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Devil Whiskey - The Bard's Tale Resurrected?
Tony Bybell writes "For the old school RPGamers, the 1980s Bard's Tale style of role playing is being unofficially resurrected as Bard's Legacy: Devil Whiskey. Check out the FAQ: a Linux port will be available immediately and they'll be releasing the code under an Open Source license after 50,000 copies of the full game have been sold." There's also a new downloadable demo available in both Windows and Linux flavors.
I checked this out last night. It's a good experience. The interface was entirely keyboard driven and brought a *ton* of memories back from Bard's Tale. The overworld graphics are just right for this kind of game; smoothly scrolling, high res, but still delivers that grid based feeling of navigating a town or dungeon. The monster and character art ranges from Ok to fantastic, but I'm happy to say it walks more on the "fantastic" side most of the time. (Go Socar Miles!)
My only complaints would be the stat rolling for character creation and audio. I would consistently roll high stats for my gnome characters, stats > 15 for nearly everything, while some of my other characters refused to gain stats higher than 15 or 16 (like my dwarf who was awarded the name "wimpy" for this little characteristic. On the other hand my Gnome could easily get a full load of stats at 15 or above on everything, and I rarely saw anything below 10 for the little guy. He put all my other characters in their places, so that was quite odd.
The audio was the second thing I noticed, while the music in the game is *beautiful* and fits the game and the mood quite nicely, some of the sound effects seem like they were taken right from a google search. They had very poor sampling rate and there was a noticeable level of white noise in the background when certain birds would chirp or crow in the distance.
Other than that, I recommend this to anyone who misses their Amiga or C64 and wishes RPGS today could throwback to the simpler times. Very good stuff.
According to the FAQ, the engine is the only thing they're planning on releasing. They're not planning on releasing the game data at all, currently. I quote:
This is not to say that the content, such as the original artwork, audio, movies, maps, cut scenes, etc. will be available for free, but anyone who wants a copy of the source code will be able to get it.
Still, very nice of them, even if it never actually happens. I'll probably buy a copy.
Take a look at the difference in graphics between the two. You may remember the original BT's as having good graphics (and they were, at the time), but memory can do funny things. That's probably a big reason for the increased memory requirements. Not to mention that it requires a modern OS and windowing system to run within.
As for processor requirements, it does use OpenGL for the graphics engine... I'm fairly certain that the engine could be optimized to use less CPU, and it probably doesn't even peg a P3, but who doesn't have P3-or-better processing power nowadays?
Feel free to try it on a lesser system and let the team know that the requirements are high!
Disclaimer: I am part of the Devil Whiskey team, but these comments are personal and should not be construed as official Shifting Suns comments.
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