dtgreene: So, would Bard's Tale 3 belong on my list if I made one?
DoomSooth: I think Bard's Tale II is way better. Had a lot of fun leveling my destiny knight. He's 144. If only it had geomancers and chronomancers...
I like the bard songs a lot more, too. Forgot to mention I'm talking about the C=64 versions.
If you're looking at the DOS verison, then BT2 is better, as it isn't as buggy. (There are still bugs, like light disappearing when you stop singling Spellsong.)
In the Apple 2 version of Bard's Tale 3, I managed to get an Archmage past level 200 with the help of an exploit I found by accident (summoning a monster then going to the Review Board can get you XP awards you've already obtained). In the DOS version, you can reach levels this high in BT3 by purposefully level draining a BT2 Archmage, having the level drain healed by a temple, leveling up at the Review Board, and repeating; past level 13 that's 4 million XP (=10 BT3 levels) each time. Then transfer the character to BT3. (Note that the power of scaling spells (what few there are) stops increasing after level 255.)
In the remastered trilogy, it's possible to hack a character into a Geomancer or Chronomancer in the earlier games. Just be aware that the games weren't balanced with them in mind. (If you want things to get really silly, hack the Kael's Overture song into a BT1 bard; no enemy will be able to survive their singing (150-600 damage in a game where enemy HP originally had to fit in one byte will do that).
By the way, bard songs are different between different versions. In the C64 version of BT1, for example, it appears that one of the bard songs is Russian Sailor's Dance, but I couldn't tell which one from the video I saw.
Kelefane: I see no Dungeon Master love.
That's because I originally played the Kid's Dungeon on the Apple 2GS, and these days I'm most likely to play CSBWin (of all the clones, it seems to be the one that's most faithful mechanically).
Good game, and quite unique, but not for beginners.
I haven't played the DOS version; I've only played the PSX version (Classic mode) and the Apple 2 version, but not the DOS version.
In the Apple 2 version, I ran into a strange glitch that corrupted the stats of my Greater Demons:
* Their breath attack would do 0 damage. (Greater Demons don't normally get a breath attack.)
* They would die in one attack, even if the attack missed. (What? Sounds like they have 0 HP.)
* If one called for help, the new one would apparently have a lot of HP. If that new one breathed, the breath would kill the enemies outright (and the game unfortunately doesn't say how much damage the breath does in any case, but it could easily be a 5 digit number).
