The Bard's Tale Review (Xbox)

  The Bard's Tale was originally released on the PC in the 80's. It was a fairly standard PC RPG in which you made your character, made a party, and went out adventuring and looting dungeons. I owned this game on my old Apple IIGS, so I looked foward to playing an updated version.

  The new game is not so much just an update as it is a completely new game with very little to compare to the old one, save for the name and the adventuring bit. It's not a bad thing, just a warning for those of you who are fans of the original and looking for more of the same with pretty graphics.

  The Bard's tale is funny. It's got a Monty Pyhtonesque sense of humor in just about everything it does. From the opening quest where you go down in a cellar to take out a rat, kill it in one hit, and say, "Victory!" to the multiple endings, the dialouge and writing is classic. If the game was as popular as the Monty Python skits and movies, you could almost imagine people singing "It's Bad Luck to Be You" as fequently as they do "Every Sperm is Sacred".

  Beneath the humor, however, is a fairly standard hack n' slash RPG in the vein of Baldaur's Gate: Dark Alliance. A few ingenious improvements have been made to the system, however.

  Your main attacks won't come from you, they'll come from creatures you summon using a musical instrument...you are a bard after all. For the majority of the game, the summoned creatures will be much more powerful than you are, so you'll be hanging around behind them waiting to get a few stabs in the back while they dish out the damage. There are creatures that heal, creatures that fire arrows at your foes, creatures that set enemies on fire; there are sixteen in all. Finding a good combination of summons is part of the stategy in battle.

  Other innovations include automatic selling of unwanted weapons and armor. All you have to do is walk over a less powerful item, and you get the cash for it. This is a great idea because it saves you the legwork of going back and forth to shops and managing an inventory, making the game move at a faster pace. Also, being able to call a crone to heal you makes it so you don't have to worry about finding or buying potions that heal, cure disease, etc.

  But other than that, the combat is standard press the A button button to attack, B to block action. It gets rather repetitive, especially toward the end where your going through huge dungeons with loads of enemies. This is a weakness in the genre in general I guess, and can't be blamed on this game alone.

  It's good in two to four hour doses, but I get bored after that, unlike a traditional RPG (a good one I mean) where the immersion of the story and characters can keep you going for days on end.

  That's not saying the story and characters in this game aren't good. The bard (voiced by Robin Hood: Men in Tights and Saw's Cary Elwes) is a character indeed. He's selfish, money and woman-hungry, and has a quick wit. An even better charcter is the narrator, whose conversations with the Bard and comments on his actions are priceless.

  The story is cliched, but purposely. It's a send up on RPG conventions, with a princess locked in a castle and a Chosen One who has to rescue her. Well, a bunch of Chosen Ones actually. These cliches are what gives the game most of it's humor, so if you haven't played any similar games, you may not find it as funny. It's kind of like watching Scary Movie without seeing Scream first, or Hot Shots without seeing Top Gun, if you get my meaning.

  All in all, it's a game worth playing if you're a hack n' slash fan looking for some humor to go with your adventuring. The main fault I can find is that this is a niche game inside of a niche genre, so it won't really appeal to the majority of gamers.