Why I buy this one ?
- Third person action RPG that casts you as the Bard, musician and adventurer
- Based on the original Bard's Tale, the grandfather of all role playing games
- Snarky/Nice conversation system lets the players choose the tone of the Bard's interactions
- Get immersed in an environment alive with interactive townsfolk, original music, birds, animals, rustling trees, waving grass, and trickling water
- For 1 player

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What our customer's say!

"Best bar in any game I've played yet", I really enjoyed the bars & songs. Just awesome. The playing was fun, the rat scenerio was awesome. Overall, this game was fun but not intense. This is not addictive but worth the money. Pretty easy to catch on which was great for this new gamer.

"Great idea, poor execution ", I liked the concept of Bards Tale but quirky and fun does not equal "good".

It suffers from a lot of the same problems that so many games suffer from Its flashy it looks cool, but it is way too short and has absolutely no replay value.

Its not its fault it just suffers because its an Xbox adaptation.


"Complete waste!", If you want to throw away money, buy this game. The poor interface and hideous execution make this one of the worst games I've ever tried to play. As for the attempt at humor, forget it. The best thing about this game is the tolerable intro in the booklet that comes with it.

"Fantastic! A wonderful game! Nicely done!", I confess that I prefer playing games sitting around a table. It is a social thing for me. I was more than pleasantly surprised by the Bard's Tale. This is not a re-release of a classic game; it is an entirely new game that is extremely well done. I had to battle my teenage son for computer time to complete the quests. He played the game as well. From the witty banter to the nice game play, reasonable puzzles, and "snarky" hints, this game is a classic.

"You nasty little Bard you...", This game is really fun... my complaints were that it is pretty much linear in it's design without many choices in dialogue & exploration. The graphics were choppy on my system (but I have a better system now & haven't tried it on this one yet) The game is hilarious in parts. I can still hear those nasty little goblins? singing... In summary if you want a game that provides a good diversion for a short amount of time (about 20 hours) this one is worth the money. I would buy a used copy though... replay value is really non-existent.

Read this reviews before You buy...

"I have to agree with some of the other reviewers. . .", I picked this game up fairly cheap for the PC (I think I paid five bucks for it) because I had heard many good things about it. I loaded it up on my desktop computer (which is only about a year old and not that slow, after all, I had just put in a new video card) and started playing it. I loved the dialogue, the witty banter, and I was generally having a blast playing it until it started to slow waaayy down as I started moving through the game until the characters were moving so sluggishly and swinging their weapons so slowly, they all looked like they were in slow motion (like some of the other reviewers have said.) I gave up on it and took the game to my laptop, which is newer and has a faster processor. It started off at what seemed to be normal speed. The Bard was trotting across the screen and swinging his flail at a rapid pace. Then about chapter four, it started slowing down again, all the way to a point where I couldn't play it anymore. All the fun had been zapped out of it as it took a good hour to swing and chop at four wolves in the forest. Sadly, I abandoned it for the PC, even though I was having a lot of fun with it up until then. I don't understand why it has so many problems running on a PC. Everything was sluggish, like the characters were moving in molasses. I turned down all the game settings, but it didn't seem to help much. If I want to see the game all the way through, I guess I'll have to break down and get it for the Playstation.

"Game has features InXile hasn't marketed!!", The following is a letter I sent to programmers for "The Bard's Tale". I believe it adequately reflects my feelings for this game:


To the developers of "The Bard's Tale",

I wanted to write and extend my supreme compliments for the craftmanship and feature-set of this game. A few features in particular leave me breathless in wonderment and I felt it was necessary to draw them to your attention for future marketing of the game. For example, despite having spent over $3000 on my newest computer system which far exceeds the stated requirements of the game, the game still runs at a sometimes snailish pace. This has produced the happy benefit of being able to point to the game and justify a new computer upgrade to my wife. I can only surmise you had this goal in mind in obviously understating the recommended system configuration.

However, the benefits do not stop there. By turning the graphics settings to their lowest levels, I am able to play the game in slow motion in exactly those moments when the action may become too fast for me to follow adequately. This is especially dramatic in the cut-scenes, wherein the hero walks and moves in that slow, methodical pace usually seen in Matrix-like blockbuster movies. There is nothing quite like pressing the Attack button, taking a puff of my cigarette, and a swig of my beer before having to pick up the controller again once the hero's sword swing has completed. This makes for very leisurely game play and no one can ever accuse me again of wasting my time playing videogames. Indeed, since I started "The Bard's Tale", I have been able to compute my taxes, prepare meals, and even vacuum my office while waiting for a particularly long story scene to finish.

Turning the graphics to their highest setting unlocks what I call the "Screensaver Mode". The characters move so slowly as to be barely visible to the naked eye, yet keeping the screen in turtle-crawl movement for those hours and days I might be away from my machine.

In all, this has made for a refreshing change of pace from the other PC games I have played. In playing daily for the nearly six months I have owned the game, I have completely explored and spoken to every member of the very first town, with hints there are many more locations to come. This will result in literally years of gameplay! In speaking to others who own the game and have advanced much further, I estimate I will finish it sometime before my seven year old daughter reaches junior high school. Now that is getting my money's worth!

Good job, InXile! You have provided me with a game my children may very well have to complete for me someday. That truly is family entertainment!

Brian Ragle
bragle@gmail.com

"Promising Game- wrecked by implementation", I was an original Bard's Tale enthusiast, and really wanted to like this game. After I got over the fact this was almost NOTHING like the original game, I just looked at it as a new game. Unfortunately, this is basically a console gamer, as others have stated. Absolutely none of a PC's capabilities were used- every house, village and dungeon has to be loaded EVERY single time. The view cannot be changed, and none of the 'standard' PC mouse/cursor interface seems implemented at all. All in all, I was very disappointed. I periodically try and revisit it again, because I DO like the humor, but it's just too painful to play.

"Hahaha... Oh, man I got a box in the basement with your name on it...", The sky view isn't as effecient as some thing like a first person view, but it's easy to get used to and I don't think the game play would be as good with out it. There are very good qualities within the game, but it felt very repetitive and I just couldn't finish it. I think there's a good chance I'll play it again.

I would reccomend this game to any one who values classic RP gaming styles and raw humor. There's lots of both.

"Occasionally funny/entertaining, some flaws", The humor and the musical interactions within the game are first rate. It was almost like watching a play at times. The music was very entertaining. The twists in the game were entertaining and I played the game through to the end because I enjoyed it. I wanted to see what they'd do at the end.

But there were quite a few flaws. The alleged "non-linear" aspect of the game is highly misleading. There are very few choices to undertake at all. You have to do A, to get to B, to get to C, etc. At least you need to do that to succeed. While you certainly could visit certain limited places almost immediately, you'd get killed mucho pronto if you did.

With all the sparkly effects and in game rendering of cut-scenes, they would almost always slow to a crawl. While I'm sure the screaming cutting edge machines of the developers ran all those auras around the creatures nicely, my machine (which beats the recommended configuration) couldn't handle them, even with all video controls turned to the minimum.

And at a certain point, nothing can stand in your way. Even the Bosses were a pushover. No real strategy was involved, except some minor tweaking of your party. And the "less A, more I" was not that accurate. My party frequently did very stupid things, and didn't follow orders hardly at all.

Overall, it was entertaining and I'd recommend it, but only after it was patched to fix the framerate problems. It is relatively inexpensive, so would be worth the money if fixed.