The Bard's Tale

The Bard's Tale was my first ever 'real' video game. By Jesus it was unforgiving though. You rolled a party of level one characters, and had to go bashing into houses to find monsters. You had to hope that you only met easy level one monsters that you could kill and gain experience because there were a lot of higher monsters in those houses that would kill you outright, forcing to reload a save and try again. And again, and again.

Then to level up, they didn't tell you where the level up place was! You had to methodically click into every freaking house in the city until you found it!

Halfway through the game my Bard character (El Cid) lost all of his stats, and I had to build him up again. I didn't know about 'bugs' back then so I thought it was just a really stupid feature.

You could only save in the adventurer guild in the city. Some of the dungeons were several levels deep, but you had to trek all the way back to save. I think I have some of the routes between stairs in the sewers still ingrained in my muscle memory.

Repeating dungeons. They were on a 30x30 grid, but would open exits on the edges that just teleported you to the opposite edge. I would walk for minutes in one direction only to come back to a marking I had seen before. NO hints that this was happening.

Difficulty spikes out the wazoo.

When you got in a fight, each party member would try and hit each monster, and vice versa. Some groups had 396 monsters in them (4x99). Times 6 of your group = 2,376 text entries that have to scroll past to finish one round of fighting. I would get up and walk away while it was doing it.

But I persevered and I finally beat the whole game, rolling with my two archmages (Merlin and Gandalf), my monk (Friar Tuck) and Ranger (Robin Hood).

Good times.