The bards tale tales of the unknown volume i how to#

The bards tale tales of the unknown volume i how to#

Except, after setting the game up like this, the manual actively goes out of the way to advise you how to work around it by backing up your character files or just turning off your PC when a party member has died before it saves their dead state. You can’t reload a previous game to recover. When someone dies, unless you’re willing to pay the (unfeasibly enormous for a beginning character) fee to raise them from the dead, they’re dead. Which makes the bits where they were clearly learning how to actually make a role-playing game work stick out like a Thief who’s forgot to take any stealth skills. An RPG now is an RPG then, so those skills of perfecting character builds and equipping people with the right armour or weapons, practiced in every role-playing game since, move directly into play. Firstly, strategy games – especially turn based games like The Bard’s Tale – tend to age better than their action-based brethren. You go back to games like this with a certain knowledge. With their help, I booked a one way ticket to Skara Brae to see how time has treated this particular blighted city. Erk!) Only Hyland persisted to the final confrontation with Mangar, where he discovered the game really hadn’t bothered with a proper end-sequence. But its all low double-digits figures until you open a certain door in Harkyn’s and get the ominous message “You face death itself in the form of… 99 berserkers, 99 berserkers, 99 berserkers and 99 berserkers”. As you progress, you get things like “You face death itself in the form of… 5 gnomes, 4 orcs, 3 magicians and a Wild Dog” which does make you suspect Magnar must be the proverbial charming motherfucker to get all these diverse personages to join beneath his banner. At low levels it may be “You face death itself in the form of… a Halfling”. Holmes got tied-up battling in Harkyn’s Castle, stuck in an attempt to grind the 396 Berserkers (When you faced off against enemies in Bard’s Tale, it arranged them into four groups. The “play” key of my Spectrum +2 snapped off when I was wrestling with the multiload, leaving Hyland and Holmes to rush ahead in the three weeks it took to be fixed. Which could go awry: our map for the first level of the Catacombs stretched across three textbooks before we realised that the dungeon loops every 22 squares. Our Maths lessons- sans-Maths were all about collating everyone’s work. Play comprised of taking a step forward, pausing, carefully noting with a few pencil marks the walls and then progressing, occasionally interrupted by traps, fisticuffs or trips back up to the city to heal and recharge spell-points. You pressed forward, and your trundles an entire square forward. While viewed from the first-person, this wasn’t a true scrolling 3D environment. Take Bard's Tale's sequel which describes its new wilderness areas as 'a mapping challenge never before seen in a fantasy game, and a whole new way to get lost”. In fact, people seemed to think this now-lost art was actually a core part of the game. To have a clue where you were, you resorted to scrawling on squared paper. While much of The Bard’s Tale’s constituents would be familiar to a modern gamer, this is a world before the joy of either overhead views or automaps. This is where things differed back in the eighties. The settings were archetypal: Sewers, Cellars, Castles, Towers and Catacombs. The plot was archetypal: the city of Skara Brae has been isolated in eternal winter by the Archmage Mangar! Stop him! The characters were archetypes: any six selected from a list of Warriors, Paladins, Magicians, Conjurers, Rogues, the eponymous Bard and so on. Because if we could do that, what else would we ever need?”.Įven if us Britkids didn't seem to actually do it as much, we were hungry for it, and had the graph-paper to prove it. When I was interviewing assorted developers about D&D's influence, Big Huge Games captured the zeitgeist elegantly: 'Back in those days I’d say the holy grail of teenager boys learning how to program was to figure out how to ‘make the computer play D&D’. It was a particularly American desire, it seemed. Conversely, following on from Ultima and Wizardry, Bard’s Tale was an attempt to – basically – be Dungeons and Dragons on a home computer. The previous Spectrum fantasy games were grown from first principles of what a videogames should be, with D&D as an indirect influence. The Bard’s Tale wasn’t the first computer role-playing game by any measure, but its conversion-from-DOS was the first any of us had actually played. From a distance, it even looked as if we were working. There were always more obvious rebels for the teacher to whip into line than David Hyland, Simon Holmes and myself, crouched over our desks and using the class’ infinite supply of squared paper to copy out each others maps. Maths was always our favourite lesson, for the simple reason we never did any Maths in it.