Ultima VII: Part Two - Serpent Isle

I played this, like the Black Gate before it, on a:

486 SX 25, overclocked to a whopping 33 mhz.
4 MEG of ram.
Packard Bell (Yes, it was my first "real" computer purchase, after an old XT I had. I was rather ignorant at the time...)
Downloaded an umb driver from a newsgroup (the "web" was not really around yet.)
which fixed a lot of problems with the "Voodoo" mem management, letting me run PCXDUMP and stuff "high" and still letting me run the game fine.

Like the black gate, I did not get the game until the bugs were worked out and there was an add on for it. Like the Black Gate, I was a late adopter of CDROMS (did it come on those? I think so...) so I was installing with 7 or 8 3.5 inch floppies (as well as the add on floppies.)

Some of my favorite parts of the game:

The paperdoll inventory system was fantastic. It was new at the time and pretty cool.

The way you could move stuff around was neat; In fact, I had moved so much "junk" near my home base of "Moonglow", or something, that the city started to derez (evidently there were too many objects around. ) Some visits to the creamatorium, to delete lots o' stuff, I fixed that. I loved all the stuff you could do in this game without hacks/editors/ etc; Just playing it normally you could do weird stuff.

Boyden (sp?) Though he could "explode" so I saved just in case. I think he exploded once, so I went back to a save.

Petra, my hot metal friend. She was cool because you could get her to stay in the group by killing and resurrecting her (via that automaton spell) So you could have an extra party member, sort of.

The everlasting Goblet. I found this deep in a dungeon. Again, this was pre the web and pre many walkthroughs and such. You had to look at "newsgroups" or the like for hints, or in magazines (which were largely worthless.) I remember viewing comp.sys.games.pc.rpg (or something) and the ultima groups a lot for this game. I was proud that I found the goblet by chance, without knowing about it. It solved the food problem well along with a "feed me" hotkey or something that I think came with the silver seed.

Spoiler, possibly!!!!:

Dupre: By going back to that monk lady, before you face the bad guy, she says something like "All of your party needs to be with you..."
The she promptly resurrects Dupre, who had something happen to him earlier. So I was running around with Dupre, carrying Dupre's ashes, with people acting like he was dead (except Dupre himself.)

All in all, this was one of my favorite game experiences though I played it on what to some people must have seemed like an abacus.

I finished it then I think I finished it again. I think this was the one you could play as a female? So my second time I was a dark complected female, as different from the "white avatar" Avatar as possible. That led to a fun "lesbian" sex scene with Frigidizzi, or whatever.

I thought it was a big improvement over The Black Gate, but I missed the ships from that first one. In the Black Gate, you could have excess people who could join your party stand on the side rails of the ship and then you could ask them to leave the party but "wait." So I had two ladies stand on each side with firedoom staffs, while we sailed around. Even with the teleport stones, I still liked to sail around sometimes instead, with my ship full of junk and extra people (again, this was all stuff you could do without hacking but just normally playing.)

Damn, now I want to play this thing again, this time under Linux.

By the way, click a bunch of times in rapid succession on a sheep. Yeah, funny stuff. "That's Baaaaaaaaaaad, Avatar!"

On the bright side, you had liberty in this game to do what you wanted, you could help a NPC or kill him/her. You could get married, steal... Also it was huge to roam. However the story was too complicated for my taste and it took forever to complete. I think I never finished it, in fact.

Where part Two and Part One differ from each other is the main story in part two is more involved than part one, while the side quests in part one were more engaging.