Forced platforming in games where there really should not have been platforming. There are some first person games from back in the day that have asinine platforming sections.

Unnecessarily long animations to show off technology. The summons and battle transitions in the PS1 Final Fantasy games seem to go on forever.

The inability to rebind keys/controller inputs. When you've grown accustomed to "A" to run and "B" to jump, it's really difficult to play a game that swaps them.

That gives me a cruel idea. You know how, in some games, confusion reverses your directional controls? (By the way, anyone know what game started this convention?) How about a status ailment or other effect in a platformer that swaps your jump and attack buttons?

I think in U6 the inventory was still sort of manageable, it was tile-based after all, but it got noticeably worse with U7, when they switched to a replacement back bag system. Ultima 7 and Serpent Isle have one of the worst inventory systems ever made for a game. It actually might even be the worst inventory system ever made

Ultima 6's inventory system was manageable, but it was still worse than how Ultima 5 handled it. One significant improvement Ultima 4 had over Ultima 3 was the shared inventory, where you don't need to worry about who's carrying what; Ultima 6 got rid of it.

Incidentally, this reminds me of one other "feature" of Ultima 7; having to manually feed your characters. In Ultima 4-6, food management wasn't a problem; in 4 and 5, just buy a lot of food and you're fine until it runs out. Ultima 6 only requires food when resting, and with MP regenerating every hour (unlike in 5), and the Help spell existing (free deathwarp without the XP loss that would come if you actually died, but still restoring your party to full), you don't need to worry about food at all! But then Ultima 7 came around, and not only do you need to worry about food, you must now *manually* feed your characters, or else they'll starve to death.

You, as the reader, might ask, "How do you manually feed your characters"? Well, the answer is that you go into your inventory, select the food item you want to use, and then select the character to use it on. This, of course, means that you have to navigate the atrocious inventory system to do something that was never required in previous games!

Between the atrocious inventory system, the need to manually feed characters, the poor combat system where you have almost no control, and the bugs in the game, it really makes me wonder how Ultima 7 ended up so well regarded; many of those issues should have been dealbreakers for most players.

I think, for many, it was still simple enough to work around those "simulation" aspects of Ultima 7 and concentrate on the story itself. But I do find it a bit odd, that U7 is so well regarded, as besides having a pretty poor UI and annoying busy work like feeding the characters, its combat system is also pretty poor.

Its saving grace might be, that you can run away from most fights pretty easily. I don't think I personally levelled up once when I played it through myself, as the RPG mechanics in it are so poorly done. The same happened with Ultima 6 as well, as its combat system isn't much better.

Actually, I think I like Ultima 6's combat system the most out of all the Utlima games; the one change I'd make is make physical attacks considerably more likely to hit (and, to keep things balanced, make offensive spells do more damage; this wouldn't affect Disable or Kill, of course).

On the other hand, Ultima 3 has the best class system in the game, and even *that* isn't really balanced (Exotic Armor hurts it, as does the fact that you can only hit with Exotic Weapons in the endgame, and the classes that get neither strong magic nor ranged attacks are pretty much worthless). Ultima 4 is worse in class balance (Fighters get shafted, lacking both magic and good ranged weapons; in fact they can't hit at all with ranged weapons in the final dungeon).

Anyway, the problem with working around the simulation aspects of Ultima 7 is that you can't ignore them, and you still have to deal with the mundane task of feeding the characters or they'll die. It wouldn't be as much of a problem if the simulation mechanics were optional, but they aren't.

Incidentally, one other thing I don't miss about the Ultima games (starting with 4) is the need to gather (and in 4 and 5, mix) reagents to cast even the most basic spells; many spells (like Missile and Open) are basically useless because of this requirements, and the mechanic discourages players from using anything other than basic attacks during combat. It's really a shame, because the Ultima series is one of the earliest games I've seen MP regenerate in (starts in 3, though the mechanic is absent in 5 for whatever reason), a mechanic that encourages players to actually use spells.

By the way, did you know that, in Ultima 7, you can get enough money to make the game crash? (The easiest way to do this is to gamble; save first, than reload if you lose. Your wager will grow exponentially, and you can just leave your bet on the table and play again. Winning enough times will crash the game, as the game has to create more money objects, and will run out of memory; while this easily happens in the original engine, since the growth is exponential, it is probably feasible to get this to happen in Exult.)

Wait. this was a thing? That is a terrible idea, whose idea was this and what kind of drug was he on?

You never had a secret decoder? You could get them from Happy Meals and boxes of cereal.


Oh god these kids today! HOW SAD!


Next think I know you'll tell me you never had that little plastic submarine that would go up and down when you filled it with baking soda.

No, but those were jokes on the cartoons I watched. I did get a trial version of the Amazon Trail, that was pretty nice.

That reminds me of the bug in Oblivion: A cabinet in one of the homes (the paranoiac I think?) will repeatedly duplicate items until the number is higher than the variable can deal with, causing a crash.

This is off-topic, but as you know a great deal about Ultima, can you briefly explain to me why people pretend that the series ended at 7? What exactly is so bad about 8?

I briefly watched a cousin play it not long after release, but I never had a PC myself until years later. I have the series now, and when I launched Pagan, the atmosphere, thanks in part to the music, instantly drew me in. I haven't gotten around to starting a playthrough yet, but I plan to soon. Is it the gameplay that's really that bad? The story?

Ultima 8 takes place on an entirely different plane. The events of which only serve to temporarily trap the Avatar so the Guardian can invade; to which otherwise the land of Pagan has absolutely no bearing on the rest of the Ultima Mythos. The gameplay was considerably considered bad, especially before patching. The entire magic system had been replaced, there were now platforming segments, and no longer was there the traditional RPG things such as EXP or levels.

A large amount of the game is empty space and caves which all look the same. This includes areas which upon casual inspection will appear normal, but instantly kill you should you set foot on them, due to them being just outside of bounds. Oh, and there is a lot of backtracking. While you do have a recall item, it's use is greatly limited, as you first have to find the recall point, and secondly activate it. Thirdly, many of the recall points are located in areas entirely useless to return to.

The story of Pagan is unfortunately unclear and incomplete, as EA decided to drop it out the window in quite a hurry, leaving a large amount of the plot entirely unresolved.

Any customization or agency the Avatar had is now entirely gone.

These aren't factors which make it bad, per say but rather are demerits against it as a whole.

Those racing games where it was next to impossible to even get first place no matter what you did and all the hours you played. I'll probably edit this later to throw in an example but I purged those memories in order to give racers another chance.

I actually don't like Ultima 7, and I haven't actually played Ultima 8, but from what I have seen from watching somebody speedrun the game, some of the problems include:
* The controls are quite terrible. The Avatar will often not do what you want him to; this can be a problem when climbing things.
* There are plenty of situations where you will be instantly killed if you make the wrong path, like failing a jump or walking on a certain carpet. With the poor controls, this becomes a real problem.
* The game has bugs, and many of them can softlock your game, forcing you to start over (unless you have a save from before the bug occurred). The speedrunner kept running into various ways the game could softlock. (There was also one time that the screen would not stop shaking, even when the save/load screen is open.)
* Ultima 3 to 7 were party-based RPGs (though 7 less so than 3-6); Ultima 8 is not. This change probably didn't sit well for fans of the series.
* For me, the fact that the Avatar has to be male and that the option to play a female Avatar, present in earlier installments in the series (including 7), is the dealbreaker (and also explains the pronoun I used in the first point).

Of course, the worst Ultima game, I think, may be the NES "port" of Ultima 5; now *that* was a bad game (unlike computer versions of 5, which are actually good). The NES 5 actually turned me off from trying the PC version.

Editing config.sys and autoexec.bat files, to get JUST the right amount of memory and features to run game xyz....

.. TSRs... heh, i remember making one. that was fun...

Reminds me of one race in Zelda: Majora's Mask (which, I should point out, is not a racing game, so it's even less excusable here) where your time doesn't actually matter; when you get close to the goal, another racer will teleport right behind you and likely overtake you unless you are able to knock it away. I am quite sure that my personal best time (which I haven't kept track of) was a time I did not win the race, and my victories were actually significantly slower than most of my losses.

(Incidentally, I find that the reward for winning actually makes combat less interesting, and as a result less fun, but that's another story.)