They've got great tricks up their sleeves, like the Bard's songs and the Sorcerer's instant illusionary allies who fight by your side. Magical abilities are based on a spell point system, so you can divvy up enchantments as necessary. Combat, like the rest of the game, is menu-driven and easy to conduct. As in most such scenarios, Bard's Tale requires lots of beastie-bashing to build experience and add new powers to your party's arsenal.
You explore dozens of map-making-required mazes, and unlike most similar titles, here you get two play views, a first-person 3-D look and an overhead perspective. While BT's visuals and music aren't much to talk about, the diverse locations throughout Skara Brae, such as the Wine Cellar and Kylearan's Tower, are a definite high point. Bard's Tale isn't the best-looking or sounding RPG around, but maze trail-blazers will find this musician's song is worth a listen.
If There's one sure fire way to drum up free publicity for your latest gaming venture, it's by wheeling out an update. In the case of The Bard's Tale, you'd have to be a fairly grizzled old school gamer to remember the original and its sequels from when they first showed up some 20 years ago.
This particular update isn't quite as cynical as some, though - not only is the original developer Brian Fargo involved, but he's used his return as an opportunity to send up the RPG genre. Many of the nods to the cliches of the genre are made by the Bard himself, expertly voiced by The Princess Bhde's Cary Elwes in cockney mode. A refreshingly witty but shitty character, the Bard is concerned only with earning cash through whatever means necessary, and encouraging the land's various buxom wenches to play his purple flute.
Naturally, his less than noble efforts at getting his rather unsavoury end away are channelled into a more wide-reaching plot involving saving a beautiful and, of course, rich princess. Just how much of a cad the Bard is throughout the adventure is, to a limited extent, up to you, as you can pick whether to be bolshy or nice at key points during conversations.
It's even based on the same engine used for Dark Alliance and Champions Of Norrath, which are the console versions of Baldur's Gate and Everquest respectively. Taking into account that the Snowblind engine is effectively four years old helps to explain it looking less than state of the art, but it's by no means terrible.
The majority of the RPG elements have been stripped down to their bare bones. The loot regurgitated by vanquished enemies one of many commonplace RPG nonsenses acknowledged by the Bard is automatically sold, and you have to distribute a couple of experience points every now and then when you level up.
The summoning system proves to be the most interesting aspect, as once you've collected some summoning-tunes, it's left to you to select the best combination of allies to call upon to help you out at any given point. The biggest sting in the Bard's tail is that it doesn't realise that taking the piss out of the genre's cliches doesn't excuse it from relying on them. Most of the quests consist of a repetitive and sometimes excruciatingly strung-out series of battles. The fact that the combat itself amounts to little more than uninspiring buttonbashing leaves the impression that much of it is there merely to serve as padding.
While The Bard's Tale is told amusingly enough, the disappointing combat fails to lift it from the upper end of mediocrity.
Although the gags fail to hold a candle to the likes of Monkey Island and its ilk, they still just about maintain your attention long enough to make it to one of the multiple endings.
Ultimately it's lightweight stuff and would be a better buy if it was going for a song. Twenty years later this re-imagining delivered 3D graphics, Carry On Take this: the tutorial mission in has you killing a giant rat in the cellar of an inn.
So far, so cliche you think, until you see this giant rat would dwarf a rhino and breathes fire. Added to this healthy disrespect for all things Tolkien is double-entendre laden dialogue; a dickish anti-hero of a main character; and squad-based combat that lets you use an imaginative range of a dozen or so summoned allies. But this good work is gutted by The Bard's Tale being the laziest console port we've seen.
WASD don't move the Bard, they zoom the camera in and out and turn it Moving the Bard involves rightclicking the destination, but this only works if there's nothing in the way. As there's no pathfinding Al, if the Bard walks into an object he stands frozen. Add to this is the camera's angle a few degrees from top-down, creating a vertiginous sensation that can't be adjusted, which makes looking around areas impossible.
Especially annoying when the Bard runs behind a wall, and is blocked from sight. The final insults are a checkpoint save system there's no excuse for this, as keyboards have over key combos that could be set to quicksave and ugly, PS2 graphics. This is a decent game destroyed by really lazy porting. This game was a breakthrough when it was first released by Electronic Arts for home computers in the mids. To begin with, it was one of the first RPGs that let you select commands from a list or "menu" of possible actions.
Most earlier RPGs required players to type their commands on the keyboard. The typical command was a short two-word sentence, such as "Get lamp. The view window, a small screen-within-a-screen, gave players the illusion of walking through a mysterious city and its underground mazes.
It seems that the city of Skara Brae is under a curse of perpetual winter. Its people are locked behind the city gates, held in the frozen grip of a creature known as Mangar, the Archmage. Their only hope is the Adventurer's Guild, an ancient organization of heroes. To save the people of Skara Brae, a small group of adventurers prepares for a dangerous descent into the catacombs of the city.
Their mission: to search for the keys to Mangar's tower and the powers to defeat him. The game begins in the Adventurer's Guild, where you create a band of six heroes by choosing from the six different professions available wizard, rogue, warrior, and so on. Once the party is assembled, you exit the Guild Hall and travel up the street toGarth's Equipment Shop, where you outfit your characters with the best weapons and armor you can afford.
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Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. Bards Tale 1 Item Preview. EMBED for wordpress. Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! Publication date Language English. There are no reviews yet. Be the first one to write a review. Software Library: C Software Library.
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