Let's Play Bard's Tale: Getting This Party Started

Allow me to speak out of character for a moment.

Getting this Let's Play/Let's Chronicle/Let's Whatever off the ground has been a major thorn in my side for the past week. One, it's the absolute only thing I want to do, which is strange, because I never show this amount of conviction over anything. Two, I've gone through about three parties.

If you somehow managed to find this blog and have been reading the adventure since the very beginning, you'd have noticed the starting party picture changed about two days later. There a few simple rules I laid down at the beginning of this adventure:

• There needed to be absolutely no characters on the disk other than the six members I used throughout the game.
• Garth's Shop needed to be completely and totally devoid of non-starter items at the outset.
• There were to be no trainers, no cracks, no anything on the disk image that wasn't Bard's Tale.

My first disk worked, but it had an Adventurer's Guild full of high-level, hacked characters with 31 of each attribute (the maximum is 18, by the way), and Garth's Shop was full of stuff that you didn't find until the end of the game. I kept looking, and finally came across a character disk that had an empty shop. I figured get rid of the high level characters on there and the disk would be fine.

It wasn't. I discovered that the disk was home to a massive character editor that would have been quite nice if it were not in German and I could understand it. And, of course, if it worked. Normally I'd just ignore it and pretend it wasn't there, but something went wrong deep in the code. When I tried to use a temple for healing (the only way you can heal low-level characters, and the only way ANYONE can heal special status ailments like withering), the game would crash. Actually, that isn't entirely accurate: the Commodore 64's CPU would crash and everything would stop. This disk was unusable. There was no way I was going to just accept 'no temples' as a handicap. Besides, if temples are broken, what else was? Would the dungeons work? Would the Review Board work? What if I went all the way to Mangar only to find out his encounter was bugged?

I can't find any other versions of C64 Bard's Tale anywhere. People are happy to hand me images for the Apple II, or the Amiga, or DOS, but I simply do not want to play those versions. If there's an original disk of Bard's Tale 2 floating around, why not the first one? The first one was more popular! I can't believe there's not an image SOMEWHERE that hasn't been tampered with.

At this point my only course of action is to load up the less hacked of the two and manually reset everything. Use those characters with the two million gold between them and pay Garth a visit. I bought everything he had. Everything. Then I stepped outside and dropped it on the ground. I single-handedly destroyed Skara Brae's economy.

One problem though. Somehow, through either a fluke of the disk or some hacking, the Adamant Dagger and Broom items became flagged as infinite, so I can't manually remove them from Garth's Shop. I won't be buying them, of course (for one, it's against my rule, and two, they're not really particularly useful items), but it still frustrates me that they're there.

I intend on continuing this Let's Play however I can, though. Fifteen years and counting, Bard's Tale. I can wait another few days. I can wait.