aschultz's The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate review

A fine review of my favourite Bard's Tale. Though aesthetically, the IIGS Bard's Tales I+II are the best of the lot. But as a whole game, BT3 was the best to me , and it never got a IIGS version.

Thanks! This was a review I was happy with when I wrote it on GameFAQs, and I was also happy with the changes I was able to make.

Those screenshots on whatisthe2gs look really good. If I can stomach getting through the early parts, it'd be worth it to replay, as I was planning to re-work through BT2. The downside of IIgs emulation is, of course, no save state. I could probably hack the disk bytes, though. Even fighting dream mages in the Maze of Dread might take me longer than I have patience for.

I concur this is a really good review. I remember taking a party through all three games. The cronomancer and geomancer classes new to this game were very cool.

It must've been cool to go through from the start. I got in on the series with BT2 and didn't play BT1 until emulation came along. A friend of mine told me BT1 was just too tough and slow and not to waste my money. He was right, sort of. There weren't any internet guides back then. I wound up enjoying BT1 though the NES version was more fun.

I'm still on the fence whether BT3 is an elite Apple game because it's quite good even if you don't speed it up with emulation (which makes a lot of old Apple games much more tolerable.) It's a lot of fun. Maybe I need to take more time to stop and see the graphics.

Yeah, it was very cool to play through all them from start to finish. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the series.

Also true the first BT was difficult to get started in. Right out of the guild you could be attacked and totally wiped but that was the nature of those games back then. These days you fight a couple of scrawny diseased rats and gain a level ;)

This review is really informative, but I still like your Wizard's Crown review better. Then again, I found that one to be exceptional enough to award it Featured Review status, so that was a tough act to follow.

However, I do like how you point out there are inside jokes for people who have followed the series. The allusion to the six degrees of Kevin Bacon (or is it seven?) was nice and worth a chuckle.

I'll concur with the good nostalgic review here, though I didn't play computer games so I'm not as aware of the nostalgia for this one. I still take issue with some of your grammar that makes things hard to understand and with your transitions which often are non-existent, leaving me in a scramble to try and figure out your line of thought.

However, in this case, it is all forgiven because of the Kevin Bacon joke. That was very clever of you, you sly dog.

Randxian--I actually liked this review better, though zippdementia pointed out some awkward transitions. I still have a tough time balancing "just letting myself write" and proofreading--especially since I -know- what to look for. And when I reread after a week, I kick myself for not having seen that of course these 2 points don't flow together, etc.

As for awkward transitions--I want to make them nontrivial, because I want my writing to be, and I want it to connect unusual stuff. It's important, to me, to break from the too-formulated bits of a review, or try to.

That entails a certain amount of risk, even if I leave a review for overnight proofreading. While I'm happy with my rewrite from GameFAQs--and I think I have a good pattern for sprucing those reviews up easily--the feedback helps with 1) just getting me to look at my review differently and 2) giving me some useful concrete starting points in order to make something that much more fun for myself and hopefully others to reread.