See Also: Recycle T-Shirt

So I was having some trouble sleeping the last part of last week. On thursday night I was half-conscious out on the couch at about 3am when I got this crazy idea. For some reason, I was thinking about this old video game I used to play on the Apple IIgs we used to have when I was about 10. It was called the The Bard's Tale II. It was basically a step up (technologically speaking) from a text-based adventure game and it was the first rpg (computer or otherwise) I ever played. I remember having uber high-level characters, but I never even passed the first dungeon. Wanting something to do with my insomnia, I thought "i wonder if there's some way I can play that again..."

I did some quick googling and I found a DOS version of the game. The entire game was one file that was about 500k. Yeah. 500K. It took about 3 seconds to download. I was able to get it to run on my xp laptop, but it was only in 16 colors. The version I remembered from our old computer was a much-prettier 256 colors. Also, the controls and interface were a little different.

Thinking that if I'm going to go for nostalgia here I might as well do it right, I decided I'd try to get as close to what i had before as possible. It took a while, but I dug up an Apple IIgs emulator for OSX and the IIgs version of the game - which was *exactly* what I used to play. It took me a couple more hours to get it to work, but i was successful. So now I have the ghost of our old computer running in a window on my computer here, playing a game that was put out 20 years ago.

So this game has been lots of fun to play - both because it brings back some memories and because it really is a fun game. Having been playing Twilight Princess recently (All the bugs collected!!), I've been remembering the amazing difference between how games used to be put together vs how they are now - and not just in terms of flashiness.

Also, I know why i never completed the first dungeon when I was a kid. OH. MY. We've been so spoiled by games like Zelda where a) there's a map you can find in the game and b) where said maps also make some kind of sense. I have 4 pages of graph-paper maps drawn out for the starter dungeon. And I haven't completed it yet. The dungeons in this game are basically multi-level 22x22 mazes full of random walls, doors, tons of monsters and a handful of objectives, few of which were explicitly stated at the outset. This also makes getting in and out of the dungeons difficult - since there's no spiffy 'warp me out' item/spell (well, there is an uber high-level spell that teleports you to The Guild, but you lose all your gold when you do and I can't get it for several levels anyway). I've resorted to consulting a walkthrough already - because i've hit quite a few literal and figurative dead-ends. I'm trying to do it as little as possible though. It doesn't matter much anyway, since I've only found one walkthrough duplicated on about 12 different sites - and it seems to be...wrong...with respect to locations in the dungeons. Perhaps it was for a different version of the game and the mazes for this version are slightly different.

So yeah, I have a Wii and several modern-ish computers, and the game I've been playing lately came on one 3.5 floppy and required 200k of ram to play.

~PS

Update: I have finally completed the started dungeon! It was 4 maze levels long. The guy at the end was pretty easy to beat though. I think it only took me 8 hours. Good grief. ~PS

YIPES!! That's a heck of a dungeon!