![]() He was crudely depicted in the early games but he's grown up as the series has gone on, until he's key to the plot of Ultima 7 and 9. He's an old crossbow-wielding comrade, a mentor figure to the Avatar who's stayed in Britannia since Ultima 1 and hence has aged much more rapidly than your friend. Turn left out of my room, and you're in Iolo's chamber. Consider this, then, a retrospective about the sadly-defunct Ultima series, a discussion of an archaic psychological technique used by mystics since the dawn of time but curiously in abeyance during the modern era, and a pyx about the potential for the things we call games to become more than the structural limitations of engine design. In UUII, you play the Avatar, a hero trapped in a castle whilst an enemy invades his world, and who must explore the maze of the basements to find the way out. Mine is based on the first floor of Lord British's castle from Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds, a game that was the peak of the Western RPG before Morrowind. It's a Memory Palace, a mental construct used before computers or even printing. You knew this from the beginning but my keep is no physical palace. They're the only ones I'm not going to tell you about. Behind that door are some small runes on a table, some drinks, another secret door, and my most precious memories. There's a secret door behind the bookshelf. ![]() This room is a comfortable home-from-home, built like a sauna with wood on the floor and walls, a roaring fire, a stacked bookshelf, some food and beer on the table. The way in, for me, is a tiny room in the North-West corner. Bits of it are in disrepair, tattered, cobwebbed fragments of texture and space, but much of it's intact and strangely ageless. I've owned it since 1990, which is over twenty years now. ![]() Let me start in the middle I own a palace. ![]() This is Dan Griliopoulos' account of Ultima Underworld II as a " memory palace", a mental construct which Wikipedia describes as a "mnemonic technique that relies on memorised spatial relationships to establish, order and recollect memorial content." That's the starting point. This isn't like other Ultima Underworld II retrospectives. ![]()
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