The Bard's Tale IV - PC Review

Starting off with a bit of an admission, the most of this series that I’ve ever played was a whole ten minutes of the first back on the PS2 before my optical drive started to give out and even the briefest puff of wind would stop it from reading a disk. So a little to my surprise, there were two sequels before the now third that I didn’t even know about! So diving into the forth title of the series with very little to compare it to in the sense of its predecessors, The Bard’s Tale IV was awesome and I’m really going to go have to go back and sit through the first three.

Starting off like basically any good tale, in a pub, it’s not long before things go sideways in said pub as the local powers that be declare that everyone who doesn’t believe in what they believe in is wrong. You would think by this point in time that they would learn better as what else is there than a hero in their midsts just waiting to take them down! Well that may be a bit of a bold statement as you are totally a level one whatever you decide to pick as you escape to the undercity in order to run away from the witch hunt. But you’ll be back…

Honestly before winding up in my lap, as I played this generally on my laptop, heh… get it? Sorry… moving on… I didn’t know much about The Bard’s Tale IV other than it was an RPG. Moving around and being able to talk to people or interacting with objects in first person, there’s a duality to the system. While moving around everything pretty much runs in real time. NPCs will move about their daily lives, guards will make their patrols, and evenies who are all represented on screen while you move through the environments will attack you on sight unless you attack them first which moves the real time into turned based scenarios.

The environments are very well detailed and a pleasure to move through. The textures of the buildings on the ground just looks good. There are not many buildings that you can really go into but once you get into the “sketchier” locations which essentially acts as dungeons, things get good as you start to learn new abilities either of your own or from allies that join up with you. Adding in some bardic music just seals the deal as once you’ve launched into battle? The tempo speeds up and it becomes time to either sink or swim.

Like the exploration, getting into fights is not only fun, but different than the norm. Starting off with only three “action points”, you are the one to decide what your party does. Does the Bard take all three of the actions? Do they take two and leave one to the fighter? One to the Rogue? It’ll honestly depend on what is needed as the enemy plays their turns out the same.

It was a bit weird to get settled into at first, but once I did, the combat was a lot of fun. Sure you only start off with three points but some of your actions are free to use. Drinking booze as a Bard in order to get your spell on, I would often break out a tune that would cause a decent amount of fire damage to anyone that decided to hit me or any adjacent ally physically. So that’s two actions for the price of one. After that there are a few other abilities that can be used but where things can be a bit tricky is that abilities, and even standard attacks have cooldowns meaning that you can’t just use them every turn. You can make attack patterns based off of the cooldowns, but can’t just spam the exact same move turn after turn which is why I was grateful to have party members.

The other factor to the turned based approach is that you are also on a grid with your enemies. You can move your characters left or right, forward or backwards and each of these moves cost one action AND can only be done once a turn, so honestly? Make sure that you remember to put your ranged units in the back row BEFORE the battle starts as your starting positions are defined in the menus, NOT where they ended up last.

From that point it somewhat becomes a rinse and repeat of checking out how badly your characters were hurt during the battle and then validating if it’s worth going back to a save point or using some of the healing items on hand. Even these though can become a bit of a decision later down the line as the save points / check points that you respawn at during a party wipe can be consumed for experience. If you do this, the point stops being usable as you “ate” it for experience but as you open up new paths some of these points become redundant so why not?

If there’s anything really negative to say about The Bard’s Tale IV it would be that it’s bloated. Load times can often be lengthy enough even on performance machines with more RAM and CPU power than they know what to do with. Further to that, the main reason that I spent more time on my laptop than I did on my desktop is that it ran much better on an NVidia based machine (laptop runs a GTX 1060) than it did on an AMD (Desktop runs an RX 480). Once loaded everything runs smoothly but it’s getting there sometimes and running on a laptop without being plugged in is not recommended as not only was my battery dead in no time flat but the screen tearing was enough to give a headache.

Overall The Bard’s Tale IV is a great title. Well drawn environments, dialog and an awesome accompaniment of bardic music make it worth playing for long stints at a time. Adding in elements such as a customizable leveling up system in order to style your characters just right, and the rest of the adventure is simply waiting for you to explore it the way you want to.

Game Information

Platform:
PC
Developer(s):
inXile Entertainment
Publisher(s):
inXile Entertainment
Genre(s):
RPG
Mode(s):
Single Player
Other Platform(s):
N/A

Source:
Provided by Publisher

Article by Pierre-Yves

Read More

Wasteland 2 - Switch Review

Wasteland 2 has come a long way since its original release back in 2014 on the PC and 2015 onto both the Xbox and PlayStation platforms. This interesting take on a squad based RPG through a wasteland starts off with a funeral in which you are tasked with finding communication repeaters of a fellow fallen ranger, the law enforcement of the wastelands. Setting out with your newly created squad, you'd better be a quick learner as this wasteland is out for both your water and your blood.

After many, many hours, I'm at an impasse with Wasteland 2. On one hand it's a brilliantly designed and presented title. On the other? I just can't seem to get into it and a lot of the little issues that have come out to me mechanically have stopped me from enjoying what could have been a contender to hold the same podium as others in its genre that I absolutely love.

Starting off, you'll be able to either take the default party that the developers deemed worthy for the upcoming adventure or start from absolute scratch and design them yourself. The default party? It felt rather solid and I honestly only tweaked a few cosmetic elements to make it more of my own since I liked the versatility that it was promising with all aspects covered from your snipers to your Close Quarter Combat specialists.

Once out into the field you can choose which of your party of four will be the one to start off conversations. What I really appreciated is that even if you throw your most charismatic character forward, the others can chime in for snarky comments if you decide to go their route instead of being diplomatic. Each of these options distinctly lets you know who's going to be the one saying the words that could lead a peaceful encounter into a violent one or the other way around.

When things turn violent is about where I'm also uncertain about Wasteland 2 as there are various elements that make up the combat that I just couldn't seem to get behind. Combat is both Turned and Action Point (AP) based. Whenever it becomes one of your characters or enemy's turns, they can either move or attack within the limit of points that they currently have access to. This style has been around for a long time with my earliest being the original Fallout back when it was still owned by Interplay and worked on by Black Isles. It's not here that I have issues as the basics of battle are as solid as they could be.

Where my issues lie is when it becomes your character's turn. You can either move around the map in which varying distances cost varying AP. You can pull the trigger on your weapons if your enemy is in range in which a pistol requires less AP than a Sniper Rifle for example. Or you can do a combination of both or save up for the next turn. It's up to what makes the most strategic sense.

The above sounds solid doesn't it? Where my issues come into play is that you have to move your cursor around in order to find out exactly how far you can move and how much it'll cost. There are no outlines detailing in an increment of two for example which would give quick visual queues that would save on time. Another issue is that the range of weapons felt off. The closer you were to an enemy the chance you had to hit them. With a weapon such as a shotgun? Having to step back as far as your sniper to maybe get a 46% chance at hitting something? I lost a lot of ammo and most fights went to my CQC specialist because he was the only one that could hit something. It made little to no sense to me as even pistols needed to be closer ranged than a shotgun in order to hit something even remotely close to 50%.

On this note though, the battlefields and the environments that you will be facing off in are brilliant. Out in the wastelands there's sand with nothing to use for cover, broken down houses to use for cover from both frontal and aerial attacks. Add in some crates that can be destroyed into the mix and there are plenty of options for both you and those wise enough to use them. Monsters like bugs will just spit and fly at you so using cover is only as useful as it can be when acid is being launched vertically in an arc towards your party.

Once you've hopefully survived an encounter and patched up your squad, you'll be gaining experience in order to level up to learn new abilities or improve on the ones that you already have. It's a solid system that works on points gained once you've leveled up. Do you want someone else to be able to heal up your party? Someone to pick locks because you oops starting off without one? What about improving upon their firearms accuracy? It's there and you'll want to pass through all of the options because if you simply buy new abilities without really thinking about it? Your character may not end up useless, but just somewhat “ok” as they can't support the rest of the squad.

There is one thing that I have to mention and that is that Wasteland 2 is way too hard to play in a handheld mode as the text is damned tiny. No scaling has been done which means that if you really want to sit down to and enjoy, you'll need your Switch in its cradle and a controller in hand with a large enough screen which made me grateful for the projector and the 103” it projects onto. While there is some voice acting, there isn't enough to get by without having to read and even then that wouldn't even include the menus and the character customizations that are left to go through.

Porting titles to consoles is either a super hit, or a miss. To me, with the way that the controls felt while trying to navigate my menus, I constantly felt like I could have gone for a keyboard and a mouse because the controllers just were not doing it for me. Divinity Original Sin, Pillars of Eternity, even Diablo 3 and a few others have spent time crafting the transition and kept in mind that a controller only has so many buttons to pull off what one on a PC would have. Menus felt clunky and navigating through, especially my inventory, often had be doing things that I never even meant to do. Add in that the combat would often freeze on me having to restart an entire encounter sometimes five or ten minutes down the line? Wasteland 2 is something that I would need to re-visit on my PC.

Overall, at least on the Switch, I could not get into Wasteland 2. Clunky controls combined with performance issues kept holding me back from even getting pasts the oddness that ranged combat could often have. I hope to revisit this soon upon a PC, but in the meantime, I'm feeling disappointed because it has been a title that I've been looking forward to for a long while and after reading Nick and especially Robert's reviews, I had expected to be blown away.

Game Information

Platform:
Nintendo Switch
Developer(s):
inXile Entertainment
Publisher(s):
inXile Entertainment
Genre(s):
RPG
Mode(s):
Single Player
Other Platform(s):
Sony PlayStation 4
Microsoft Xbox One
PC

Source:
Provided by Publisher

Article by Pierre-Yves

Read More

Torment: Tides of Numenera - PC Review

After over a decade, the spiritual successor to Planescape Torment took itself to Kickstarter and destroyed its original asking amount in almost no time. Paying tribute to both its predecessor and to the fans of it, Torment: Tides of Numenera is the perfect follow-up the cult classic RPG.

Starting off perfectly with a face planted nose dive from the atmosphere, The Last Castoff has an existential conversation with the fragments of their mind. What are they? Who are they? The what is easy. The Last Castoff is the latest being to be thrown to the wind as the one known as the Changing God discarded that body as they were done with it. The who? That's entirely up to you.

Like Planescape Torment before it, Torment: Tides of Numenera is all about how "you" want to go about the journey. The world itself knows your face. Some people will hate you, others will love you while the rest simply won't care about you. How you go about it and who you go about it with are all decisions that are entirely in your hands. Solo or with company to talk to, this journey through an incredible realm can be as pleasant or as rough and intimidating as you make it with how you decide to approach each situation that you find yourself in.

No two people will have the same adventures as they take on the role of The Last Castoff. At least not right away unless they catalogue their choices of course and the other follows suit. After the aforementioned face planting, you find yourself as either a Male or Female inside your own mind seeing reflections of yourself and remembering memories that are not quite yours. These start to set up the interesting journey that is about to take place but it isn't until you decide for yourself if you will be what amounts to a Warrior, a Rogue, or a Wizard. These are rough categories but capture the basic essence of the Glaive / Jack / Nano which are the "classes" that the Last Castoff can become.

What makes the experience unique is that just because you chose a path in which to level your character, it doesn't mean that you can't go about doing something completely outside of those parameters. Torment is not restrictive. You want to be a glaive and end up with a silver tongue to get out of everything without having to lift a finger? Go for it. You want to be a Glaive that solves everything with the tip of a weapon? That's ok too. The level of freedom in which you can experience makes the original path you choose nothing more than a basic template. Sure some paths will make getting other abilities harder but if that's what you want? Then go for it.

Following the path of the Nano I was able to go through Numenera as I wanted. I talked my way through EVERYTHING. Why? Because I could as much as because the amount of dialog that I got to read was incredible. Choosing an ability to hear surface thoughts increased what could be said from the Last Castoff's point of view making conversations that much more enjoyable and intriguing which brings me to the next point. Just because you've said something once or inspected something once, doesn't mean that your second or third time will be the same making for some rather interesting situations.

With all the situations that you can find yourself in as the Last Castoff are amazing. Looking at something you'll get a description. Looking at it again could lead to an even further inspection. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't. You'll never actually know until you do it and even at that, you would have to be persistent enough to even try those multiple times. Sometimes you'll need to have talked to someone else in order to see something more because you'll know what you're looking for. The amount of detail that was put it was stunning at times making me realize just how much I've missed its predecessor.

While exploring the world there are four real ways of going about it. The first is simply to walk around and literally poke at everything you come across. Inspect rubble, examine an artifact, talk to people or simply look at how things move before making a further decision. From this initial starting point three other major factors can come into play. Might, Speed and Intellect can then be used to further your agenda from lifting rubble, running up a cliff face, taking an item from a fast moving mechanism or sweet talking someone into doing something for less or just doing it in the first place.

Each one of these actions take "Effort" which come from using points in the stat pool that a specific character has. This system was brilliant as instead of simply having arbitrary numbers, your specific stat point is your pool. Have a score of ten or fifteen Intellect? Then you've got that many points to play with which blends into the rest of the RPG mechanics. Starting off with a smaller amount of points, these can be increased either by leveling up your characters or by exploring the world and receiving rewards. In either case these give more points in order to spend as Effort however things are never quite just that easy.

On top of having points for Effort, characters can also increase their available points and obtain what are known as Edges. Gaining extra Effort denotes how many Effort points can be used for the specific stat challenge that you've selected. The more points that you put in then the obvious more points that you can use in order to try to get your way. Because running out of points is easy as these are both used for exploration and combat and only come back when you rest, Edges can also be gained which automatically give the character a free Effort point in what they are trying to do.

Automatically being given a point makes both tasks and combat easier. Need to convince someone but you're out of Intellect points? Having a few Edge points in your Intellect will make your base percentage that much higher as well as let's you try. There's a balance to strike between gaining more Effort and Edges. If you have enough Edge points for example, you've basically covered the stat input on your own leaving the character unable to use that particular pool of points because it's already fully loaded. Honestly this is a good thing because it means that you both don't need to worry about it and it means that they are already going to perform to the best of their abilities.

There's a catch to this system that manages to both balance everything out and make you have to go out of your way to complete a ton of quests in order to level up. Starting off this didn't seem to be such a big deal but it won't take long for you to realize that you're going to need a lot of experience in order to keep raising these two features as they can only be raised through leveling up "once per tier".

Setting a limit on these felt a bit restrictive but it makes sense as without it, you personally would be suffering later on with the rest of the skills, abilities, and pools to draw from. Characters when leveling up simply can choose from one of the following options:

But each one of these can only be chosen once per "tier".

Once they've all be chosen then your character goes up a tier and they all re-become accessible as well as a few bonuses for having reached that point. Torment allows you to play as you see fit as long as you play within these limits. Once a few levels have passed and the systems become familiar then it's smooth enough sailing as you can plan out your leveling up. In my first ten hours? Most of that was all role playing experience with maybe three or four battles to show for it. Five if you count the tutorial. Two of those three were quite unintentional and there really was no talking my way out of it. "Can't leave any witnesses" would be their famous last words.

Combat is a blend of old school Dungeons and Dragons meets the systems of Tides of Numenera. Once per turn a character can both move and act. Movement allows for the character to move within their allowed radius or use movement skills while acting allows for hitting your enemies or using combat or healing abilities. Initiative to decide turn order is calculated at the beginning of battle and from there the rest of the experience is smooth. Some enemies can seem fairly overpowered but that can either be because you messed with the wrong people or you simply weren't equipped for the situation. Regardless, there are always your Effort points and your Edges that come into play.

Effort Points and Edges work the same in combat as they do in exploration. If you want to increase your chance to hit an enemy you can add addional Might or Speed points in order to do so. Some characters with their Effort Points and their Edges will simply be monsters on the field of battle while others you'll almost need to deplete their Stat pools to hit something. Finding a good balance with your party setup will be important because every now and then, you will need to unleash hell on an enemy. It doesn't happen often if you decide to Silver Tongue it, but it will, and because of that? You should be prepared!

I have to praise the developers on more than just the experience that they've created. I also have to praise them on how they designed the systems that allow the player to explore this realm of vast possibilities. Playing with a Keyboard and a Mouse in front of a computer screen is just as pleasant as playing with a controller in front of a big screen. Everything feels natural and smooth with one as it does with the other. Furthermore, options have been made for the size of the text from smaller options to even larger ones allowing for the player themselves to select what they deem is appropriate instead of an arbitrary tiny font that needs a telescope to read.

Torment: Tides of Numenera is fantastic. Fans of the original Torment as well as new players alike should have no issues finding themselves gleefully lost within this realm of amazing possibilities and people. With hours easily spent exploring the first areas, getting to know the people and taking on requests while going about your quest and this world slowly reveals its secrets in which seemingly unrelated events may be more intertwined than you first thought.

Game Information

Platform:
PC
Developer(s):
inXile Entertainment
Publisher(s):
Techland Publishing
Genre(s):
RPG
Mode(s):
Single Player
Other Platform(s):
Sony PlayStation 4
Microsoft Xbox One

Source:
Provided by Publisher

Article by Pierre-Yves

Read More

The Bard's Tale - Retro Reflections

I expected the Bard’s Tale to be an original, fun to play action role playing game but it turned out to be a mediocre Dark Alliance. You control a character who chases women and gold and relies on his musical prowess to survive in battle. How? By summoning creatures who serve him as allies until they die, so he must summon them again or replace them.

Read More

Wasteland 2: Director's Cut - PS4 Review

The last couple of years has proven that the isometric RPG is not only far from a relic of the past, but alive and well. However, it usually shows up on PC, as Wasteland 2 originally did last year. Those who enjoy the genre should rejoice then, as Wasteland 2: Director's Cut faithfully brings the genre to consoles and does so in fantastic fashion.

Read More

Wasteland 2: Director's Cut coming to consoles Oct 13th

Now this is very interesting news indeed. Especially given how fond we were of Wasteland 2 when we reviewed it upon release.

Read More

The Bard's Tale IV coming to Kickstarter on June 2nd

The Bard's Tale has quite the legacy, so to hear that the franchise has a future installment planned is pretty great news.

Read More

Wasteland 2 Game of the Year Edition - a free upgrade

What's better than Wasteland 2? Not much according to Robert in his review. However, a Game of the Year Edition might just be one of the few answers to that question. Making it free for existing users? That seems like an even better answer.

Read More

Wasteland 2 - PC Review

While I was not old enough to experience Wasteland when it first released, a few years later I stumbled on it and was blown away. Here was a fantastic title that blended roleplaying, story telling, addictive game, and quality graphics (for the time) in one amazing package. Since then we have been fervently awaiting a sequel, having to sate our appetites on titles like Fallout and the Jagged Alliance games was just not enough. It is not that Fallout Tactics or others in the Fallout line were not great games; they were, they just were not Wasteland. Then the good folks over at inXile Entertainment got it into their minds to start up a crowdfunding campaign to see if the fans wanted another Wasteland title.

Needless to say, gamers were throwing wallets and large stacks of bills at their monitors in an attempt to get the money over to inXile. With resounding success in the Kickstarter campaign, inXile began development on the sequel to Wasteland and in a break away from the norm of crowdfunded projects, actually released Wasteland 2 (an unfortunate truth of crowdfunding is that more often than not, development is stalled and in some cases, titles are never released). When I previewed Wasteland 2 I could not help but gush about how great the title was; in truth the preview, while months prior to the actual release of Wasteland 2, was one of the most complete Early Access builds I have ever gotten my hands on. It was so far along that I could have given the game a score then, but there were still things to work on as inXile cleaned up bugs, added more audio, and fleshed out more quests and gameplay options. When Wasteland 2 was fully released I dove into the game, hoping to find that the already excellent game had gotten better. This is what I found.

I had mentioned previously that character creation models looked a little sub-par and fortunately the good folks at inXile not only improved the models and the character images, but added more options to the whole setup; you have more heads and outfits to choose from now and it definitely helps in creating a sense of individuality. During the creation process you have the option to use one of a handful of premade parties or you can customize the party from the ground up. While the pre-defined parties are good, I created my own party from scratch and it consisted of one charismatic wilderness man specializing in rifles, an atypical medic, a close-range "mechanic" specializing in melee and shotguns and the fourth a pistol-whipping thief-like character.

Fortunately with the new skins/faces/ hairstyles there are more than enough options to go through and make sure your little avatars look different enough that you will not be getting confused (something that periodically happened to me throughout the Preview). Once you roll your characters and set their stats its on to the game which aims to take you through a rollercoaster ride of a story (and succeeds) and has some of the best character banter found outside of Dragon Age: Origins. Fans of the Jagged Alliance series and Fallout Tactics will be right at home with the near steampunk-y style and the western flair which begins with the UI and carries on into the world design and level aesthetics; even the weapons feel old, used, and pieced-together, a feel that fits very well with the post-apocalyptic setting of Wasteland 2.

Gameplay is a mix between run-of-the-mill strategy, similar to the X-COM: Enemy Within reboot, mixed with some neat new (well, returning) mechanics. For one when you go to select your action, say an aimed shot, depending on where you place the cursor (head, arms/legs, body, etc.) hit percentages will change; my "main" character, the one that specializes in sniper rifles, could reliably one-shot with an aimed shot to the noggin as long as they were some distance away. If a target was right next to you, there was no way to attack the target with the sniper rifle so switching to a secondary weapon (in this case, pistol) was required. This restriction was a welcome addition to the strategy genre, as it forces you to think tactically rather than simply running-and-gunning.

I did find that one of my favorite strategies was something akin to a skirmish line that you would have found in the musket-era; I would have my sniper and my medic (who used assault rifles) kneeling down and they consisted of the "front line" where the close-range support (the 'mechanic' and 'thief') would stand in the back on overwatch, which has them firing at enemies as they come into their firing arcs. I would use the long-range characters to kite the enemy into the firing zones that the close range units had and it would decimate them. The biggest issues were the super fast moving units (like dogs ... dogs were the bane of my existence) and those baddies that were toting RPG's and grenades; I had to reload dozens of times due to well-placed 'nades and rocket shots, while the formation I used was very successful, it was not without its drawbacks.

I think that part of the reason that Wasteland 2, in my mind, is one of the best strategy games available (and trust me, I loved the recent X-COM reboots, going as far as purchasing it, for full price, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and the PC) is that there is no fail-safe, perfect, nor impregnable playstyle. Maintaining overlapping lines of fire, covering your teammates' backs, and protecting your medic at all costs should be your priorities throughout the entirety of your campaign as haphazardly placing units, or running them forward with no adequate coverage will spell disaster. Having one unit go down out in the open, then sending your medic out to help them can and will most definitely end badly so taking care of your assets is extremely important; running-and-gunning is just not something you want to try to do in Wasteland 2 as it will chew you up and spit you out.

On top of amazing gameplay, Wasteland 2 sucks players in and does not let them go with some excellent voice acting, a stellar soundtrack and some truly great ambient audio has Wasteland 2 being one of the best pieces of immersive media that I have seen in a good long while. From the static-y crackle that plagues the radio waves to the lone, loud crack of a sniper rifle, the audio grabs hold of you and keeps you slogging through this desolate wasteland. Explosions sound great, whether they are coming out of the built in laptop speakers, my SteelSeries Siberia Elite Anniversary Edition, or the Kingston HyperX Cloud headsets; the range of audio is spectacular and I can only hope that inXile Entertainment's next title, Torment: Tides of Numenera will have audio of the same caliber and if it does, expect Torment to be a title that is not only worthy of its successor, but just like Wasteland 2, be better than.

Rarely will you find a sequel that is better than an original, especially when that original is Wasteland, a game that defined not just one generation, but every generation since it was released. Wasteland 2 is hands down, better than the pivotal original title. Gorgeous landscapes, amazing acting, some of the best storytelling in the business, all slapped on top of decades of nostalgia while mixed with some new features, Wasteland 2 is as every bit as good as the 'greats' of the roleplaying genre. I would not hesitate a single moment to place Wasteland 2 next to Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn, Mass Effect, or Final Fantasy VI when it comes to creating a "top RPGs of all time" list. The long wait for Wasteland's sequel was worth it and Wasteland 2 faithfully carries on the mantle of excellence that was set in place two and a half decades prior. This is, without a doubt, a game that every gamer must have in their library.

Review by Robert

Read More

Wasteland 2 - PC Preview

Wasteland 2 is the product of a massively successful Kickstarter campaign, where inXile Entertainment asked for $900,000 and the fans of the original Wasteland game (as well as other gaming fans, all 70,000+ of them) actually crowd-funded $2,933,252! Returning you to the Citadel from the original, Wasteland 2 takes place in the same post-apocalyptic world that Wasteland previously enjoyed. Wasteland 2 is a direct sequel to the first ever post-apocalyptic tactical turn-based computer RPG game, Wasteland (which was the primary inspiration behind the much-loved Fallout series). What made the original game so unique was the ability to control and command individual party members for tactical purposes as well as the first ever appearance of the now-standard moral choices.

Read More

The Bard's Tale - iPhone Review

I am not one to shy away from an RPG game, and The Bard's Tale has been around for a long time. Despite that, I never got around to playing it until somewhat recently when it was a freebie game for iOS. The humor throughout was probably the primary selling point in this classic but still entertaining title.

Read More