Let's Play Bard's Tale: The Beginning

Tales of the Unknown: the Bard's Tale is a fantasy role-playing game that came out in 1984. It's on a variety of 8- and 16-bit computers, and is one of my favorite games of all time. I've tried many times to play the game on my own, from start to finish, but I've never gotten very far. I was very close to finishing the quest on the Amiga just a few months back, but there was a disk error and I lost a very important character. Since this was the third error of its type (I thought emulators were supposed to fix stupid things like disk-copy errors), I gave up and turned my back on the Amiga, which had a strange version of Bard's Tale anyway - all the dungeons had the same wall design and Warriors didn't get multiple hits in their attacks.

This time, I'm playing the Commodore 64 version of Bard's Tale. It's the version closest to my heart, as it's the one my brothers and I owned back in the day. (We still have it, in fact, and I bet it still works.) This version doesn't punish you for not saving your characters when you turn the game off; the Amiga version would take every non-saved character's gold, and some versions would go so far as to return your characters dead when you loaded them next start-up.

I'll be using every dirty trick I know this time through. I'll be abusing save states and selectively save and load characters in order to get the optimum amount of hitpoints and spellpoints every level-up. I'll create dummy characters and take their gold if I'm ever in need of some quick cash. Bard's Tale doesn't pull any punches at the beginning of the game, when you're weakest, so I'll be more than glad to return the favor.

My party this time consists of Bluey, Darkmoon, and Elena, old standbys that you might recognize from other stories of mine. Joining the party are Camis, Selendro, and Sai, named after some good friends of mine. Warrior, Paladin, Monk, Bard, Conjuror, Magician. It's the party makeup I've used time and time again.

I'll be documenting the party's progress and making periodic updates to Project Empire about their quest to save the cursed city of Skara Brae. Hopefully they will succeed where others have faltered.