I have been playing Centauri Alliance - aka Bard's Tale in Space - recently and the game is quite good.
The game was never released on PC, only on Apple II and Commodore 64 ; I played the C64 version, I didn't have major problems with emulation although it's not that comfortable compared with emulation or even dosbox, there are loading times and so.
The centauri alliance is one alliance among many alliances in the galaxy. You're a group of adventurers sent by the alliance to investigate about the actions of an hostile confederation inside the alliance sector.
You can travel at will between 10 worlds from the start composed of one "town" map with a starport, a headquarter and facilities. Then proper dungeons are eventually accessible from here. There's a a plot involving a natural path, and at some points you'll get orders from different headquarters.
Overall although I may be wrong here I think you can't skip most parts but you don't really have to follow the natural order.
You create a party of up to 8 characters.
There are diverse skills divided in 4 categories : combat, technical skills, magic and technology. You can create your characters among the 6 races composing the alliance, and each race have access to only one or two categories of skills.
Metamorph is one individual skill, at each level of the skill the character can transform into a stronger type of creature, given he has enough PP which won't happen if you only raise the metarmorph skill. It's pretty fun.
Magic is classic but good, with navigation spells and combat ones. 2 of the 4 magic schools are unavailable to new characters.
Technical skills consist in item recharging, healing and (item and robot) repairing skills and are precious.
Finally there are combat skills divided into melee, guns and throwing skill.
At each level you gain some HP and PP (psi points, used for magic and technical skills) and choose to add one point to one of your available skils. Besides, basically, if you put a point in a skill where you score is low then the experience you'll need to reach the next level is low, which invites you to put points in diverse skills and is really well thought.
Free rooms can be filled with robots that you can buy at shops, and monsters that may decide to join you as you explore dungeons. Although robots especially are strong, you don't directly control these recruited characters.
There really are multiple ways to build your party, and party management is very good with also a large range of weapons, detailed below.
Concerning exploration, towns are really boring, all of them only contain the easiest enemies in the game, their layout isn't good, the facilities are the same exact same everywhere and there are at most one or two points of interest. The starting town also contains the academy where you'll gain levels.
Dungeons are a totally different story. They are self-contained, contain several floors with interesting layouts, traps, hard puzzles (riddle types of puzzles much more than plates and levers) and good fights. The encounter rate is very low and the fights are "randomly" generated and intense.
You can save everywhere, but you've got only one save position and there are dungeons you get stuck in, looking for an exit. I didn't save in these dungeons before finding an exit, and ultimately I'm undecided, I'm not sure you can reach a dead-end but I can think of situations where "blindly" saving wouldn't be a good idea.
Fights are sparse, quick and violent. They're phase-based, and after completing one or two easy first dungeons, you'll need to be well prepared, with good weapons, bombs, PP and actually kill most enemies or use some strong protection spell before they get to attack you. According to the manual initiative directly depends on your score on your involved skill (type of weapon or magic) which seems very plausible. What's sure is that without a good initiative score you can't survive. Note that You've still got a rechargeable shield score which will absorbe some damage from the few remaining enemies you wouldn't have killed.
The encounter rate is very low, and each fight gives a lot of experience (if a character just raised a skill whose current score is still low then he/she may eventually gain one level after just one fight), as well as "random" items.
Combat takes place on a grid where your party and group of enemies take place, but the grid is not much more than a gimmick if you compare with Bard's Tale. The combat is like in Bard's Tale, with groups of enemies at different distances, and that's fine.
You have got a large range of guns and bombs, first to buy and then to find, with different damage, ranges, some target only enemy, some one group, or some the entire grid, provided the enemies are in range. Given you hit an enemy with a strong spell, weapon or bomb you'll generally kill it, and all the challenge is in managing your resource, targeting all enemies, possibly twice because of probable misfires. By the late parts managing your all-found bombs and guns is fun, as well as your items which provide a navigation spell effects in anti-magic area (although to be fair you can cast "LIGHT" and other spells before entering the zone and the effect lasts even where you can't cast spells, which kinda sucks).
I got one annoying bug, sometimes the combat and some of other things became significantly slower, which made me resort to the "Warp mode" function of the emulator but that does not work that well, and unfortunately I saved my game after one of these bugs because I assumed it would disappear after restarting the game, and in fact it didn't disapper. Besides after several hours I needed to restart from the beginning because I wasn't using the proper version of the game files (reason why I made
this thread). Also like I said in the beginning I wouldn't say playing this game was as comfortable as playing a dos game with dosbox. But past these technical aspects the game was a lot of fun. Well I say "was" but I've not finished yet, I've been stuck for a while and I'm not sure I'll manage to finish it, but that's life.
