Getting on with things was very much my overall feeling of The Bard's Tale IV. And from there on, if have you the inclination, it's perfectly possible to slide awkwardly into that groove and get on with things. Instead, relying on your having played enough other similar games to understand what its outdoor sections are flailingly attempting to be, you just start talking to people, and walking toward quest markers, for want of anything else to do. (Because of course you can't skip cutscenes.) Failing to introduce itself in any meaningful way, establish its world, even tell you who you are, where you are, or what you're doing, it just assumes you're au fait enough with first-person RPGs to just muddle your way through. Immediately looking dated, it begins in a giant clumsy mess: half-arsed, poorly Photoshopped, mostly static image budget cutscenes interrupting each other, dialogue crashing, the scenes jumping about so much I thought I must have accidentally skipped something and started over. ![]() And if that's faint enough praise to damn The Bard's Tale IV, I've done my job already. What I've been playing for the last couple of days is a bit of a crap RPG with some nice puzzles, and a decent combat system. ![]() And I'm certainly free of the peculiar reverence of those for whom such cows are too sacred to criticise even the decades-later follow-ups (subtweet). ![]() I don't really remember them with any special degree of affection. Are you nostalgic for The Bard's Tale? I certainly played them back between 19, but being under 10, that was a very long time ago.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |