Ultima I

 Released in June 1981, this was the beginning of the Ultima series.  I never actually played this one before.  I started in on the series around Ultima 3 but I thought I'd play them all for the sake of thoroughness.  This is one of the first games for the PC (in this case it was for the Apple II, Atari, Commodore, etc.) and probably the first RPG.
You start with 100 coin and a dagger.  After heading to town to buy some better equipment you can head to the nearby castle to gather the one quest available there.  You then can travel to the other castle on the starting continent or go dungeon delving.  The dungeons are randomly generated based on a template but there is no reason to explore more than one of them as all of the quests that require you to kill a dungeon monster (all 4 of them) can be achieved in any given dungeon.  The dungeons themselves are interesting as it switches to a first-person, vector graphics display.  One of the strange mechanics in Ultima I is the health system.  Depending on how many and which kinds of enemies you defeat in the dungeon you will gain a varying amount of health on exiting.  Meaning, if you go into the dungeon and kill 8 monsters then return to the surface, you will gain something like 128 health for that. It's odd, but it works out alright.

Title Screen

The wide world of Sosaria

After grinding long enough to gain more experience, gear, health and some for of water transportation, you are ready for the next phase of the game.  I should mention at this point that there are exactly two types of towns and two types of castles in the world.  All towns fall into either the Type-A town or the Type-B town.  Each sells about half of the equipment available in the game.  Similarly, all Type-A castles offer the same type of quest, i.e. find such-and-such location, whereas Type-B castles offer the other type, kill such-and-such monster.  I mention this because this next phase requires you to complete all 4 of the kill-a-monster quests.  Once completed you can return to the castles to receive a colored gem as your reward.  With all four gems in hand you can head to space... that's right, space.

A typical town

A typical dungeon

So you buy a shuttle and head into space.  I'm not really sure why, but the goal here is to shoot down 20 enemy fighters, which look an awful lot like TIE fighters.  Once you do this you gain the rank of "Space Ace" and can go ahead and head back down to earth, er, Sosaria.  If you have the Space Ace rank and then rescue a princess trapped in any of the castles, she will tell you about the Time Machine hidden nearby.  This thing just keeps getting crazier and crazier.  Once you find the Time Machine you can board it and, assuming you have al 4 gems, you can use it to travel to the past.  Apparently, the bad guy, Mondain, has grown so powerful that he is invincible and it is only be traveling back 1,000 years before Mondain gained too much power that he can be defeated.  After a quick trip back in time and a quick battle, Mondain is cast down and you get a nice screen of text telling you how the world now loves you and sees you as their hero.

The Star Wars portion of the game

The final boss, Mondain

This game goes from dungeon crawling to world exploration to space shooter to time traveling.  It's a strange game but highly ambitious.  It's a little odd that there is no real incentive to explore the world.  You need to visit, maybe two of the world's 20-ish cities and only one of the world's 20-ish dungeons.  There are only about 6 hours of gameplay here, depending on how many times you die while grinding for cash and health.  I was able to complete the game in a single day.  It really inspired a lot of ideas in future RPGs, however.  Particularly, I believe that Final Fantasy is heavily inspired by this game.  Final Fantasy has a more coherent plot (marginally), but it also sends the players to space and back in time to defeat the final boss.  Overall, this game was fun to play, partly because of the crazy directions that the plot went and partly just to experience this piece of gaming history.