Xebec's Demise

Wow, I really like the look of this one! The dark shading makes it look like a far higher quality image than it actually is, especially when looking at it with a bright white background on my PC. 🏆

Thank you for the info on legal Atari OS ROMs. I noticed the download link for Xformer 2000 has been dead since 2018, so PC Xformer Classic 3.8 might be next to go. Here's an archive that will hopefully last forever: PC Xformer Classic 3.8 Atari 8-bit emulator for MS-DOS PCXF380.ZIP (570K) with Atari OS ROMs.

I just joined an Alternate Reality yesterday after having not visited for a very long time. Right off the bat, I ended up excitedly getting a potion off an imp I barely managed to kill with my bare hands. The imp nearly killed me, taking me down to within 1 or 2 hit points of ending my life. I looked at the potion and it was black, I tasted it and it was bitter, I sipped it and it seemed safe. I felt I would take a risk, so I drank it without further study. I ended up drinking a potion of delusion, so now I'm being deceived of all my stats and they keep rapidly changing, going up and down and all over the place. As you can see in the picture, I was delusional, feeling like I had 161 hit points while on level 0. What other game does that, showing you the wrong stats for your character because you're delusional? I don't think I've come across another. I'm waiting outside the healer now because I know I only have 1 or 2 hit points until my death, but Alternate Reality is trying to convince me I have 161 hit points, I'm seriously delusional about my health. 😁

@phaeron, yes I believe you may be right for the original hardware. I was just hoping that maybe Altirra had a setting to auto swap disks or check all drives with images loaded. Maybe that's more complicated to code than I'm thinking. I've been using Atari800Win and a little utility called AR Wrapper to auto swap drives in the past.

@Rafael1138 I'm happy to see you got help from @Wrathchild and @_The Doctor__ so quickly! I was online and randomly checking here for something else when I noticed your questions just now. I wasn't even following my own topic! I just experienced a similar issue yesterday, trying Altirra emulator for the first time with Alternate Reality. Alternate Reality can cause issues and confusion due to how unusual it is, it's not your fault at all, it's just a fairly complex and unusual game that stores information about your character in other places besides just the character disk. Actually, I doubt any other Atari games secretly store information about your character on the actual game disks in addition to a character disk? So, I ran into a very similar issue myself using Altirra to Play Alternate Reality for the first time. By default the drives are set to Virtual Read/Write or VRW, probably so people will read and write to a virtual disk without unintentionally modifying their original disk images. However, this won't work with Alternate Reality past the first time you play, unless you make sure to save your virtual disk image of Disk 1 Side 2 and either change the drive setting to Read/Write or R/W when using the save or continue saving the virtual disk each time you play, making sure you use that most recent virtual save for playing your character going forward. 🤦‍♂️

I just tried out Altirra for the first time with Alternate Reality: The City and it doesn't appear to recognize disks in multiple drives automatically? I have to continually swap the four different disks to D1? Or is there a setting that will automate detecting and using all drives with disks in them? I tried searching the help file and a bit of searching that resulted in me here with people talking about using command lines to automate things, but I was just wondering if there a simple setting I'm missing that results in Altirra checking and using all drives that have disk images in them?

@Albert I was just reading the Wikipedia article on Alternate Reality and I happened to check the first reference link because I wanted to see the exact date that Alternate Reality was released. The reference didn't have the exact date, but to my surprise, our Atariage Alternate Reality: The City competition was mentioned and linked in an article from gamedeveloper.com: The History of Computer Role-Playing Games Part 2: The Golden Age (1985-1993). "In 1985, a Datasoft published Philip Price's Alternate Reality: The City, the first of a planned series of five games based on the same premise: aliens abducting the character and transporting him to different "realities." Even though only two of the games were ever published (the second part, The Dungeon, appeared in 1987), the series maintains a cult status, particularly among fans of Atari 8-bit computers (where it originated). Atari Age even hosts a competition for the game that is still going strong! The games feature first-person perspective and nice graphics, and are in many ways much ahead of their time. Both The City and The Dungeon are located on Medieval worlds, so most of the standard fantasy conventions still apply (mages, dwarves, etc.) However, Alternate Reality is more realistic than most CRPGs of its era--the avatar gets thirsty, hungry, and tired. The only way to address these problems (and get better equipment) is to raise capital. Thankfully, players can store their money and earn interest at banks, though the really profitable investment plans are risky. Even the treasures weren't always good; many items were cursed and had dire consequences for unwary players. And, as if all this isn't enough--it often rains, which apparently brings out the truly dangerous denizens of Xebec's Demise. Frustrated (or evil) players are free to prey upon the innocent. In any case, the high degree of realism and complexity makes Alternate Reality one of the most challenging of all CRPGs. Downloads and emulator information is available here." https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-history-of-computer-role-playing-games-part-2-the-golden-age-1985-1993- That's pretty cool! I only found out by chance 16 years later. 😁 @eobet's website is also linked to for downloads and information.

Have any of you asked Philip Price for an interview? He basically reverse engineered the Atari 800, teaching himself how to code and developed an amazing 3D game in 1985 called Alternate Reality, he then went on to code for the B2 stealth bomber. Here's an old interview: https://dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/PRICE.HTM

@eobet, even though it's sad news, thank you for the update. It's sad to hear that Gary Gilbertson passed away, but his music will live on and continue to be appreciated and enjoyed by thousands of people, potentially forever. I'm sure his music featured in Alternate Reality alone has captivated and entertained hundreds of thousands of people around the world and will continue to do so. His music was a big part of what immersed me within an Alternate Reality dream world as a kid and I still appreciate and enjoy it today as an adult, so do my kids now. It's also sad to hear that Philip Price may have put AR firmly in his rear view mirror, I suppose that means no more responses here? I should've spoken up years ago when I was thinking about creating a running list of Atariage questions for a Philip Price interview as a reply here. I was hoping that maybe if I got it started and kept an updated list of all the questions asked here for an interview in one place, Philip Price might agree to do a final professional interview for Antic's @Savetz, @rkindig, @playermissile, @Ripdubski or any other professional Atari oriented interviewer here that was interested. Given a month or two, I'm sure Atariage members could come up with an excellent list of interesting questions that haven't been asked before to choose from and prepare for the interview. There's actually probably a bunch of questions that have already been asked that would be worthwhile going over again in a professional interview too. I would love to hear the complete story of everything from Philip Price, including his career after coding games in a nice modern long format interview too, that would be awesome. Did you ever archive Gary's music somewhere?

False, in The Dungeon you escape the virtual reality, breaking into an alien computer control room. There are many obvious clues too, like the very title of the game itself, "Alternate Reality." If you were merely abducted by aliens that's not an alternate reality, that's the same reality. You don't roll stats for your current existence nor do you need to be 'connected' to your current existence. You're truly very unfamiliar with Alternate Reality, much like the others attempting to unfairly criticize the game recently, like @zzip and @NorbertP. It's odd that this topic has been here nearly two decades with very little unfounded criticism of the game and suddenly a group of you who are clearly ignorant about the game all show up at once to unfairly criticize it.

I liked your post because you finally answered me and provided some information on your attempt at an open-ended game. So, I'm glad to see you weren't just entirely making that up as a way to try to bolster your criticisms of Alternate Reality. I feel like this shouldn't have to be said, but since you're continuing to grasp at fairly flimsy assumptions to criticize Alternate Realty maybe it does. The way to figure out the genre of any game is simply ask yourself what the primary challenge or activity of a game is. In the case of a survival game, it's simply surviving. So, if you take a game like Ultima IV, it's clearly not a survival game even though it does have minor elements of survival games, like "stats to maintain," as most games do. Whereas, if you take a game like Alternate Reality: The City the primary challenge and activity is clearly surviving all of it's deeply survival focused game systems, like hunger, thirst, disease, tiredness, poisons, delusions, inebriation, curses and extreme threats to your resources and life around every corner of the city. At this point, you're playing very fast and loose with your definitions and terms to imprecisely and generically claim all RPGs with stats to maintain are "survival" games, even when I specifically defined for you many of the unique and complex survival focused game systems that set Alternate Reality: The City apart from other RPGs and truly make it a game deeply focused on survival. If you wanted to get even more careless with your terms and definitions you might claim that all games where you have to avoid death and try to survive are "survival" games, even Pac-Man. Again, what obviously defines a game as a survival game is a depth and focus on survival systems over and above all else. Alternate Reality: The City has an absolute focus on intricate and deep survival systems, like no other game before nor after it for quite some time and I detailed many of them for you. As for the intent of the City, it was absolutely specifically designed for survival and development of your character and Philip Price has said so. A survival game doesn't have to have the word "survival" on the box for it to be a survival game, that should be obvious too. The box literally states that the goal of The City is to "improve yourself physically, mentally, morally, and financially," in other words, that means your overall goal for The City is simply learning to survive and developing your character, that's it. The ultimate goal of returning to Earth or seeking revenge on your abductors is also clearly stated as the goal for the entire series, not The City. You just directly provided information contradicting your claims, apparently without realizing it. But, if you insist on seeing the word "survive" regarding The City somewhere in order to believe, here's the word directly from the developer himself, Philip Price: "So I wanted both an initial shock and survive part(aka The City) in what was meant to feel like an alive world" - Philip Price Regarding game systems, yes, you can fall into a trap of adding unnecessary stats and features, overcomplicating things, especially if those features don't support the main challenge or objective for your game. However, this is not the case with Alternate Reality: The City, all of the complex survival systems specifically and masterfully focus on the objective of The City, which is survival, making it extremely challenging and fun to try to survive. See, the only problem here in this discussion is that you're continually failing to acknowledge or recognize that the objective or goal of The City actually is survival, so to you all the complex survival systems appear overcomplicated and pointless. That's a failure on your part, not the game's. If you truly do "love a good survival game," then you should finally recognize The City for what it is and play it as the survival game it was designed to be and stop bemoaning that there's no quests or story for you to complete, you're trying to fit a square peg into a round hole with numerous unfounded assumptions. Since you prefer to have goals set for you, I challenge you to create a character with the goal of simply surviving without any cheats or backups and enter it into our competition here: Atari Age Alternate Reality: The City Competition If you love survival games, it's about time you finally play Alternate Reality: The City as one.

I really liked Ultima IV too and I like most RPG games in general, but you probably wouldn't be surprised to hear that my favorite by far of the Ultima series is Ultima Online. Ultima Online took everything to the next level and therefore became one of my favorite games of all time. And that is the same way I felt about Alternate Reality: The City when I first played it too. Like many people, I had played most of the popular RPGs including Ultima IV before I had ever even heard of Alternate Reality. So, when I first played Alternate Reality I was blown away that this hidden gem of a game was out there and I'd never even heard of it before. The City truly took RPGs to the next level too, not only with graphics, sound and music, but all kinds of incredibly realistic gameplay features I'd never seen before in any other RPGs. It's certainly a largely overlooked and ignored masterpiece of RPG history. I truly don't understand why there are so many haters of Alternate Reality either, I suppose it's mostly due to bias, ignorance, inexperience or resentment of one form or another.

@Wilheim @Wrathchild I think I just witnessed the end results of your amazing work on this project and thought you would enjoying seeing too. Alternate Reality The Dungeon - Atari 8-bit home computers - Unboxing and first time playing Where do you have these complete boxed games for sale? Has anybody made any progress on The City?

Isn't the main theme of both Alternate Reality and The Matrix that you discover your mind has been involuntarily placed within a virtual reality? Did you not see this post here and the article I linked to quoting Philip Price?

You certainly could not "easily" play Ultima or any other RPG as a survival game if you cannot play Alternate Reality: The City as one. That's a fairly extreme and absurd self-contradiction you're trying to make. The City was particularly and specifically designed as a survival game and hub for developing your character and other RPGs were not. If you find The City gameplay "lackluster" as a survival game when it was specifically designed with very advanced survival type features that no other games of the time ever had, some not even seen in many survival games even to this day, such as blood alcohol levels, disease incubation times, neural and blood poisoning, intoxication and physical loss of control of your character, delusion resulting in a false sense of ability with misrepresented stats, progressive thirst, hunger, tiredness and sleep quality, which all affect your stats and performance, body temperature affected by clothing, real-time weather, time of day and seasons, use-based skill development, haggling and reputation with npcs, npc operating times, variable npc inventories and pricing, interest rates and bank failures, very realistic irreversible alignment based upon your actions, surprise, noticeability and dapper stats affecting encounters and how npcs react to you based upon your skills and physical appearance within the game world and even a speed stat which physically determines how fast you can actually move within the game world. Either you're just entirely ignorant of all the game's advanced survival features, or you're just plainly dishonest to suggest that any old RPG game, not even intended to be a survival game, could just as "easily" be a survival game as Alternate Reality. I'm leaning towards dishonest since you conveniently failed to answer one of the most interesting questions I had for you. What was your open-ended game called and where can we see some of your work from the game?

I'm disappointed in you, zzip. I thought we were having an honest discussion until now. When you didn't dispute my response to you that Alternate Reality and Ultima IV offer two very different types of gameplay and that different people prefer different types of gameplay, I felt we found some common ground of agreement, even though we like different types of games. From your adamant dislike of Alternate Reality: The City and love of Ultima IV it appears you're clearly the type of person that prefers to be told what to do in your games and led along a storyline to an end; preferring completing quests that are predefined for you in games that you can eventually complete and put back on your shelf. I seriously doubt it's really much of a shock to you, but I prefer doing my own thing, setting my own goals and testing my skills at surviving in open-ended virtual world type games and so do many millions of others, especially in modern games today. Alternate Reality was way ahead of it's time with regard to gameplay, but decades later some of the top games in the world today are now very similar to Alternate Reality; open-ended survival-type virtual worlds which cannot be 'completed' in any real sense and which have very little to no storyline nor questing required at all. Prior to you now claiming that @NorbertP summed up Alternate Reality "perfectly" with his dishonest, exaggerated claims there's no "actual game" in Alternate Reality and that its visuals are "aesthetically unpleasant and monotonous" compared to Ultima III and Temple of Apshai, you even admitted yourself that Alternate Reality, "made excellent use of Music, animation, DLI color washes," that "AR :The City certainly nailed the presentation & music," and that "The intro was something to behold. Nobody did that kind of thing better in 1985." So, if NorbertP summed up the game "perfectly," were your initial statements on Alternate reality false? Let's at least get some facts straight. Unlike NorbetP's dishonest and absurd opinion, Alternate Reality is in fact a "game" and is in fact a game that many people like, have a lot of fun playing and greatly appreciate. You two may not realize and therefore not appreciate all the innovative features of Alternate Reality nor like the gameplay yourself, but that doesn't mean there's not an "actual game" in Alternate Reality. It is in fact a game and it's a highly regarded game for many. When you say, "AR designers," you still don't realize it was just one original person that designed the game, Philip Price? The only "trap" he fell into was signing a very bad contract with the drugged up crooks at Datasoft who made millions from his game and didn't pay him, claiming that the cost of all the conversion expenses for all the other systems Datasoft wanted to port the game to would have to be paid before he received any royalties. This forced him to find employment elsewhere, leaving behind the game he designed and created. Philip was clearly taken advantage of by Datasoft. From everything I know about him, he appears to be a very private, humble person that avoids conflict and doesn't seek very much recognition or attention; truly the opposite of Ultima IV's designer, Richard Garriott for a relevant comparison. Philip also did code an actual Dungeon expansion to The City and Datasoft "lost" it, hiring their own team of coders to make their own version of the Dungeon, which was basically a Frankenstein monster pieced together from Philip's ideas, concepts and code from The City game and very likely Philip's Dungeon that they "lost." A clearly recognizable example of how little thought or care was put into the design of the Datasoft Dungeon is that the intro for their version of the Dungeon is basically just a hacked up copy of the original abduction intro for The City, with the exception of new music and a poorly rendered "space ship" that looks more like a monastery. It doesn't even make sense to have you re-abducted from Earth for The Dungeon because when entering The Dungeon from The City you've already been abducted and you're already in an Alternate Reality. So, they clearly put very little care or thought into the game. Instead of a seamless Dungeon expansion like Philip created and wanted, Datasoft basically turned it into a separate incompatible game at his expense, regressing to more conventional and basic quest driven gameplay to complete and be done with, the very type of gameplay you prefer, but also making the game far less mysterious and far less of a an open-ended virtual world challenge to survive. So, I can definitely understand if you prefer The Dungeon. You say The City game itself was lacking for you, but that's probably simply because you prefer to be told what to do in games and to follow a predefined storyline to its end, as explained previously and you don't appear to like open-ended virtual worlds, but you should at least admit and recognize that many other people do and that these type of games have become popular today. I'm also disappointed to hear you claim that gave up on your open-ended game simply because you felt it had to have a story, when it truly doesn't. From your description it sounds like it would be an amazing game for me and modern gamers alike. We don't need quests and we don't need a story because we create our own quests and stories given a great virtual world sandbox to do that in. You giving up on your game, if you truly did, merely because you felt it should have had a predefined story in the end to keep you focused is quite the hangup. It makes me wonder if you just made that up to try to make a point? What was your game called and where can I see some of the work you did on it?

I never accused you of a crime for not liking something, apparently you're just someone that likes to exaggerate. However, it is in fact an entirely disingenuous attack to claim Philip Price never made an "actual game" and that his graphics were "aesthetically unpleasant and monotonous" while comparing his game to Ultima III and Temple of Apshai. You exposed yourself as dishonest.

😄 Consistently contrarian? I wasn't going to reply to you because from your first hypocritical reply it was obvious you're not even trying to be objective and clearly harboring some kind of bias and unusual disdain for Alternate Reality as a game and it's developer, Philip Price. However, maybe it's worth a try so you can re-examine what you just said. It appears fairly contradictory that you claim Temple of Apshai barely counts as an RPG, but you enjoyed playing the heck out of it and that the goal of Ultima III was unclear to you, but you still enjoyed it and felt you were achieving something, while at the same time claiming Alternate Reality is aesthetically unpleasant with monotonous visuals and you failed to find an actual game in Alternate Reality, leading to a combination of boredom, frustration and confusion. It truly sounds like you never really gave the game a chance after taking an initial dislike to it as a kid, while at the same time spending a lot of time playing games which by all standards truly do have inferior "aesthetically unpleasant" and "monotonous" graphics and by your own admission had unclear goals for you. So, you're holding on to some kind of grudge and now attacking Philip Price as having not even developed an "actual game."

Some people prefer the blue pill.

Philip Price was certainly artistic enough and capable of designing graphics that looked like a typical city, as above. However, this is quite a spoiler, but what you may not realize is that in Alternate Reality you are quite literally like a rat in a maze. You're not actually in a medieval town, the maze-like alternate reality city you're in is actually an alien computer simulation your mind has been connected to after being abducted by aliens and having your actual body put in an incubating cocoon-like state. Your actions and behaviors are being monitored and recorded in the simulation and you're being experimented on and studied by the aliens as your mind is busy wandering around in their virtual reality city maze. Alternate Reality is like the movie The Matrix, which was released in 1999, except 14 years earlier. You're like the main protagonist of the film, Neo, eventually discovering that you're actually living in a virtual reality simulation after all your previous memories of life on Earth have been blocked or erased, but instead of using your body as a power source, the alien beings are studying and experimenting on you. The Matrix, 1999 Alternate Reality is actually a deep rabbit hole and according to Philip Price himself, may have actually inspired the The Matrix film: I did talk to two guys while at a restaurant in Westwood [In LA , near UCLA, it's the core of Hollywood]. I explained to them AR and it storyline, ideas and the Hollywood movie Dark City similarities to some of it and it's differences [i.e. things I think they did wrong in that movie that made it a bomb in the box office]. They listened intently, and one of them remarked to me (as they smiled to each other) was that "ideas can't be copyrighted". Matrix came out a few years later, I very much doubt they were the two brothers who came up with Matrix, but it made me wonder after Matrix came out. Technically the idea of being deceived into thinking one's environment is one thing, when it is actually another has been expressed in Science Fiction for decades before I used that core concept. Those books by great Science Fiction authors probably is where I got my kernel of an idea. Phil Alternate Reality, 1998

I don't think it's selling Ultima IV a bit short, Alternate Reality is technically superior to Ultima IV in sound, graphics and design and has more ground-breaking features and technology too, including concepts that didn't even appear in Ultima games until 1997 with Ultima Online. Though Ultima IV was much better marketed and is certainly far more popular and influential, if you seriously compare the graphics, sound and features of the games side by side Ultima IV is a fairly basic story and quest driven RPG in comparison, while Alternate Reality was far ahead of it's time venturing into the open world survival type gameplay that has become popular in modern games today. The gameplay is more of a preference, if you like following pre-defined story-driven quests to completion, which is what most people expected and were accustomed to in RPGs back in 1985, then Ultima IV is your game, but if you're more into doing your own thing in an open-ended survival world then Alternate Reality was delivering that type of gameplay decades ahead of its time. This is also surely a reason that players of typical old-school RPGs don't get nor appreciate Alternate Reality very much, they're expecting to be told what to do by NPCs and have pre-defined quests to finish in order to complete the game and Alternate Reality doesn't do that; you have to decide for yourself what you want to do and what your own goals are in Alternate Reality, it's not a typical story driven game to be completed and put back on the shelf like Ultima IV, it's literally an alternate reality for players to immerse themselves in. Of course, the main failure of Alternate Reality is that the expansions for the game were never completed by Philip Price after he was basically taken advantage of and never paid by his corporate publisher. On the other hand, Ultima IV was a complete game in itself, well promoted and very successful as a result. However, the popularity and success of Ultima IV alone tends to overshadow how much more innovative and advanced Alternate Reality actually is for a game that came out prior to Ultima IV.

After watching the above Alternate Reality stream, I noticed that BillBull actually did an 8 part series of streams on Alternate Reality: The City which can be found here: https://www.twitch.tv/search?term=alternate reality%3A the city&type=videos I liked watching the reactions of a new player to the game who actually understands and appreciates how ground-breaking and incredible Alternate Reality: The City was for the year 1985. "So, the intro to this game is absolutely mind-blowing, I'm just going to be quiet and watch cause I love, I've watched this like 10 times, it's super cool." https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1144308103?t=00h32m42s "Dude, I love how, like, the lights and stuff are choreographed to the music and the sound effects just fit in perfectly with the song. It's so cool." https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1144308103?t=00h35m12s "They just constantly, like, reprise the same theme and constantly riff on the motif throughout the game, it's so cool!" https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1144308103?t=00h39m43s "Dude, this is so cool. Dude, this audio landscape is just fantastic, I just want to listen to the music. What! The blacksmith is just hammering away and singing. Holy crap! I just want to live here. I think I've met my new friend, I think I just want to hang out, the singing blacksmith...[starts singing along] This is the coolest shit ever. 1985, it's mind blowing!" https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1144308103?t=00h47m14s "You're dead. [music starts] Another song! You're dead. I don't know what happens when you die, besides the awesome song. Do I immediately get to reroll a character? Does it teleport me someplace? [more music starts] What! What is happening? Where are you? This is a surreal trip. I think I'm dead." https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1144308103?t=00h56m04s All his reactions remind me how much the music and sound can really set the feeling and atmosphere for a game and can be a significant part of helping immerse players within it. Alternate Reality certainly made use of excellent music and sound better than most games of the time. Unfortunately, it also reminds me of a very ignorant and unfair review I recently re-read of Alternate Reality: The City from Chester Bolingbroke aka CRPG Addict: http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2016/02/revisiting-alternate-reality-city-1985.html "3 points for graphics, sound, and interface. You want me to give points for the graphics, but I find them ugly and crude no matter how innovative the color-changes and raindrops are. You want me to give points for the music, but I don't care about music, and the other sound effects are primitive. The keyboard input works okay." That's a 3 out of 10 score he gave Alternate Reality for graphics, sound and interface! His review could not be more absurd, when Alternate Reality actually had some of the best graphics, music, sound effects and one of the most advanced designs and interfaces of it's time. It makes his review appear not just inaccurate, but intentionally dishonest. It's also very telling that CRPG Addict would declare he doesn't care about music and sound in games, something which can have a very dramatic effect on the atmosphere and feeling of a game. His absurd Alternate Reality review aside, even from that one declaration alone, Chester Bolingbroke and his reviews lose credibility with me. I'm surprised that for someone that reviews a lot of old games, he obviously has no clue how advanced the design, sound, music and graphics were in Alternate Reality: The City way back in 1985. The most charitable opinion I can give on him on this is that he must be unfairly comparing Alternate Reality to more modern games. His declaration that he doesn't care about such an important element of games, and really all media for that matter, demonstrates he's intentionally not comparing or ignoring important game elements and his reviews are therefore inherently faulty. But he's also very contradictory, if he doesn't care about music then why does he even have it as a rating category? If we compare one of the most popular games of all time, which actually came out after Alternate Reality: The City, Ultima IV, the sound, graphics and design are fairly rudimentary in comparison. It's also remarkable that CRPG Addict appears to be overall ignorant or dishonest about games and game technologies in general, resulting in unfair comparisons in his reviews and ratings. Unfortunately, that's not unusual for game reviewers, especially when they're doing it as a job and for pay and the company they work for is receiving advertising dollars. I don't know if CRPG Addict is making money from his reviews, but he's just as ignorant or dishonest as many paid game reviewers. Ultima IV, 1985 Alternate Reality: The City, 1985 I'm not sure if I've even seen any mainstream reviews for Alternate Reality the year it came out, it's like it got ignored the year of release and then poorly reviewed years later against newer games. For example, CRPG Addict tries to give his faulty review some credibility by proclaiming that he scored it about as well as Scorpia, someone paid to review cookie-cutter RPGs, which Alternate Reality certainly is not, in a November 1986 Computer Gaming World article, over a year after Alternate Reality was actually released. What a shame. The Ultima IV and Alternate Reality comparison is also an interesting one in how different the developers are. While Philip Price seems to be a very humble, private person, Richard Garriott or Lord British is the opposite, always seeking recognition and media publicity for his accomplishments. Could that be main the difference in how the two games were promoted, reviewed, received by the public and also their success? If only Philip Price had been paid for his work, we may have received the Philip Price version of The Dungeon and all the games in his Alternate Reality series. It's also disappointing to see that Philip Price's Wikipedia article has been deleted by Wiki editors. Isn't the point of Wikipedia to be a resource of information? It seems that deleting information for no other reason than someone feels it's not important enough is the opposite of providing a resource of information, it's hiding information. It's ironic that someone named "Czar" is responsible for deleting the Wikipedia article on Philip Price: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Philip_Price_(programmer)&diff=703005821&oldid=702992317 One of the viewers in the chat of the first stream I watched named thoughtlessdeed posted this link in chat to Gary Gilbertson's music at Demozoo which I was unaware of: https://demozoo.org/sceners/50829/ I'm looking forward to watching the next 7 streams in the BillBull series when I get time, I followed the Alternate Reality categories on Twitch and will watch for notifications for new livestreams from anyone. Maybe I will see you there? I also came across this new ad from 1987 that I had not see before at Moby:

Scans of all five AR newsletters can be found below, including a UK version and a letter that appears to have preceded the newsletters. There's also scans of the various boxes. https://www.mocagh.org/loadpage.php?getcompany=datasoft

Alternate Reality has made it to Twitch, there's a category for The City and The Dungeon. I stumbled upon the following recording of an Alternate Reality: The City livestream today. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1144308103

So, the DOS PC version of Alternate Reality also has jobs at banks, inns and taverns, making it very easy to get money and survive. Below is an image of me washing dishes for 63 coppers. You can do this as many times as you want at all establishments and the only risk is a rare small injury, like a few hit points. While it seems like a cool novelty to get jobs, it really further ruins the gameplay of The City by just making surviving so much easier. Just thinking of spending time washing dishes in Alternate Reality The City seems fairly fairly ironic, especially after the far more challenging Atari 800 version where you're lucky if you can kill a rat without getting rabbies, find a few coppers, get to a tavern before you are robbed and buy a food packet before starving to death. There's quite a difference overall! In the DOS version you're able to escape encounters easily and are apparently never stolen from when trying to escape, so you keep all your money, food and water flasks when running away from encounters. I noticed other smaller things too, like when rolling a character the stats go up to 24 instead of 21 and you start off with 1 gold in addition to any copper you roll. So, the DOS version truly is not a very accurate conversion of the original and not much of a challenge either. It has the same theme, but it's not the same game. It was fun to revisit, but I've gotten bored of it fairly quickly as it's just too easy, it's more like a simulation of Alternate Reality than an actual alternate reality, like the original Atari 800 version. I can see new developers wanting to add more features, but in doing so they ruined the challenge of the game. This is kind of cool though, the Alternate Reality online DOS Box emulator does seem to save your characters by cookie or browser, so you only see your characters, along with the three sample ones. For example, if you use a different browser or a private tab then the character saves will be new. Opening the browser in private mode or using another browser results in a new character disk: It is really cool that you can play AR online, but disappointed with the PC version of AR online, I began searching for more online Atari 800 emulators and found another at https://8bitworkshop.com named Atari 800XL (MAME) online emulator. It includes Disassembly, Memory Browser, Memory Map and Asset Editor features, so you can code right online too, but I can't seem to get Alternate Reality to load. When I try to load Alternate Reality - The City _ side 1-1.atx it shows a message, "AltirraOS This is a substitute for the standard OS ROM. See the help file for how to use real Atari ROM images for higher compatibility." Does anybody know what I'm doing wrong? https://8bitworkshop.com/v3.8.0/?platform=atari8-800xl.mame&file=Alternate Reality - The City _ side 1-1.atx