Dear Future Gamer

I must say, I do agree with thy review of Ultima IX. I borrowed a demo from my mate, fondly looking forward to resuming my adventures with the intrepid Avatar, having played the Ultima series before (yes all eight of them!). After installing the demo, I was all fired up by the intro and then the game began...

What can I say? It was as stuttering as the village idiot, even on my PC (a PII 400 with 128Mb RAM!) and as uncontrollable as a lame sloth. After finally turning the detail down to absolutely appalling levels, I managed to get going. Following the instructions I looked at a book on my bedside table, only to find it had been trapped with the "Blue Screen of Death Spell". After much testing I discovered that anything I clicked on had been cursed with this "spell".

Not to be outdone, I went out and bought a brand new GeForce DDR and installed it. Yes, I have more money than sense. And hurrah! The demo worked! It was no longer stuttery and looked amazing. Great, but then the curse of the Blue Screen of Death Spell reared its head again, forcing me to shut down the computer.

Perhaps when the game is released these awful bugs will have been sorted, but I for one don't want to go on patching the game every weekend to make sure I can play it. Why didn't they test the game? I was under the perhaps misguided impression that testing found these sort of bugs and sorted them out. It's truly a very nice looking game; pity it's more buggy than an insect house.

Jez

FG: It's galling, isn't it, and not something we'd have expected from reputable publishers like EA.