Bard's Tale II: Hiatus

I can save the GAME? This is different than saving my characters? FF...no, I'm not doing that.

A series of unfortunate things this week:

1) I've been on the road again, this time to the west coast, and I've had lots of down time in hotel rooms in which I could have been finishing The Bard's Tale II, but I've found it so mind-crushing that I've been re-watching Firefly instead. That would be fine if my blog was called the "geeky TV Addict."

2) When I did finally fire up the game, I discovered to my horror that the pieces of the Destiny Wand I'd managed to collect were gone! No idea where they went. But perhaps it's related to...

3) I discovered that there's a "save game" option completely independent of saving your characters, and that you can save anywhere--even in dungeons. Somehow I missed this in the manual. I had been trekking back to a guild every time I wanted to save, and then I was only saving my characters attributes, not what I had accomplished in the game. Bollocks.

4) Insistent that I was not going to reply the previous dungeons just to find those wand pieces again, I downloaded a character editor, frigged around with it, and ended up corrupting my character files, of which I had not made backups.

So I'm faced with the task of starting completely over in The Bard's Tale II. And you know what? I'm going to do it. My posts lately have sucked, I've been playing with a bad attitude, and finishing the damned thing is my penance. But I'm going to take a one-game break before I tackle it again. Might and Magic I is the next game on my list, and it was released the same year as The Bard's Tale II, so technically I'm not going out of order. I'm downloading it now and getting back into the game.

Much Later Edit: After finishing Might & Magic, I have no desire to return to The Bard's Tale II.

Bard's Tale II: Not Feelin' It

I'm going to say "death and drek!" every time I curse from now on.

When I last wrote about The Bard's Tale II, I was "waiting for it to get difficult." My wait didn't last long. By the time I got to the third level of the Ephesus tombs, I was facing some pretty tough critters. Not tough enough to send me crying home to mama, but the game definitely notched it up. I expect it to get harder from hereon in.

My biggest problem now is fighting boredom. This game is an endless slog through dungeons and battles. The little obstacles in the dungeons--spinners, teleporters, anti-magic zones, zones of darkness--are more "annoyances" than challenges.

I managed to find the first segment of the Destiny Wand. The "snare" part of the dungeon was somewhat interesting. I assume the other segments involve something similar. Basically, I had to interpret a series of clues written on the dungeon walls to get through the maze and find the segment. The moment I entered the "snare," a voice told me that I had a limited amount of time, but it couldn't have been that limited, because it took me a while to bumble through it. Spells didn't work, and the "time out" function was disabled. The puzzle consisted of:

• A pool of water that poisoned my characters when I drank it
• An old warrior who offered to join my party
• A creature called a "toxic giant."

Clues from the walls suggested that I should put the old man first in my party and he should "light the way." Others informed me that only poisoned characters could defeat the toxic giant. So I put the old guy in the number one slot, poisoned everyone from the pool, killed the giant, and got a torch from it. I gave the torch to the old feller, which revealed a secret door, behind which I found the wand segment. Woo-hoo.

Earlier in the level, I solved a rhyming riddle to get a hint as to the next dungeon I should explore: Fanskar's Fortress. This was confirmed by the Sage, who for a bundle of gold told me where it was, which was nice except I already knew from having mapped the wilderness. That's where I am now.



The creators made the game a little more tactical by putting distance between your party and the enemies (check out the first screen shot above), forcing you (or the monsters) to "advance" towards each other before you can engage in melee combat. I keep getting into fights with liches and mages in which they repeatedly summon monsters, and I spend a combat round killing their summoned monsters. Then they summon more. Round and round we go, with spellcasters remaining outside melee range, and you can't "advance" towards them as long as there are other monsters closer than they are. My only options are to invest in ranged weapons, but these take precious spaces in your inventory slots, or to cast the MEME spell, which yanks them into melee range but costs a boatload of spell points.

Yeah, so even I'm going to vote "meh" on this posting, but that's really how I feel about the game. It's extremely linear and repetitive, and the endless combats are annoying. Character development is nil: my spellcasters already have all the spells and my other characters' stats are maxed. I get a few hit points and spell points for each level up, but that's it. I feel like I should be enjoying the tactical combat more, but I'm just not. I don't know whether it's me or the game, but I'll give it a few more days and move on if it still doesn't click.

Bard's Tale II: Waiting for It to Get Difficult

Yes, yes: legions of horrific undead. .

Okay, so I followed y'all's advice and kept my Bard's Tale I characters. To make it at least somewhat challenging, I ditched all their equipment. I changed my two spellcasters to the new "archmage" class, bought some basic swords and armor (the shop in every town is called "Garth's," just like in Skara Brae), and set out...


...and promptly got bored. The game threw all kinds of monsters at me that couldn't even begin to touch me. The critter I summoned didn't even take a hit during the three hours it took me to map the wilderness.



The "wilderness" is a 48 x 32 area with six cities, a handful of huts, and dozens of trees that serve in the basic capacity as dungeon walls, forcing you to navigate around them. The cities are all named after ancient Greek metropolises: Corinth, Ephesus, Philippi, and so on.

As usual, I mapped it in Excel.


One of the huts, incidentally, holds the "Temple of Narn." I have no idea what I'm supposed to do here--I'm sure it becomes clear later--but I hope it has something to do with G'Kar.

"What do you want?"

The game manual told me to seek out the Sage's hut and ask the Sage about the Tombs. The Sage required a bit of a bribe, but I managed to get a hint from him to visit the city of Ephesus. This led me to my first dungeon; I am currently mapping level 2 and still haven't had a decent stand-up fight.


The basic trouble with The Bard's Tale II is that it's too much like The Bard's Tale, just bigger. So far, I'm encountering copious monsters, messages scrawled on dungeon walls, teleporters, traps, zones of darkness, anti-magic zones, magic mouths, and everything that I already experienced a couple of months ago. Since I don't even have the satisfaction of character development to go along with it, this game promises to be fairly tedious.

One good thing, though: there's an archmage spell called BASP ("batch spell") that simultaneously casts all of the buffing spells (levitate, sorcerer's sight, greater revelation, shield, and magic compass) at once. That saves a little bit of annoyance.

Expect a lot of "special topic" postings as I play this one.

Game 18: The Bard's Tale II (1986)

The Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight picks up shortly after the first installment of the game. The premise and main quest are provided in a single page of the game manual: 700 years ago, an archmage named Turin forged an artifact called the Destiny Wand in the molten depths of the holy mountain Krontor. The power of the wand maintained peace and prosperity for seven centuries, but then the evil archmage Lagoth Zanta, ruler of the neighboring kingdom of Lestradae, stole the Destiny Wand and broke it into seven pieces, hiding each in a different dungeon, in a puzzle room called a "Snare of Death." Lagoth Zanta's monsters and mercenaries are now roaming freely across the realm. Now, the wizard Saradon has called my party, fresh from our Bard's Tale I victory over Mangar in Skara Brae, to find the pieces and reforge the wand, promising "unimaginable power" if we do.

(Many thanks, incidentally, to The Adventurer's Guild, which has the original documents for each of The Bard's Tale games.)

The game was originally released for the Commodore 64 in 1986. It was ported for the Apple II in 1987 and for DOS in 1988. That, of course, is the version I'm playing.

You begin in the Guild of Adventurers, next to a roaring fire, listening to a bard strumming an eight-bit banjo.


Reading through the manual, it looks as though not much has changed since The Bard's Tale. The basic interface and combat actions are the same, and so are most of the spells. From what I can tell so far, the differences are:

• The ability to summon creatures and slot NPCs in ANY available slot, not just a single slot at the top of the party list.
• Slightly better graphics for everything, including dungeon textures, city views, monsters, and character portraits.

• A few new spells, including some "mystery" spells that you have to figure out at some point in the game. There is also (finally!) a stone-to-flesh spell.
• An "archmage" is not just a title you get when you complete levels in all four mage classes; it is a separate class with its own spells.
• Instead of a single city with five dungeons, there are multiple cities, dungeons, castles, and wilderness areas.

The official game map.

• Missile weapons exist.
• All of the bard songs have been renamed, there are seven instead of six, and the effects are slightly different.
• Some battles start with your characters not quite engaged with the enemy--they can be some distance away, allowing them to shoot missile weapons at you before you advance and engage them.
• New monsters, some with strange names.
  

"Wander mages"?

Already I'm facing an interesting dilemma. The game allows you to import your characters from The Bard's Tale, which I did, finding to my surprise that the import retained all their levels and items! This means I have absurdly powerful Level 28 characters, including two characters who have achieved all spell levels in four mage classes and can both transition to archmages. I like being rewarded for finishing previous games, but I also like a challenge, and this seems a little too easy. Thus, I'm mulling four options:

• Play with my existing party and breeze on through--at least the opening sections
• Retain one or two of my existing characters but drop the rest and start the rest of my party at level 1
• Play with a brand new party but keep my existing spellcasters in the Guild of Adventurers so I can use them to heal/resurrect my new characters if they die
• Delete my old characters entirely and start afresh

Any opinions, especially from those who have played The Bard's Tale II before?

I'm looking forward to stepping back into this world.