As the ninth game in an RPG series you'd expect the game to have countless references that only veterans would get, leaving newbies out in the cold. Far from it. While there is the odd reference to the older games that veterans will appreciate, new players get a good feel for the history of Ultima through informative books, conversations and the gorgeous Tapestry of Ages that hangs in Britain, depicting the entire Ultima History from Ultima I to VIII.
As we mentioned in the introduction to this review the copy of Ultima IX we played through has been remastered since the problematic first release. Does it fix all the bugs? Well, yes and no. We've already mentioned the terrible FPS on any system we threw at the game and to be honest they weren't much better than in the first release. Most of the showstopper bugs have thankfully been squashed, though. We only encountered one major bug during play that we managed to work around. Other than that a few random crashes were in evidence although far, far fewer than the original release. If only they'd spent more time on the engine speed as well.
If it weren't for the engine speed and dire voice acting we'd have to place Ultima IX as one of the best RPGs in recent years. As it stands though the terrible speed is likely to discourage many gamers, particularly those without 3dfx cards, and so it should. CPUs will have to hit gigahertz speeds before the game becomes smooth in higher resolutions like 1024x768. Ultima fans will also want to know if it lives up to the standards set by the previous games and to an extent it does.