Ultima Online: The Ultimate Collector's Guide: 2013 Edition

I really want to give this guy five stars based just on how much work went into this thing but I am being generous with 4 stars based on what I think the average person would hope to get out of this gargantuan volume. You can tell the author absolutely slaved over this thing. A lot of love went into this book but I finished it with a little dissapointment. First an explantion of what this guide is in a nutshell. Imagine every expansion that ever came out for Ultima Online then multiply that by three for the Japanese and other country versions. Now multiply that by three more for the alternate versions of those games leaving your with hundreds of different versions of Ultima Online. Too much math but you are starting to get the idea. Now each of those expansions had items produced for local conventions such as E3, giveaways, retail bonuses, etc. Every country, Japan in particular, had different items as well, shirts, magnets, posters, pins, mugs and the list goes on. Every item is in here with a black and white pic (really longing for color but I am aware the costs were probably prohibitive). You end up with mostly hundreds of pages of physical items and box covers of games, something non-collectors would consider to be filler but for the ultimate hard core collector or UO merchandise, this book is a godsend. I am not one of those collectors. I played UO and loved it, I have one poster and love to talk about the "gold ole' days". Now the one saving grace that makes me want to keep this book is the awesome little stories that were gathered from the programmers, developers and anyone who could still remember this stuff. It talks about challenges of each expansion, origins of things such as the purple llama, dates of milestones and hard numbers on sales, subscribers, expectations, etc. The down side is, if you put all of this cool info together, you fit it in a 30 page book and I am probably being generous. I would buy it again because I savor every little thing I can learn about the game but I wish there were two books, a $10 version with everything except the product info and shots and another for $20 with all the collector stuff. In conclusion, if you don't mind the fairly hefty price and are interested in seeing all the cool merchandise that is out there, get it. If you just wanted a very few good stories and development info, it is worth the price? For you to decide...

As it says, its a collectors guide. Its basically a catalogue of everything UO. Not quite what I expected or wanted. Hoped it would have more game playing information.Still hats off to the guy who wrote it. That was no mean task.