Review Bard's Tale trashed at GameSpot

[Spazmo]

Tags: Bard's Tale (2005); InXile Entertainment

inXile's first game, an action RPG remake of the classic dungeon crawler The Bard's Tale, recently got released on PC, and <a href="http://www.gamespot.com/pc">Gamespot PC</a> have their <a href=http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/thebardstale/review.html>review of it</a> ready. They didn't like it so much and rate it <b>6.7/10</b>, which, on the 6-10 scale major sites use, means it's pretty weak.<blockquote>But, even though The Bard's Tale would like to mock the conventions of wizards, warriors, dungeons, and dragons, it ultimately ends up relying on the things it's supposedly trying to make fun of. Most of the people you meet, places you visit, and enemies you encounter wouldn't be at all out of place in a straitlaced high-fantasy RPG, but here it makes the somewhat halfhearted humor often feel like an afterthought. There are a few genuinely funny moments, though they're usually because of the talented voice-acting cast rather than the writing. There are scores of missed opportunities for puns and silly names, and yet the game manages to find the time for a head-shakingly out-of-place reference to You Got Served.</blockquote>That's a thing that also bugged me in Troika's Bloodlines, which had a couple of George W. Bush jokes that won't be relevant anymore in a few years.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

Bard's Tale Got Served?

 

[Shagnak]

Interesting:

The Bard's Tale comes packed with the first three Bard's Tale games, all of which were originally released in the mid to late '80s. <...snip...> One would have to go to great lengths to be able to play these games in their original form, which makes the PC version of The Bard's Tale the most compelling of them all, since it plays the games in their original form, right down to piping the music out of your PC speaker.

So you can play the oldies on a modern PC without using DOSBox?
Cool.

Or maybe not, they prolly haven't stood the test of time very well.

 

[Roqua]

since it plays the games in their original form, right down to piping the music out of your PC speaker.

Thats good to know, I hate when games decide to pipe music out of my ass. I am a firm believer in music coming out of speakers.

 

[Spazmo]

Thats good to know, I hate when games decide to pipe music out of my ass. I am a firm believer in music coming out of speakers.

You're an idiot. The PC speaker is the one that's right in your case and can only beep. It probably does so once or twice when you boot your machine up, depending on your BIOS.

 

[Deathy]

When I build machines, I tend to divert the PC speaker signals to my onboard sound (as modern computers can do, so the sound comes from external speakers. I don't like having a speaker that I can't adjust the volume on, even if it's a pissy small one.

 

[Roqua]

Thats good to know, I hate when games decide to pipe music out of my ass. I am a firm believer in music coming out of speakers.

You're an idiot. The PC speaker is the one that's right in your case and can only beep. It probably does so once or twice when you boot your machine up, depending on your BIOS.

I know what a PC speaker is. I was playing computer games when you were sucking on your mothers dick.

 

[hijks]

Fallout 2 got some Bill Clinton jokes...

They might not be relevant in time, but they are a testimony of history.

 

[Psilon]

The PC speaker is the one that's right in your case and can only beep.

Not entirely true. There have been several games that pulled digitized sound effects out of the PC speaker. Even Microsoft released a sound driver for it for Windows 3.1, though it was a separate download.

The reason most people just beep it (if that speaker's used at all) is because you pretty much have to do all the standard sound card processing on the main CPU in order to use it. Since no one enjoys DSP, few used the speaker except for the easy stuff.

 

[Elwro]

Pirates! PC version (back in 1988) had 2-part Bach pieces played with the PC-Speaker. Polyphony! Some good piece of assembler coding.

 

[undead dolphin hacker]

There were text-to-voice programs back in the day that actually managed to wrangle voice out of the PC speaker.

PS Roqua -- women don't have dicks. That was your dad in your mom's clothes assraping you.

 

[Ap_Jolly]

A number of games had a legible human speech coming from PC speaker. Activision's "Ghostbusters 2", for example, or Access Software games.

But who cares anyway. Nowadays everyone has sound cards built-in the motherboard. IIRC, Dosbox emulates PC speaker through your sound card.

 

[LlamaGod]

if I remember right, Might and Magic 3 did voice though the PC speaker, but it runs slow as shit on my GOLDBOX GAMES PC.

 

[Naked_Lunch]

You remember right, M&M 3,4, and 5 all were some of the first games to have voice acting and such like that. On top of that, they're all kick ass games.