The C64 Appreciation Society continues their playthrough of the first Bard’s Tale. (23 minutes) If you want to start from the beginning, they’re collected in this playlist. (7 items)
I’ve already introduced The Bard’s Tale in prior posts, so in brief: The original Bard’s Tale trilogy were all Wizardry-style dungeon exploration RPGs in the classic style, called by some “blobbers.” Indeed they did a lot to define that style. A few things that Wizardry did weren’t adopted by later blobbers, especially its particular form of permadeath, its simulation of “Out” parties and retrieving lost characters from the dungeon, and its willingness to obliterate your entire group instantly and permanently if you teleported into solid stone.
The Bard’s Tale, on the other hand, looks exactly what the standard picture of a classic blobber looks like today. So long as you have the cash to revive a character there is no real penalty for dying, there is no absolutely solid stone to teleport into, and there’s no concept of “Out” parties, for if your party wipes their corpses get mysteriously teleported back to the Adventurer’s Guild, where if there’s enough gold in their cold pockets you, I guess in the capacity of being a caring guardian spirit, can tell the priests to bring them back to life.
But while not as eager to annihilate members of your group, neither is The Bard’s Tale an easy game. Compensating for the lack of permadeath, dungeons tend to be much more diabolical in design, with magical darkness, teleporters, spinners and antimagic zones in evidence. Dungeon levels are bigger than Wizardry’s, there are more of them, and most significantly to a new player, “Town,” here named Skara Brae, isn’t a simple menu of options but an entire level of its own to explore! And at the start of the game, you don’t know where anything except the Adventurer’s Guild is! You have to do significant mapping before you can buy equipment, recharge your spell points, or even raise your experience level.
In this 7th installment of the video series, the player finds and begins to explore the third of the game’s dungeons, finds some interesting items, suffers from disk corruption and loses some progress, earns it back, and fights a jabberwock.
