Comment by thesuperbigfrog

16 hours ago

Many years ago I played one of her works, Bard's Tale 3: Thief of Fate and enjoyed it very much.

It was a masterful blend of RPG, dungeon crawl, and puzzles and had a memorable soundtrack.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru5kg35dNso

Having a bard in your party let you choose a soundtrack and their songs brought magical effects. For example, the Rhyme of Duotime let your party attack more frequently in combat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oR4j7w4FIY

BT3 is available on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/msdos_The_Bards_Tale_3_-_Thief_O...

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thesuperbigfrog

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slfnflctd  3 hours ago

The first trilogy (including BT3) was also remastered about 7 years ago and released on Steam, it's like $15 and has many quality of life improvements.

mrits  4 hours ago

She was originally chosen to do a remaster of the series. This was eventually reassigned to another publisher.

If you purchase Bards Tale 4 you get the remastered 1,2, and 3 for free.

I have played BT 1 every year or so since the late 80s.

senectus1  14 hours ago

ahh i have fond memories of this game... and the silly anti piracy attempts (decoder ring) they shipped it with.

  • slfnflctd  3 hours ago

    In middle school, a friend and I 'cracked' that decoder ring by copying all the info by hand on to paper so we could both play the game from one store bought copy because we were poor. I don't think we ever finished the game, but it's still one of my happiest early gaming memories.

    They remastered all three of the first Bard's Tale games a few years ago and released them on Steam with many quality of life improvements-- I bought the set without a second thought even though I know I will probably never take the time to play it all the way through. I've spent a few dozen hours on it so far, though.

einpoklum  7 hours ago

It seems Bard's Tale 3 can be played on the DosBox emulator:

https://www.dosbox.com/comp_list.php?showID=188&letter=B

... which is available for many platforms, including Windows and Linux:

https://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1

although the latest version of DosBox seems to be from 2019, so maybe others can suggest a more actively-maintained emulator.

  • 1313ed01  7 hours ago

    DOSBox-X is a port that is actively developed and has many features missing in vanilla DOSBox.

    There are a few other ones as well. DOSBox Staging is one. Magic DOSBox seems to be the most popular on Android. There is some iOS port as well.