You bastards. I didn’t want to start this again but now I have to.
C.
I’d really love a good Bards Tale/Wizardry/Might and Magic style RPG on the DS. There’s that Mazes of Fate game on the GBA with a sequel coming to the DS, but that’s more Eye of the Beholder it seems.
I think I still have my painstakingly drawn maps from the Bards Tales, including the mazes with the spinners and other nonsense marked out.
Right, but I found that even if I had a complete map (thanks to the hintbook), where I’d marked all of the spinners, it became hard to navigate, because there were parts where you basically were running down a hallway where every intersection was a spinner. Maybe if I’d used a better light spell it wouldn’t have been as much a problem, so I could tell which way I was facing after I was spun.
Was it Bard’s Tale 2 that had rooms full of both spinners and darkness? Now there was a challenge for my burgeoning cartography skills.
Didn’t you use the old Magic Compass, man? WHAT KIND OF ADVENTURER ARE YOU!?!?!
KG
Actually, as I recall, that happened in both 1 and 2. The special challenge in 2 was spinners with darkness AND anti-magic zones.
My recollection was that I dropped items in strategic places so I could tell which where I was in the horrid little maze.
I thought it didn’t work when you were standing on a spinner, but I could be mistaken.
Yeah, the spinners plus darkness plus anti-magic does sound like what finally drove me to give up playing.
The first one had a nice level with darkness, spinners, and anti-magic. Since it was before the internet, I was stuck there for a very long time.
You were supposed to finish the game around level 13ish. My characters were level 50ish when I finally won.
I had waaay too much patience and time back then.
This is from memory, so it’s all IIRC:
The third one had an awesome loophole whereby if you made a chronomancer before you killed Brilhasti ap Tarj, you got an ungodly amount of XP from the reward given after the quest. I had a level 43 chronomancer immediately after the first dungeon of the game. It made the rest of it a snap, I just kept casting Witherfist over and over again.
There was also a way to get the strife spear really early on if I recall. So you could have a relatively low level character with an instant kill weapon from the get go.
You pulled ‘Brilhasti ap Tarj’ from memory? I stand in awe.
This was so long ago details are very vague, but the main thing that stands out in my memory is a final dungeon where you break through a door, and the room has literally hundreds and hundreds of skeletons in it. I would just back into a corner, jam the appropriate key down with something, then go do something else for half an hour or so. Nothing could kill me, but it just ate up a ton of time getting through the stuff.
Just wanted to point out Devil Whiskey for anyone who hasn’t seen it:
http://www.shifting-suns.com/devilwhiskey/
Relatively recent indie game in the same style as the BT games.
I’m happy to remember “Tarjan” is the answer. I could probably still navigate
around Skara Brae…
I remember going through lots of graph paper with these games.
DAMN, you guys just gave me a spinner flashback. Brrrr.
The Bard’s Tale games were grueling but I do kind of miss them – although I must have only played 1 and 2 since I recall no automap. I did try to play the similar-in-gameplay Wasteland a few years ago but eventually got stuck at a point where I was getting constantly walloped with no apparent way to improve or evade. Can’t see myself breaking out the graph paper again for BT.
I’m also flabbergasted at those of you who remember the composition of your parties and the names of NPCs. I could maybe do that with Ultima 5 (my first formative RPG experience) but the BTs, Xeens and similar games blur together in my memory.
It’s an idiot savant thing.
Oh, yes. And remember in BT1 (and 2?), when you had to type the 4-letter abbreviations for spells.
I remember DRBR, MIBL were useful… and of course PHDO
/M.
It’s funny that someone mentioned The Bard’s tale --just a week or so ago I was sorting through some old junk boxes of mine and stumbled across some old graph paper maps I made of this game circa 1986.