Field Report from Skara Brae

 My campaign through Tales of the Unknown Volume 1: The Bard's Tale, beautifully remastered on the XBox One, continues onward, with my party stepping foot in Baron Harkyn's castle this afternoon, leaving behind the undead masses back in the Catacombs for some above ground action. This felt like a good time to check in.

Here is how I am playing: I am checking the automap against my ancient hand-drawn maps for accuraccy (more on that later) by mapping out every square on every level. So far, this has seemed to be enough to keep level with what I am fighting. When exploring a level, I take every fight that comes my way (unless I'm on the way out in a rush), and in levels between the current one I'm exploring and the exit, I skip fights.

My party has levelled up enough that my magic users have learned all their available spells, so now it's all about levelling them up to get more hit and magic points. Loot is scarce in this game, and it seems like forever between weapon and armor upgrades at first. The pace picks up though, by Catacombs Two, and now my bard has a good supply of fire horns and my whole party has been upgraded one way or another.

It turns out my old maps were less comprehensive than I thought, but the majority of the misses are traps that I did not detect before, because at this point in the game your mage should be keeping you levitated at all times.  I hovered right over them in my previous visit without setting them off, so they were not marked as traps until this playthrough. 

A big miss was on Catacomb One where a dead end hallway I had mapped was actually two small rooms, the last with a message on the wall pertaining to the game's story. That was embarrassing! And there was something on the town map that I did not have noted, in a small southeast section of buildings guarded by stone giants.

I could not remember why this neighborhood was closed off, so I checked every building, and in one of them was an NPC basically saying that we were in a trilogy (of threats to Skara Brae/games). Was he there on those floppy disks 35 years ago? I have no record of it.

I have also come to realize that I was maintaining a perception for the last 3 plus decades that I was maybe only halfway through the game, but if my suspicions are correct, I was actually only one level away from the end of the game back then. My maps get even sketchier, less refined, and wholly incomplete the closer to the end they get.

Dragons have started showing up, and there is little defense against their breath. It comes down to a roll of the dice as to which spell or bard instrument can shut them up before they can get off more than a few of those attacks. Dopplegangers, too, which "jump" into your party if there is a slot and imitate one of your crew until you kill them both. Fun stuff!

The good news, in summary, is that I'm actually having fun with all this again, and feel no desire to quit or take another three and a half decade break. I'll check in again when I've got something more to report.

Beaten: Gears of War 4 (Xbox One)

 Finally, game designers with the philosophy "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". After beating Gears 1-3 back to back I thought I had had enough of the repetitive cover-based gameplay, but last year I fired up Gears of Ward Judgment and had a blast. It was exactly what I expected - more of the same - with a great story involving a side character from 1-3, great action, and polished graphics and gameplay. 

Gears of War 4, I feared, would suffer from the design philosophy where they think fans of the game want it to evolve, to become more complex, to be more like this game and that game. I was dreading things like crafting, or levelling up player attributes, or multiple choice conversation trees being added to the game.

To my surprise, the game is a perfect and polished continuation of the series and its plotlines, showcasing the next generation of heavily armored warriors fighting through varied areas of cover-based shooting. The locust threat from the previous games has been replaced by killer robots and a new threat in the form of locust 2.0, and that's all good. There are little guys and brutes and bosses as in the previous games, and their movements and tactics are a lot of fun to fight.

The graphics are gorgeous, and in some of the ruined old brick buildings I felt that Dark Souls vibe as my squad worked their way through those areas. I forgot the scale of difficulty on Gears of War games and played on normal instead of hardcore on this run and it was relatively easy but still challenging at times.

Story wise, it all comes together really well, and some familiar faces from Gears 1-3 show up to help out the next generation of Cog (or former Cog) soldiers.  It was a long enough campaign to be entertaining without wearing out its welcome, and with Gears 5 already in my backlog, I'm sure I will return to the series at some point in the future, this time without the fear of bad design ideas muddying up the perfect and polished formula that Epic Games has established with the series.

Some games do need to evolve and grow and it's great to see in subsequent releases. Other times, however, designers add too many unnecessary bells and whistles and it adds nothing to the experience (a good example is that Assassin's Creed game awhile ago that had tower defense segments). Gears of War is a simple and fun formula that ain't broke, so I am grateful that Epic choose the wise path and didn't fix it.

Thirty Five Years Later, A Return to Skara Brae

 In 1986 I was living in my parent's house, attending classes at the Mansfield branch of OSU, and working full time as a salad bar attendant at a Brown Derby restaurant. It was a golden time of hard work, hard partying, and floppy disks for my beloved Commodore 64. 

Finally, I was state of the art. However, I had yet to take on a super complex role playing game because frankly, they were intimidating when I read about them in the magazines of the time.  I took on text adventures like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Nine Princes in Amber, but Wizardry was not on the C64 yet, and the only Ultima out for it at that time was III, and I wanted to start the series with I.

My hometown of Galion, within driving distance of Mansfield, had a few good sources of software among them, but to the south in Columbus was, well, everything. Thus a party/software hunt road trip was initiated on March 28, 1986 with my good friend and fellow gaming enthusiast Andy Kiss, primarily to the Toys-R-Us on Morse Road. There, a long wall of software was on display for a variety of computer systems, and the section for the C64 was the largest.

On the shelf was a shiny new package from Electronic Arts called "Tales of the Unknown Volume 1: The Bard's Tale". It looked as sophisticated as all those other RPGs I had read about, but the animated color monster graphics and the clean screen drew me in. With Andy's encouragement, I dove in and bought it.

After character creation I was free to explore the town, not really knowing what to do or where to go, but I found all the shops and had a few warm up fights in the streets before stumbling onto the first dungeon. It was quite the education from there as I meticulously mapped my way through level after level, and just doing that was enough to grind up my party without the need for too much other grinding. 

Sessions continued that spring and into summer, and Andy, as well as our other friend Barry, spent time with me playing it, assisting in the mapping and note-taking. It was a warm moment of reminiscence last week when I opened the old manila folder with my maps and notes an saw Barry's detailed character sheets listing equipment and spells for each character.

That was March, but by August I had stopped campaigning in one Skara Brae and had started with another, as I took the dive and started Ultima IV, no longer concerned with starting the series at I. I made it pretty far until December, when Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight came out, and caught up in the hype, I dove into that, starting a cycle of unfinished RPGs that remains until this day.

Thankfully, inExile entertainment has revived and remastered the Bard's Tale Trilogy on the XBox One, and that is where I am making my second assault on the game. It plays fast, smooth, and slick, allowing for quick in and out sessions where I explore a little more each time, level up my characters, and let the automap do the hard work. 

Checking the modern automap against my 1986 graph paper map shows for the first two dungeon levels at least, a meticulous re-rendering of the original layout, from the walls to the doors to the notes and traps. I've only found one minor discrepancy so far, and it could easily be an error I made 35 years ago.

Assuming I don't flake out this time, I expect my campaign to last into late summer. At some point I will be exploring farther than I did before and may copy the automap of those uncharted levels onto graph paper so if I finish the game then that manila folder from 1986 will be complete at last.