The Legacy - Revisited

The Legacy

This time my interest falls to the Microprose published game of The Legacy. It is a blend between a traditional RPG and an adventure game and one of the first that combines those two elements. The atmosphere and settings of a horrorgame has always attracted me. And my fond memories of Elvira, Elvira II and Waxworks came to mind. 

I know I really don´t have the patience or cunning for adventure games where combination of items and spotting of pixels eventually solve mysteries. But I don´t give up as long as my interest are there.

The game comes with a huge 65+ pages manual in classic Microprose style which means very well written. Note however that Microprose is the publisher and not the developer of this game. Microprose aquired the famous text-adventure company Magnetic Scrolls in 1992 which previously had produced the famous games The Pawn, Guild of Thieves and Myth to name a few. 

I think the Preface of the manual sums up this game pretty well:

You start out the game by selecting one of eight predefined characters. All of whom is a heir to this huge mansion but with different abilities. Every character has three primary skills: Knowledge, Dexterity and Strength and each of them has secondary skills like first aid, brawling and firearms for example. Then there are Stamina and Willpower.

If you want you could customize them but contrary to my normal procedure I just choosed one of them and started the game. My first smile came when I took a closer look on the guys t-shirt which said "Gunship 2000" - another brilliant helicopter simulation from Microprose at the time. Anyway, my character had no magic but was stronger in all other skills instead. Let´s see if that is something I will regret or not later on. 

After the short intro you start out just inside the door to the mansion. There is no going back. What first stroke me was the "modern" gui of the game. A dos-based game with a windows based interface. You could even resize the windows and place the windows wherever you wish. Probably the first dos-based game I have seen with that feature before all games started to be played from within Windows instead. It also reminded me a little about the Amiga game Uninvited. 

The first scene that meets you when you start the game

I started to examine my immediate surroundings. The hall features a lot of doors in all directions plus the stairway leading to the second floor with even more doors to explore. I found a spellbook and some notes and when I started to explore the adjoining rooms I came over more notes from Robert that told me more about the house, or rather, about the horror that inhabit the house. Those notes helped to increased the atmosphere of the game. The mansion was built in 1639 by its first lord who himself was burned at the stake in 1662. His son inherited the mansion but died in a fire a few decades later, assumingly by a lantern having been tossed through a windows. Since then many strange things have been seen and heard from the mansion.

Fortunately the game features a pretty good automap in the lower left corner and that will be needed beceause I discovered after a while that this house is huge. I found a lot of different items like empty vials, a revolver, crystals, a keyring a safebox and so on. Since you have very limited storing capacity, only able to carry four items plus what you carry in your hands I had to drop all notes and items not of immediate use. That also means I will probably have to draw my own map so I can remember where all items are or areas of special interests. At this time (1993) automap was still a rare thing and being able to make notes even rarer.

It did not take long before I stumbled into the first inhabitants of the base floor. Zombies walking the long corridors. Since they move in realtime I discovered that they never enter closed doors so I could try to sneak past them or waiting for them to pass before making my exploration of the corridors. I did not wan´t to get into unneccessary fights. My revolver only had 6 bullets.

I also discovered that my experience bar had increased. Probably by exploring new areas and picking up items. What I do like is that you could increase any skill by paying with experience on the fly. There is no level up but a gradual increase in experience with which you could buy more skills. I like that. But for now, I save everything until I need it. 

The RPG like character sheet

My plan was to explore the first floor without going up or down (I did find a way down to the basement after a while). I avoided all zombies roaming and only once opted to fight because I had just found a brass handle to use as a melee weapon. That worked quite well even though I got a little injured. I also found a room with a strange symbol which I think is a safe place to rest on. At least that was information I learned from Robert who wrote most of the notes I found lying about. Where Robert is now or what happened to him is only left for my imaginatin for now.

In the north I eventually found a room with a grammophone but also a skull. I am sure this strange item will be used at a particular place later on.

The skull was hidden in the left box on the wall

After a while I think the graphics got darker and it was harder to see. I don´t know if the time advances in the game but I fould two different clockworks and they showed different times. I think I hastily found a torchlight but got killed when I tried to pick it up. The problem as said before is that you have very limited space and have to drop something else which means you have to figure out what first. Not easy when zombies are attacking you from behind. 

The only other entity I met was some sort of flying monster which terrified me so much that I couldn´t move. But other than that it seemed harmless so I just had to wait it out before proceeding.

Monster that only terrifies me and stops my movement before moving on

So far I have not yet found any puzzle or problem to solve. I still have areas to explore and when I run out of them I will go down to the basement or upstairs. Sooner or later I expect to solve some puzzle before being able to move on.

My first impressions of the game are quite good so far. I am gathering a few items. The crystals seems to enable me to meditate to increase my mana. The first aid kits increases my health but relies on my skill for success to use. The combat seems a bit odd with both a hit and aim button. I am not really sure how it works yet so I have just pressed the "hit" button and waited for the aim bar to increase before hitting again. The music is almost non-existens and only some ambient sounds could be heard except for some sinister laugther or a door opening. 

The standard dos-box configuration from gog.com was pretty slow so I had to increase the cycles for the movement in the game to feel smooth. 

I will continue playing this game and return when I have found more information about what kind of problems I´m standing against. It also feels good to be able to post something on my blog here for almost two years :-)

The Bards Tale - Remastered version

InXile recently released Bard´s Tale IV a kickstarter backed successor to the famous Bards Tale series. While it so far has received mixed reviews - where mostly original Bard´s Tale gamers feel the lack of soul from previous games and less character customization - it seems to be a game worth considering after the first patches has been released.

Not as well known is the fact that InXile also released a remastered version of the old Bard´s Tale series trilogy where graphics, UI and other improvements has been made. After having read a little about it and needing a secondary game to play on all the other computers here at home I decided to buy it.

Tha game can be played in almost any resolution and has full mouse support as well as the old keyboard support. The ability to save anywhere and not just in the tavern is a god send improvement. I don´t have the time for running back and forth just to save the game and loosing huge amount of gaming time when I die along the way. Those times are long gone with a family and work to take care of. Except for the saving mechanism the best improvement is the inclusion of an automap. At last! 

I loved to map old games before but time has changed so this is a very valuable addition. Some of you might remember my revisit to Bard´s tale 3 several years ago. The main problems I had with it was the extremely slow regeneration of spell points in combination with a ridiculously high random encounter rate. It was extremely frustrating and made me quit the game.

Bard´s Tale opens up with the classic original Bard´s tale tune and with improved graphics that scale very well into high resolutions. There are unfortunately no manual supplied to the game. You have to find it on the web but there are tooltips almost everywhere that describes the most vital parts of the game.

I started out a whole evening with rolling characters. After an hour or so I was finished. In my setup I had one warrior, paladin, rogue, bard, magician and conjurer. You have the typical setup of races like human, elf, orc, gnome, half-orc, dwarf etc but it is not obvious what their exact advantages are.

When my party was finished and I had saved the game we went out to explore Skare Brae. Ahh...it was a fresh breeze that reminded me of my adventures 30 years back with my Commodore-64. It is exactly the same town and I still remembered some things but not all. Fortunately there is now a full featured auto-map included which also describe the things you find, for example labeling what kind of shop or temple you discovered. It writes down all hints and tips you found and so on. Perfect!

The original Bard´s Tale on Commodore 64

My first goal was to find the equipment shop because we started out with only some gold and no weapons. I had to find the shop through google and it was only around 10 steps northward. After having bought broadswords and scalemail to my warriors I was satisfied. Now begun the first hard part of just surviving. I tried to take on the easy fights to gain experience and get some gold. After half an hour I was eligible to raise to level 2 so we searched for the place where you can level up the characters. I also gradually improved the equipment of my warriors.

What struck me is that the shop only offers standard equipment. Best armour is plate mail and best weapon is the two-handed halberd. There is no magical items or expensive items to long for. I suppose I have to find all of these.

My strategy was to wait until level 3 to enter the sewers. The sewers is entered by ordering some wine "which easily goes down" from a special tavern. It was around this time that I read about how bad the rogue class was. Even if they had improved it by including the improvements made to the class in Bard´s tale III, I was not impressed by its ability to hide in shadows and automatically score a critical hit on next turn for only a few points of damage. At level four I switched out the rogue for another warrior instead. The only drawback I see is that I have to rely to magical means - and spellpoints - to disarm traps. But the successrate of the rogue is not that great in that department either.

I also eventually added a 7th magician instead of using the slot for wandering creatures after having read it was the best way to use that slot.

The much appreciated automap

I have only reached level two in the sewers and explored a little over half the town and already most of my times have been spent on levelling up my characters. At level up every character recieves a random amount of hitpoint, spellpoints and a one point increase in a random attribute as longas you haven´t reach 18 in that. I reload if my numbers are too low. This takes time so at least 10 minutes for one level up I would guess. Anyway everything is so extremely much easier and quicker than on my tapestation on the C-64 so in just a few hours I was already at level 7. Higher levels means extra attacks per round for warriors and paladins and new spell schools for the mages. But spells costs money and I cannot afford everyone to have the latest spells so I have to return to the sewers several times just to get more money.

Good items is hard to get by but I have slowly found some mithril armour parts which is more effective than the best armour the town shop can sell. I have yet to find real good magical weapons or items.

In this first part of the review I want to stress the really good, improved features of this version:

• Cloud saves - Every time I quit the saves are transferred to the cloud and I can continue playing from any of my three computers at any time. Worth gold if you have a family sharing the computers.

• Less random encounters and high ability to run away - Extremely useful and makes the game less frustrating

• Save anywhere - You can save the game anywhere and don´t have to return to the guild

• Automap - Saves you a lot of time than if you had to do this yourself

• Improved UI - Both mouse and keyboard support makes the game easier to play

I think this version from a technical standpoint is very successful. I have yet to really come deep into the game because I am still only exploring the sewers at level 8. I almost only play the game sporadically in small portions of time which makes the experience very stuttering but that is only due to my limited playing time.