"'Ultima Zero,' with its bottomless dungeons and 19x19 outside world, was no zero..."

The original Ultima I, which precluded Britain and Sosaria and even Shamino, was designed in Basic. Apparently Richard Garriott, while working at a computer store, designed ''Akalabeth,'' the precursor to the Ultima series. Although the plot may be outrageously simple, after one look at the source code, you can't help but admire how compact the game is, even if it is inordinately frustrating. Your first mission is to find Lord British's castle, and after asking your name, he sends you on four quests. You must enter a dungeon and kill a special monster--well, there are ten types, and you must kill one of each of the four toughest--and return. If you do so, your attributes increase, and you get to perform the next quest. Once you've completed the game, there is a brief message saying you've done so. Mondain's there, but only as the guy responsible for all the dungeons and monsters. You never get a crack at him.

The landscape is, of course, the smallest of the Ultimas--in the beginning, you are asked to choose your lucky number, which functions as a random seed and can thus be used to restart a game. It maps out the 19x19 terrain where you can move around. You must also choose whether to be a fighter or mage(fighters can handle rapiers, but mages have control over magic amulets,) and you must choose a difficulty level from one, the easiest, to ten. There are towns on the terrain, which have no names and all sell the same thing(food, which you must always have in supply, rapiers, shields, axes, bows/arrows, and magic amulets,) mysterious boxes, and loads of bottomless dungeons, whose traps, chests, monsters, doors and secret doors, are also determined by a random seed along with X- and Y- coordinates, although exit and up-down stairs are fixed. Perhaps Garriott sensed the game might be unfair if the dungeons were totally random, as this allows the user to map dungeons out. The downside is that cheating is trivial, which may not seem such a disappointment after you find out how hard the game seems. If you die, you get to start over with a new lucky number, and your stats are reset. An amusing side-note is that the random numbers determining your attributes are reset as well, meaning that you can reload the same game with the same attributes.

The keyboard controls are rather primitive. I suppose I can let the ''Are you ready??'' rhetorical question at the beginning, that doesn't recognize ''NO,'' slide. In the game proper, the arrows and return and slash move you in the four basic directions. S shows your stats, and A means attack. X is used to enter a place while you are outside or to climb or descend a dungeon stair. You type A and M to use a magic amulet even if you are not attacking. This can create stairs or shoot a missile or have a random effect on your statistics. The only break from this is in towns, where you type the first letter of what you want to buy, or Q to exit. At any rate, you can't plan your trips ahead, as you can only see one square in each direction. The big weakness of the keyboard controls is that it is easy to make typing mistakes in combat, for which you are penalized. If you type in a key that is not recognized as a move, oops! You waste a turn. With gremlins who steal half your food(rounded up) this is not funny. You also spend a lot of time pressing the carriage return in combat to signify you've read who's attacked you. Added to that is the problem that the monsters always see you first, so you must be on the lookout for ambushes. Even if you are, a monster that doesn't attack you from the front may require three turns to locate. An almost equally glaring omission is the lack of a compass. True, there were only three lines of text to work with, but a brief graphic would have been helpful.

There is also a problem with how the text is aligned; when your character gets very good, the hit points and food overlap on the character view screen when you type S or enter a town. I suppose a single programmer just wants to get the big picture, but this was a bit shoddy.

Garriott certainly did what he could with the basic graphics. Everything is in vector graphics, with the BASIC command ''LINE'' prominent in the code. There are only five different icons for land, and the dungeons are mostly doors or chests, which give a stenographic feel to the game. I don't suppose intense graphics and basic mix very well, and although the pictures don't really match up to the later stuff, there are some clever attempts at artistry. You can pretty much tell what everything is supposed to be, and the balron and the daemon are impressive. Sometimes the graphics break down, for instance, when you pull up a statistics screen in a dungeon, or you are on a square(all dungeons have 9x9 grid areas you can walk) that doubles as a secret door.

The idea of random numbers to create a landscape is slick. It gives immediate variety and almost certainly impresses someone who says, for instance, ''Gee, my lucky number is seven. Oops, I didn't last very long. Maybe it's three.'' Barring extremely rare cases where you can't walk to Lord British's castle, you can either concentrate on a specific scenario or try a new layout. Overall, Akalabeth is quite exhausting for its short playing time, maybe largely due to the gremlins that will nail half your food. Even the lowest level forces me to pull out all the stops for my emulator cheats(yes, this game is freeware to my knowledge.) Save states are very useful. I've found that getting through this game once on the easy was enough, especially since I could see the result of solving the toughest level in the BASIC code. However, for those who always wanted to program a game, this is a wonderful one for analyzing the source, which is also out on the net, and for those gaming history buffs, this is a must-play. This game certainly has holes, and many weren't filled for several years and by a bigger staff. However, it's not surprising something more wonderful evolved from it.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 04/03/01, Updated 04/03/01