write letters to each other in class in them. If the notes were ever intercepted, we had zero fear.

The cool thing about learning that alphabet from Ultima 5 was that I was amazed it was actually a real alphabet, and one that even Tolkien himself used early on. The map that Tolkien drew by hand at the beginning of The Hobbit uses the same runic alphabet and my 13 year-old self was blown away that I could read things like "Five feet high the door and three may walk abreast" and the like.

And then there's the incorporation of the same runes in all sorts of fantasy artwork. Book cover art, art in D&D books, etc. It's pretty interesting and kind of a neat little easter egg to be able to read the stuff.

All that, because of Ultima.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

Well, sort of. Tolkien based it on some Germanic runic alphabet, and Ultima cribbed it from Tolkien. I don't think the alphabet as Tolkien and Ultima used it, is a "real alphabet." IIRC, Tolkien did some swapping, substitution, and addition to satisfy his linguistic aesthetics.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Tolkien eventually changed his runic alphabet to his own design in LOTR. But in The Hobbit, he used an "Anglo-Saxon" alphabet that's been around for over a millennia. Ultima used the same alphabet.

I originally studied up on this stuff at the library, long before I knew what an Internet was.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_runes

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!