The Bard's Tale II

[tiresius]

BT3 was the very first RPG I ever purchased with my hard-earned paperboy money, it was for the C64. It was awesome. I was a little annoyed by the bug that gave your party tons of experience for killing the first bad guy, I think his name was Tarjan or Mangar or something. Bumps them all up to level 30+ and lets your spellcasters get to level 4-5 Archmage.

I beat BT1-3 once utilizing the cheat books which I thought were funny how they were written like a short story. I liked BT3 with automap it is too bad BT1-2 did not have those. BT2 surprise ending is the best.

I really like the way you can get monsters to join your party and fight for you in the BT series. Not many RPGs let you do that. I love mercs and monsters joining parties. Too bad they didn't level up along with regular characters.

Saxon thanks for playing and sharing, you're hitting upon all the greats!

Do you slowly level your spellcasters so they get all the spells of Conjurer/Magician or do you skip to Sorcerer as soon as you can?

[Saxon1974]

No problem, I realized a few years ago the kind of RPG's I love weren't being made anymore so I went on a quest to collect all the old RPG's I loved in the past and started playing through them. So I enjoy posting about my adventures, just glad someone enjoys the posts

I have a few from my own collection I have kept, and bought a bunch of them on EBAY. I think I have a good 30 to 40 of them now (Original copies including boxes and documentation). I should have enough for quite a few years now...

Maybe I will take a photo of my collection and post it here.

As far as Sorcerers go in Bards tale II, I had one of my spellcasters go immediately to Sorcerer and the other switch to a Magician. That's what I did with Bards Tale I and that seemed to work. The problem you have with low level sorcerers and only magicians and conjurers is finding spell that do enough damage.

[Saxon1974]

If anyone might be interested in this game, I found the Apple IIGS version which I think might be the best version of this classic.

It has improved sound, added ambient sound, great graphics (better than pc or amiga) and it has an automap!

Here are some screens





and another I took of a daemon.

[BasiliskWrangler]

S-w-e-e-t! Oh man, I have to find a few hours this weekend to play some of that!

[Saxon1974]

Here is the info if your not sure where to get the Apple IIGS emulator or the game files.

I found this info at the forum located at
http://bardstale.brotherhood.de

There are quite a few posts discussing these great games.

Its really easy to get this version going.

get the emulator here
http://www.freetoolsassociation.com/

Go to the active x tab, and then under activegs tab at the top

and then you can get the game disk and the character disk on dragonbaits website here.

http://www.icestorm9999.com/bt2/bt2.html

I have a fondess for the C64 version, yet for todays gamer this is probably the best version to play.

A couple tips, you can push V to bring up some gameplay and sound options, make sure you turn on stereo sound since mine was off my default. It will filter the sound through the left and right speaker, pretty cool. To use the automap in a dungeon press Shift+?

If you find time, post your impressions!

[Sslaxx]

IIgs version looks wonderful! Loved playing Destiny Knight on the school's old 386, still break it out on DOSBox now and then too.

In terms of looks, how did the different versions rate?

[Kreador Freeaxe]

I had a friend in high school with iigs, and I remember going over to his house to play that very game. We still had a TRS-80 Model III at home. No graphics. And when my father finally got a PC, we weren't allowed on it with our games.

[Rune_74]

Is there a download version of the 2gs emulator? not a fan of that tiny view screen of the browser version...

[CrazyBernie]

http://kegs.sourceforge.net/

[Saxon1974]

There is a downloadable version of the emulator on that page I listed under the active x tab on the left and then under the activegs tab on the top.

It is a pretty small screen too and doesn't appear to allow you to resize, but when using it I just set my screen resolution to 800x600 and its plenty big enough.

[Rune_74]

How do you use the automap? I can't seem to find a key listing...

[Saxon1974]

Automap = Shift ?

Options = "V"

[Toxic]

Thanks for the thread. I was only 12 when BTII came out and that game KICKED MY BUTT. It seemed like you could take one wrong turn and be way over your head against monsters that could wipe your entire party. I also remember there being many riddles in that game. If you got them wrong you took damage (?). It was just way over my head at that age. I stuck to simpler RPG's like Legacy of the Ancients, Questron II and the early Ultima's.

BTII is like the bully from grade school that harrasses you. Maybe I should come back to it (all grown up) and give it a beat down. Need to work through Wizardry 8 first (another game I missed out on).

[azraelck]

BT3 was the very first RPG I ever purchased with my hard-earned paperboy money, it was for the C64. It was awesome. I was a little annoyed by the bug that gave your party tons of experience for killing the first bad guy, I think his name was Tarjan or Mangar or something. Bumps them all up to level 30+ and lets your spellcasters get to level 4-5 Archmage.

Do you slowly level your spellcasters so they get all the spells of Conjurer/Magician or do you skip to Sorcerer as soon as you can?

That huge XP bump wasn't a bug. BT3 was meant to be played by a veteran BT/BT2 party. You were supposed to change an Archmage into a Chronomancer. In general though the series was not balanced.

I generally leveled them up to get all of the spells; as I did in Devil's Whiskey, a sort of spiritual successor to BT. There were several decent spells; plus the extra hp and sp helped when I needed it later.

[tiresius]

That huge XP bump wasn't a bug.

I beg to differ. BT3 had a bug at the review board that when you complete a special quest for an experience reward and then change something in your party, when you went back to the review board your party would receive a ton of experience.

Personally what happened to me was I killed the baddy in the first dungeon, where my monk had died. My party received the experience bringing them to around level 21. I went outside to get the monk ress'd, then went back to see if the monk got any experience and could level too. Much to my disappointment all my characters kept leveling until they were level 35, and I had two level 5 archmages. I had to use a character hack to get my characters back to an estimate of what I thought they should be before I went to Arboria.

The bug is detailed here under "cheats":
http://bardstale.poverellomedia.com/thi ... tml#cheats

But back on topic, I always find it funny when a non-DOS computer game has better graphics than the DOS version. It seems so odd to me! I'll have to get an Apple emulator and check them out.