The Bard-s Tale Description:

The Bard's Tale review:
1 stars (Should have finished the game) - I wanted to really like this game with its mixture of wit, ribald humor and poking fun at computer games in general I thought it would be a great game. But, I found a bunch of problems instead. First it doesn't work with my video card resulting in a bizarre problem with the sound. No fix was placed on the web site. It does work with my labtop but work in the case of this game is a relative term. The game play is very clumbsy and this simply isn't fun at all. So I'm quite sorry to say I can't recommend this game even if you find it in the bargain bin.
3 stars (Occasionally funny/entertaining, some flaws) - The humor and the musical interactions within the game are first rate. It was almost like watching a play at times. The music was very entertaining. The twists in the game were entertaining and I played the game through to the end because I enjoyed it. I wanted to see what they'd do at the end.



But there were quite a few flaws. The alleged "non-linear" aspect of the game is highly misleading. There are very few choices to undertake at all. You have to do A, to get to B, to get to C, etc. At least you need to do that to succeed. While you certainly could visit certain limited places almost immediately, you'd get killed mucho pronto if you did.



With all the sparkly effects and in game rendering of cut-scenes, they would almost always slow to a crawl. While I'm sure the screaming cutting edge machines of the developers ran all those auras around the creatures nicely, my machine (which beats the recommended configuration) couldn't handle them, even with all video controls turned to the minimum.



And at a certain point, nothing can stand in your way. Even the Bosses were a pushover. No real strategy was involved, except some minor tweaking of your party. And the "less A, more I" was not that accurate. My party frequently did very stupid things, and didn't follow orders hardly at all.



Overall, it was entertaining and I'd recommend it, but only after it was patched to fix the framerate problems. It is relatively inexpensive, so would be worth the money if fixed.
1 stars (very disappointing) - The interface is very awkward to use. They should have just used a mouse or keyboard commands. The top down view caused me vertigo and is also awkward. The humor is weak. I don't usually give up on a game, but did for this one.