The Bard's Tale Trilogy Remake

Looks like they're gonna have an automapping feature. Kinda takes away part of the fun of grabbing some graph paper and mapping everything on your own.

Nevertheless, since I get the games free of charge as part of the kickstarter, I'll almost certainly do another run through for old times' sake.

 

I’m currently moving and sold or trashed tons of old rpg stuff, including my old notebooks. I had TBT stuff in there. The irony....

 

Uh, the Apple IIGS version of Bard's Tale I and II both had a primitive automapper. It did not show much more than the walls, doors, and the location of the regular stairs or entrances. Special ones like the "long staircase" that led from the sewers to Mangar's Tower or teleporters did not appear. I don't think the holes in the floor/ceiling that you could navigate with [major] levitation appeared either.
Still, it was darn useful as I only needed to note down important coordinates.

 

Really? Were other version different? I don't remember there being a map feature. Maybe I was just too young and stupid.

 

I do not think the Apple II family (for the IIe & IIc, not sure if it ran on the 64K II+) version had an automap. The graphics and sound sucked on those versions.
I'm trying to recall if BT3 had an automap, but it has been a long time since I played. I didn't like it as much because they never made an Apple IIGS version and the sound was grating compared to the wonderful sound of the Apple IIGS version (which even today is passable for a turn-based RPG in Bard's Tale or Wizardry style).
Seriously, prior to the Apple IIGS the Apple II sound capabilities were horrible. All sound was handled by "tweaking" the speaker and varying the delay between "tweaks" to change the frequency of sound made. IIRC it was address $C030.
Oh, and "tweak" was the official term used in Apple's official AppleSoft BASIC Programmer's Reference Manual, acknowledged by just about every book and magazine as the official book on AppleSoft BASIC. At least everything in my library when I was 10 and caused me to order it.

That said, I have beaten all three, I just didn't play BT3 more than once or twice, as for once from my perspective the third game's graphics and sound were worse than the first two, although I knew darn well why. I didn't play the third until something like four or five years after the first two because I kept waiting for the Apple IIGS version that never materialized, then I found ftp.apple.asimov.net in high school and pirated it, still intending to buy the IIGS version if it ever came out (how naive, I don't think any truly new commercial software came out for the IIGS came out by that point, the closest being the freeware port of Wolfenstein 3D, but I still believed "Apple II Forever" at that point).

 

Yeah, looks like Apple IIGS version might have been the only one that had an automap feature (at least until BT3), which makes sense why I don't remember it. Apple was never really a thing here, and it still isn't to this day. You see a couple folks walking around with an iPhone or a MacBook here an there, but they're a very distinct minority. We're either smart enough or poor enough not to buy into Apple's style over substance philosophy.

I originally played the games on my uncle's Amiga, if memory serves. And I don't even think I ever got around to playing BT3.

 

The style over substance didn't really start until around ten years after this with the introduction of the iCrap, err iMac and the "Think Different ad campaign.
The Apple IIGS version was from the late 1980's, and Apple didn't start that until the late '90s.

 

That was just my explanation of why Apple still isn't a thing here. Back then, who knows. Maybe they didn't think we were a market worth investing into or maybe Commodore (and later IBM) simply saturated the Yugoslavian market and they couldn't get a foothold (kinda like it went with McDonald's and other fast food chains). But on the whole, PCs (or "home computers" if you prefer) didn't really become commonplace here until the 90s and I still don't know why my uncle had one in the first place (probably because he was loaded).

Anyway, we've veered somewhat off-topic. I'm looking forward to playing the games with an adult's eyes.

 

True enough. Sorry if I started to derail things. I will state that when talking about games from the '80s and the start of the '90s, if there was an Apple II or Apple IIGS (IIGS was significantly more advanced) version of it available, that was most likely the version I played. On a real Apple IIGS.

 

Just got my GOG key as well. Probably gonna start playing it once I finish with TToN.

 

Given how much I enjoyed the first two back in 1987/1988, I was hoping I could play BT-IV when it comes out this month, or whenever it's going to be. But the system requirements are pretty seriously high. I have a Radeon HD 7850 in one tower, and a GTX 750 Ti in a pint-sized Dell PC, neither has as speedy of an i5 as they claim to want, nor as fast of a GPU!

Rats!

I played the MS-DOS versions in EGA. Right now, a video upgrade isn't very likely, either. I'll run a search here on the new release's name. Given how long the Alpha and Beta were available publicly, someone must have started a thread! How much bogging am I likely to see with an i5 2400 (quad, 3.1 GHz) and the 7850?

 

The early returns have not been favorable (at Steam, particularly). No one here was in on the funding?

 

I just looked at the recommended requirements for BT4, and it looks like this brand new "gaming computer" that I just saw available in Best Buy would not quite meet them.
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/cyberp...-1tb-hard-drive-black/6225212.p?skuId=6225212
That seems insane.
Maybe I'm misreading things, as I'm re-learning how to understand graphics card requirements. Used to be it would just show the amount of VRAM and maybe the clock speed of the card, now it goes by model numbers that don't mean anything to me and I have to look them up.

 

@SlickRCB, video card names have never been particularly useful to anyone but a hardware grognard, and the amount of VRAM often is equally useless. Only benchmarks have held up as a true guide to which GPU is good for what purpose.

The 2004 version was garbage, although I can't recall all of what I found worthless about it. I hadn't been a big fan of the third of the original three games, for that matter. BUT given the length of time that the Alpha and the Beta copies were circulated among the fund's donors, it seems to me that if this was the 2004 crap passed off once again as something worth playing, there should've been more forewarning!