Ultima 7 Part 2 Serpent Isle - Origin RRP œ44.99
                      (RPG for PC)

               Reviewed by Julian Gregory

Yet another epic saga in the Ultima series. Each one seems to be
much bigger than the preceding ones. Serpent Isle takes up about
21 megs of your hard disk and that is not including any saved
files. These can take anything up to another 500K of space and you
are allowed up to 10.

The first thing to say about Serpent Isle is that it is devilishly
difficult to configure a computer to run it. You will need to
remove any TSRs and play around with high memory. Fortunately I
am running DOS 6. With this it is possible to have different
autoexec.bat and config.sys files. The manual seems to me to be
rather vague as to how this should be done. Luckily I have several
friends who are professional programmers and they put me right. I
do not profess to have any computer expertise. I am a only a user.

So, having managed to get the thing running, how does it look?
The layout is very similar to the latest Ultimas. The screen is
dominated by the view of your location. All actions are made with
a mouse and soon become second nature and instinctive. The playing
area is massive as is the whole game. If you like this type of
format you can look forward to several weeks if not months of game
time.

The game takes up where The Black Gate finished. Lord British has
discovered a magic scroll from the Guardian to his henchman,
Batlin. In it he commands Batlin to follow Gwenno to the Serpent
Isle, where he will reveal his new plot to destroy Britannia.
Lord British sends you and your friends to the Serpent Isle to
find Batlin and stop the Guardian. Placing the setting away from
Britannia seems to me to be sensible as the vast majority of the
area has already been explored in other Ultimas.

You have the same 3 friends with you as in previous adventures.
However this time you will lose one of them for good as he
sacrifices himself just as you were about to do so. He says that
the world cannot afford you to die. This must mean there is
another Ultima about to materialise!

The game play has been improved over other recent Ultimas. The
inventory control is now easier to handle. Also it seems to be
simpler to acquire spells, reagents, armour and weapons. There
appears to be no problem in stealing items, just so long as you do
it when no one is watching. This includes automatons who are quite
difficult to kill, particularly early on when you are not so well
equipped or strong.

One point which may not appeal to some people is the ability to
travel to so many places that it may get confusing to know what to
do next or where to go. If this happens to you I suggest that you
go back over what you have already covered as there will always be
clues in the text. Even though the game seems to allow much scope,
it is in fact very linear. The narrative structure is used to set
up various flags which must be set by your actions before another
action can be taken. In other instances, a door in one location
will remain locked until the player performs an action in another
location. It is sometimes possible to do actions out of order by
brute force (eg blowing up a door if you do not have the correct
key). Whilst this action may be possible you can screw the game up
as a flag will not have been set properly.

Other problems I have encountered include an extremely long save
and restore routine. It can take up to 20 seconds to restore a
saved game, which I find very annoying. Saving is a bit quicker,
but still too long for my taste.

Having said that, I can still recommend Serpent Isle. As Ultima 8
is now out the price of Serpent Isle seems to have come down. I
have seen it in Special Reserve at œ28.49. There is also another
add-in disk called Silver Seed, which I am about to start. This
adds another task to Serpent Isle, which you need to be able to
play it.



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