Ultima VII: Chasing ghosts

(This is part of my journey playing through Ultima VII. You can follow the entire series on the Nostalgia Lane page.)

I’m embarrassed to admit that when my party went to leave Minoc, I totally forgot where I had parked my magic carpet.  There’s one of those sentences that I don’t get to type very often.  Anyway, long meandering journey through the countryside later and our bedraggled group boards Flight 001 with nonstop service to Paws.

We chatted up Weston’s wife at the shelter there, who tells us that the guy was pardoned and given employment by Lord British.  Seems the least the ruler could do, really.

Worse news on the whole Elizabeth and Abraham front.  Looks like I just missed them.  Again.  This is the game actively messing with me.  That’s all it is.

At least once I make the long magic carpet ride to Jhelom, I’ll finally

MOTHER PUS BUCKET.  Really game?  Really?  Is this how you devs get your jollies when you’re not coding dead bunny rabbits and Kilrathi references?

Jhelom is an island town all the way to the southwest.  Every town in this game seems to have a “thing:” Paws is being poor, Cove is being about love, Minoc is about industry, and, apparently, Jhelom is about fight clubs.  Well, dueling.  The citizens seem a little unnerved by this but what are you going to do?

During my routine course of pillaging and looting the locals, I made a stupid mistake.  Usually what you need to do is to dump goods into your companions’ backpacks, since the game doesn’t blink at this.  But what happened is that my crew was hungry (again), I found a barrel full of apples, and I started to feed everyone straight from the barrel instead of transferring the food to the backpacks first.

The game went BANANAS.  My team started shouting that I wasn’t virtuous, as if I hadn’t just robbed every other town we’d visited.  The locals and guards started swarming me, all yelling, and even the Guardian made one of his rare voice cameos to chastize me.  I was given a choice to fight or surrender, so I surrendered to see what would happen.

Jail.  Jail happened.  The game carted me off to I do not know where, stripped me of all of my possessions, and left me to rot.  I love how there’s a skeleton casually decorating up the place, as if the jailer couldn’t be bothered to remove a stinking corpse from the next room over.

Getting out wasn’t hard, as the skeleton had some gold on him (her?) and I used that to buy the keys off of the jailor.  Then I saw the enormous pile of my belongings in the next room over, thought about how I parked the magic carpet on some tropical island, and thought… RELOAD.

The apple incident never happened, do you hear me?

Short post today for U7, so I’ll send you over to Casual Aggro who explains the (spoilery) subtext of the game as a slam against EA.  Elizabeth and Abraham?  E&A?  Whoa.  Mind… blown.