![]() Your bard can play Sir Robin's Song to help you flee combats. Or there's just NUTS for insane (randomly attacking) characters, or enemies' animated evil grins and raised eyebrows. Spell names like YMCA for Ybarra's Mystical Coat of Armor or MAMA for Mangar's Mallet are funny and memorable, too. And sometimes there're in-jokes for series veterans or homages to people who helped with the project. The jokes may never be gut-busters, and they're right where expected, but they show timing can work in RPGs, too. Tenebrosia's Kafkaesque location names and puzzles are an upgrade over BT2, but then the story scatters small jokes with basic technical stuff or wryly remarking you might've killed a good guy. The story itself runs smoothly, and on reflection, hiring Michael Stackpole, who wrote successful Star Wars and Battletech novels, was a great idea. The puzzles work better than BT2's death-snares, too, as the clues are less oblique and you generally have an idea if you should kill an NPC. And the variance in dungeon size is a welcome break from Bard's Tale II. It's still a favorite today, as it makes sense when it's all laid out. The final dungeon of Malefia is an awesomely nasty 3-d map with one-way teleports. The spatial reasoning puzzles from being spun around definitely trumped the riddling magic mouths from BT2. Other squares drained magic or quieted protective bard songs. ![]() One-way doors and spinning squares made even five-by-five towers daunting. Even the bad stuff worked out!Īll this cheating didn't make mapping trivial, though. More bonus! Remove and summon the wolf, and.well, my friend's younger brother was commissioned to do this until the party's hit points read "++++." And on replaying from scratch, I even found a bug where dead people got survivors' experience after a fight. Summon an Instant Wolf, and the old man "sees" a new party. If a party visits the old man after killing Brilhasti Ap Tarj in the starter dungeon, they get 600000 experience. The second friend also showed me the most wonderful game bug ever. This made BT3 even more of an adventure and maybe made me focus on the world puzzles and not leveling up. If BT3 had had fourteen worlds, I'd have wound up calling Kevin Bacon. I loaned my code wheel out to my friend who once taunted me about not having BT2, and he lost it (or did he?) He referred me to a friend, who lost HIS code wheel then referred me to another friend after I'd completed the sixth world. Each sequence of words foreshadows items or locations in later worlds, and if you're clever, you can maybe figure what matches with what ahead of time, though the game itself is not stingy when you need them. ![]() BT3 uses a code wheel-like Monkey Island-but with three circles to align. Getting there is an awesome gambit an archmage in your party must surrender all his spells to start at level 1.Īnd here's where the copy protection kicks in. He even allows you access to the seven other worlds that hold arms and armor of heroes of local heroes. A lone old man at the review board can help the party-he improves levels. Temples and bars exist in the mazy wilderness. No more Roscoe's Spell Emporium, armor shop, bank, or casino. Skara Brae, which you saved from Mangar in BT1, is trashed by Tarjan. You could even save anywhere, not just at the guild, and the auto-map saved serious frustration.īut perhaps the greatest ego boost was trashing the starter dungeon in one night. Armor classes, formerly only down to negative twenty, went to negative fifty and below. BT2's attributes went up to eighteen BT3, thirty. I just liked winning big and having a cool story and seeing new gimmicks.īT3 certainly had that-better graphics, more monsters, new spells, new character classes, bigger areas, and even cool copy protection. But then, I wasn't big on strategy back then. I figured I'd avoided the starting grind where you had to create and delete side characters for gold to resurrect your main party. My overpowered party walked through BT3's entertaining story. As a teen fanboy, I reaped the benefits of destroying far too many Dream Mages in BT2. I'm fortunate enough to have enjoyed Bard's Tale III (BT3) twice and in different ways. "I'm fortunate enough to have enjoyed Bard's Tale III (BT3) twice and in different ways. The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate (Apple II) review
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