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Great witty version of an RPG classic

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 121 / 127
Date: November 21, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I remember playing the original Bard's Tale game - it was a game I loved and played for months and months. This new version features the brilliant acting of Cary Elwes of Priness Bride frame!

You get to create your bard character with the standard attributes - strength, dexterity and so on. But once you get into the game, you'll quickly discover the comic timing that makes this game so unique. You wander into a tavern and are promptly told to go search for rats. Your character asides that this is a rather cliche quest, but you'll do it for the (ahem) ample barmaid who smiles at you.

You head down into the dusty cellar, where you find your rat and slay him. Then, as you get your little scene of the Bard's Victory, a HUGE rat sneaks up behind you and breathes on you with a massive fire breath! When you hobble up to the tavern, everyone is laughing their fool heads off.

It's that sort of twist that makes the entire game hilarious, especially for RPG buffs. Every normal twist and turn of RPG campaigning is made fun of here. You are given the option of the "nice" or "naughty" option at every turn - and it's not always the "nice" option that you want to try! The game is very replayable, as you see what happens with various combinations of answers.

There's plenty of combinations of fighting, spellcasting, healing and so on - in traditional RPG fashion. I particularly like the wiggly little magic spiders myself, as they remind me of the Spirited Away anime. But really the wit is the key feature of this game. You fight through scenarios to get to hear what the witty comments will be at the end :)

Highly recommended for RPG fans - especially those who are fans of the Princess Bride style of dry wit!

Very Amusing, Interesting Game Marred by Interface

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 62 / 64
Date: July 27, 2005
Author: Amazon User

The plotline of this game and the way in which it's "acted" are excellent: very witty, very interesting (though predictable), and very well done. I enjoyed that immensely. Unfortunately, the way the publisher implemented the gameplay reduces the overall enjoyability... A lot. My biggest gripes:

- I didn't care much for the top-down viewpoint which this game uses. I'd much rather have a first person point of view. This is especially true since you can't change the vertical angle (azimuth) that you're looking through. It's always almost directly overhead. You can't see what's in front of you and you can't really see what's on the walls around you.
- The game gives you only a very limited view of the area. I ran it at 1280x1024 and could only see the various monsters as they were about to pounce on me. Theoretically, you can zoom the camera in and out, but the amount of difference is insignificant. This is especially bad when using a bow: throughout the game you end up focused on the small "radar screen" and firing blindly in the approximate direction of some red dots (your bow range far exceeds your view). You hardly ever get to see what you're shooting. Since I used the bow almost exclusively, that really reduced the enjoyment of the gameplay.
- The controls are very awkward. You move by right-clicking where you want to go. Fire/Strike by left-clicking. Block with the space bar. Rotate the view clockwise/counterclockwise with the A and D keys. Change your radar with the X key. And, most awkwardly, change weapons/party members with 2-level combinations of the 1, 2, 3, and 4 keys (1st "menu" level) and the A, S, D, and W keys (2nd "menu" level). Because of the difficulty of the keystrokes, this last "control" makes it very tough to make changes during combat. So, essentially, what you start a combat round with is what you're going to be stuck with (unless you can find a corner to hide in while you make changes).

I've got some other complaints, but compared to the above, they're minor. For the most part, the game is enjoyable and fairly easy. There are a couple of areas that are pretty hard. But, they're workable. Without those three major gripes I listed above, I'd highly recommend the game. As it is, though, I rate it as just 3 stars out of 3: it's OK.

Update: This game comes on 6 CDs. If your computer has a DVD reader, I highly recommend you hunt out the DVD version of the game (just for the sake of ease of loading). One other thing: in my case, CD 5 wouldn't read during installation on my computer. On my wife's and son's computers, it read fine, so I was able to make a copy of that CD to install with. If you run into the same problem, see if you can make a copy of the troublesome CD somewhere else.

Oh, it's bad luck to be you.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 31 / 40
Date: July 09, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I wonder if the people who have so far reviewed "The Bard's Tale" (PC) on the web actually played it or the demo, or if they are relying on the reputation of previous games with the same name to make a judgment call about this game. I do not believe many did play it, because if they did, they would have seen how frustrating and how little fun the game becomes as it drags on. Yes, the voice acting is funny and enjoyable, but a cute and quirky story cannot make up for the game's overall poor design.

During certain animations (and more importantly during battle) the game will slow to a crawl comparable to the lag you might experience playing a newly released MMORPG on a dial-up connection. The slow down is a known problem for users of certain models of GeForce and Radeon cards, but not all users will be affected. As of the date of this review, there is no support for this issue and no official forum for discussion of such tech problems.

Don't rely on the game box and screenshots as a judge of the game environment. Basically we are dealing with a slightly modified, old fashioned top-down view with the added bonus of trees and other structures that must become transparent to allow you to see your character as you move under them. Due to the limited field of view, the minimap becomes essential to know what is a few feet away from you, either because you will not be able to actually see monsters until they are practically right on top of you or because they will be obscured if they move under trees that you are not under at the same moment.

Yes, you have companions that have cool powers that will be helpful in different situations. But no matter what you do, if you are ganged up on by more than three monsters at once, you may as well give up and load your game. This is because most of the monsters you fight have a tendency to knock you down or stun you for some time when they hit. Basically, if you cannot block perfectly, you will be round-robined to death as you enemy takes turns knocking you down and doing damage to you while you cannot stand up and recover. Meanwhile your companions will do whatever would be most illogical in such a situation: Healers will run forward and fight monsters with their fists, warriors will stop fighting in the middle of a battle and simply stand still, ranged weapon users will fire at monsters offscreen, drawing them into the battle.

Forget about the claim "less A, more I", the monsters aren't any better than most games...you will simply be overwhelmed with numbers in most cases.

Overall, the game is sub par...the price at release is low for a reason.

Bard's Tale

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 24 / 29
Date: October 31, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I have been a fan of Bard's Tale from the beginning. And I also remember the catacombs. This game does not look or feel anything like the original, but I did expect that.

It has the same type of graphics as the latest Baldur's gate. It has cut animation in which you (the bard) will talk with other characters. You have little choices on the conversation. You may chose to be sarcastic or sincere.

Other choices are limited as well. When you kill the opponent, his objects go straight to you in the form of money. His armor, sword, pants, etc are all converted into money. Unless his armor or weapon is better than your current weapon, then you automatically receive it and your item is converted to money.

What I don't like about the game is that it limits your choices and tends to be very linear. Unlike a game like Morrowind where you are able to explore where and how you would like, you are stuck in a storyline in this game.

I gave it 4 stars because it is well made and is keeping my interest. The graphics are great and I like the music.

Poor conversion of a console interface

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 19 / 21
Date: July 08, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I wanted to like this game... but could not get over the poorly designed interface and clunky gameplay.

This game was built for a console, and poorly ported to the PC - Controls are non-intuitive, the camera control is very limited, and you can only 'save' at specific locations. I would rate the graphics as only 'so-so' - I found them far less impressive than WoW, EQ2, GuildWars, or any other recent game on the PC.

There is no menu based options; use of the mouse is limited. Context sensitive help is non-existant. All of the controls are based on a keypad layout - but mapping I,J,K,M to random functions is completely unintuitive on the PC (where it makes sense to have them mapped to a diamond layout of keys on a keypad). Truly, this is one of the worst PC interfaces ever. The interface makes sense for a gamepad controller, but does not take advantage of any PC based tools (keyboard & mouse). At best, support for keyboard and mouse is a badly done kludge. At worst, what they did is criminal destruction of an otherwise good game.

The dialog is amusing; the voice acting is excellent.... but I just can't get over how clunky the game is to play. I really would like to recommend the game, but I just can't quite do it. To me, the gameplay is ruined by the interface. They should have taken another couple of months and designed a reasonable PC interface.

If you have a choice, get the game on a console or skip it altogether.

Occasionally funny/entertaining, some flaws

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 17 / 18
Date: August 31, 2005
Author: Amazon User

The humor and the musical interactions within the game are first rate. It was almost like watching a play at times. The music was very entertaining. The twists in the game were entertaining and I played the game through to the end because I enjoyed it. I wanted to see what they'd do at the end.

But there were quite a few flaws. The alleged "non-linear" aspect of the game is highly misleading. There are very few choices to undertake at all. You have to do A, to get to B, to get to C, etc. At least you need to do that to succeed. While you certainly could visit certain limited places almost immediately, you'd get killed mucho pronto if you did.

With all the sparkly effects and in game rendering of cut-scenes, they would almost always slow to a crawl. While I'm sure the screaming cutting edge machines of the developers ran all those auras around the creatures nicely, my machine (which beats the recommended configuration) couldn't handle them, even with all video controls turned to the minimum.

And at a certain point, nothing can stand in your way. Even the Bosses were a pushover. No real strategy was involved, except some minor tweaking of your party. And the "less A, more I" was not that accurate. My party frequently did very stupid things, and didn't follow orders hardly at all.

Overall, it was entertaining and I'd recommend it, but only after it was patched to fix the framerate problems. It is relatively inexpensive, so would be worth the money if fixed.

Remake of a classic that may or may not hold your interest

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 14 / 15
Date: August 06, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Outside of the Ultima series, nothing brings back fond memories of old school gaming like Bard's Tale. Of course, in the 80's a lot of imagination was needed to compensate for poor graphics. Gameplay usually involved sending a brown square to kill off a red square or something similar. Fortunately, I can say this part of the game has been vastly improved in this remake, but I'm not sure it has the certain something that made the original Bard's Tale so appealing.

You start off as your typical scruffy looking bad boy with the oversized muscles, messed up hair and a three-day shadow. Looking for a place to stay you conjure up a rat with your musical instrument. The bard's songplaying acts as sort of a musical magic wand and the songs you learn act as spells as you progress through the game. You send your magic rat into the local pub and valiantly offer to kill it in exchange for room and board for the evening. The little squeaker is no match for your mighty sword, however the rat in the basement that the barmaid sends you on a quest to kill is much more vicious. And so the tale begins...

As a game, it's a pretty straightforward quest adventure. You set off to rescue some damsel in distress, kill a bunch of baddies, collect your gold, upgrade your armor, then set off once again to kill more powerful baddies on your next quest. It may sound boring, but this part of the game I like. One of the problems with modern games is they're becoming too overloaded with features that confuse more than enhance. It's a refreshing change to not have to think about using this item in combination with that or be forced to memorize key combinations for secret spells, fighting moves, or whatever. In this game, if you've got a sword worth $1000 and you see one for $2000, it's a safe bet it'll perform better. Same thing with shields and the like. The only thing you'll have to remember is what song helps you in what way. One may conjure up a bolt of electricity to use in battle, another might bring up a character that casts healing spells on you if you are wounded, and so on. It's nice to be able to load up this game a month from now without having to review a stack of notes first.

Other nice features are the spells and characters that act as additional party members. In the original game you would form a party of six members and have to make decisions for each. This could get tedious at times. In this remake, the spells you cast will summon up additional party members who act individually and rather competently. Plus, if they get killed off, you can always summon them up later. In addition, I've managed to pick up a dog who now follows me around in my travels. As a result, one of my new options is to teach my dog how to fight once I gain enough experience points. It'll be interesting to see how this works out (he's a rather diminuitive little terrier) and whether there are other, similar surprises in store.

What doesn't impress me is that it's a pretty simplistic hack and slash game. If you've leveled up far enough and you have the right weapons, you'll plow through whatever quest you're on. If you don't have the equipment, you just retrace an old level and collect the coin or experience you need until you're ready. Unfortunately, this turns the game into a rather brain-dead experience. Even something as simple as making combat so that clicking on the creature scores better hits than randomly clicking on the screen would have kept this game from feeling like a button masher.

I also have to take issue with the other reviewers about the humor in this game. I certainly don't mind humor in gameplay but, frankly, none of it is funny. The bard argues with the narrator, but the jokes fall flat. Attempts at sarcasm come off weak and, in some cases, unrealistic and a little cruel. I don't know if the voice actors are attempting British or Scottish accents, but it sounds like everyone watched too much Shrek. Characters will also break out into bizarre song at different points of the game. If JRR Tolkien had sex with Julie Andrews, the script in this game might have been the result.

Other reviewers complained of gameplay and graphics problems but I didn't see any. I'm running it at 1280x1024 on an AMD64 3000 with a Radeon 9600XT - a system that's middle of the road for gaming - and everything looks fine. No crashes so far either.

Since others find this game amusing, I'll just leave it by saying you will likely enjoy this game if you can deal with the game's dry wit. If not, you can always go retro and load up the original Bard's Tale I, II, and III included in the release.

Hope the review helped.

Promising Game- wrecked by implementation

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 10 / 11
Date: March 30, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I was an original Bard's Tale enthusiast, and really wanted to like this game. After I got over the fact this was almost NOTHING like the original game, I just looked at it as a new game. Unfortunately, this is basically a console gamer, as others have stated. Absolutely none of a PC's capabilities were used- every house, village and dungeon has to be loaded EVERY single time. The view cannot be changed, and none of the 'standard' PC mouse/cursor interface seems implemented at all. All in all, I was very disappointed. I periodically try and revisit it again, because I DO like the humor, but it's just too painful to play.

Game has features InXile hasn't marketed!!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 17 / 25
Date: June 05, 2006
Author: Amazon User

The following is a letter I sent to programmers for "The Bard's Tale". I believe it adequately reflects my feelings for this game:

To the developers of "The Bard's Tale",

I wanted to write and extend my supreme compliments for the craftmanship and feature-set of this game. A few features in particular leave me breathless in wonderment and I felt it was necessary to draw them to your attention for future marketing of the game. For example, despite having spent over $3000 on my newest computer system which far exceeds the stated requirements of the game, the game still runs at a sometimes snailish pace. This has produced the happy benefit of being able to point to the game and justify a new computer upgrade to my wife. I can only surmise you had this goal in mind in obviously understating the recommended system configuration.

However, the benefits do not stop there. By turning the graphics settings to their lowest levels, I am able to play the game in slow motion in exactly those moments when the action may become too fast for me to follow adequately. This is especially dramatic in the cut-scenes, wherein the hero walks and moves in that slow, methodical pace usually seen in Matrix-like blockbuster movies. There is nothing quite like pressing the Attack button, taking a puff of my cigarette, and a swig of my beer before having to pick up the controller again once the hero's sword swing has completed. This makes for very leisurely game play and no one can ever accuse me again of wasting my time playing videogames. Indeed, since I started "The Bard's Tale", I have been able to compute my taxes, prepare meals, and even vacuum my office while waiting for a particularly long story scene to finish.

Turning the graphics to their highest setting unlocks what I call the "Screensaver Mode". The characters move so slowly as to be barely visible to the naked eye, yet keeping the screen in turtle-crawl movement for those hours and days I might be away from my machine.

In all, this has made for a refreshing change of pace from the other PC games I have played. In playing daily for the nearly six months I have owned the game, I have completely explored and spoken to every member of the very first town, with hints there are many more locations to come. This will result in literally years of gameplay! In speaking to others who own the game and have advanced much further, I estimate I will finish it sometime before my seven year old daughter reaches junior high school. Now that is getting my money's worth!

Good job, InXile! You have provided me with a game my children may very well have to complete for me someday. That truly is family entertainment!

Brian Ragle
bragle@gmail.com

I have to agree with some of the other reviewers. . .

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: July 22, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I picked this game up fairly cheap for the PC (I think I paid five bucks for it) because I had heard many good things about it. I loaded it up on my desktop computer (which is only about a year old and not that slow, after all, I had just put in a new video card) and started playing it. I loved the dialogue, the witty banter, and I was generally having a blast playing it until it started to slow waaayy down as I started moving through the game until the characters were moving so sluggishly and swinging their weapons so slowly, they all looked like they were in slow motion (like some of the other reviewers have said.) I gave up on it and took the game to my laptop, which is newer and has a faster processor. It started off at what seemed to be normal speed. The Bard was trotting across the screen and swinging his flail at a rapid pace. Then about chapter four, it started slowing down again, all the way to a point where I couldn't play it anymore. All the fun had been zapped out of it as it took a good hour to swing and chop at four wolves in the forest. Sadly, I abandoned it for the PC, even though I was having a lot of fun with it up until then. I don't understand why it has so many problems running on a PC. Everything was sluggish, like the characters were moving in molasses. I turned down all the game settings, but it didn't seem to help much. If I want to see the game all the way through, I guess I'll have to break down and get it for the Playstation.

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