Runes of Virtue I

History: When the unbelievable happened, the return of consoles and hand-held games in a time when many people already had a computer, everybody jumped on this trend and hoped to get its share. Origin has not been an exception. Apart from their conversions of Ultima 4-7 for the consoles they created two additional games with an Ultima background, Runes of Virtue I only for the GameBoy and Runes of Virtue II for GameBoy and the Super Nintendo Console.

Four Avatar companions are available for selection.

And again Lord British's castle, this time in a monochrome version.

Background: Runes of Virtue is generally considered a non-canonical Ultima, it has a greatly reduced Britannia and some plot inconsistencies. It seems to play in the long time of the absence of the Avatar between Ultima 6 and 7 and introduces a new Foozle, the Black Knight. The reduced Britannia has only the four castles and the eight dungeons in the first game, the second game also has the eight cities. You can pick one of four companions as a replacement Avatar in this single-player action game. In part I the Black Knight has stolen the eight runes and you have to solve puzzles in the dungeons to get them back. In part II he captures the mayors of the cities in amusing cut-scenes and you will have to free them and finally defeat the Black Knight himself.

Each NPC has a portrait in conversations.

One of several shops.

Recommended Version: Not much choice here. The first part was released exclusively for the GameBoy, this is the reason for the crappy screenshots here.

The countryside near Lord British's castle.

Approaching a dungeon entrance.

Statistics:

Single-player game
No magic spells
Dungeons/Outdoors/Buildings 2D
On-Screen-mapping: No

A typical dungeon interior.

You have found one of the missing runes!

Morale: No morale. Runes of Virtue is a sliding puzzle game for the average GameBoy player. But it can be fun for a while.

Britannia