Recent reviews by Mecandes

Quite a cool and well-designed idle game. Love all the auto features! (1100+ achievements??)

This is great! Just the kind of thing I look for in an idle game. Kudos to the developer!

Simple game, great in the background or while watching shows.

The spirit of Ultima returns.

Cool idle game to run in a window in the background while working. Gets addictive if you decide to go after unlocking new characters and progressing further and deeper.

Definitely worth checking out if you're a fan of Ghosts 'n Goblins and electronic music; there's a bit of a Double Dragon vibe in here too.

Fun free puzzle game; quite like Bejewelled (match-three mechanic) mixed with Castle Crashers (art style and unit upgrade system). Making tiles spawns units into battle; as the game grows in difficulty, there's some strategy regarding which units to take and which to leave behind.

As a hardcore fan of the original games and webmaster of The Bard's Tale Compendium site since 1999, I am happy to recommend this Remastered edition to any oldschool fans of the series. They've nicely updated the Amiga/Atari ST version of the graphics/music (although I personally would have liked to see the C64/Apple versions, possibly as an option one could toggle, that's a minor gripe), and made improvements, like adding snowfall to Skara Brae and improving the look of the Wilderness (Thief of Fate has not been released yet as of the time of this writing). They've added some new visible spell effects in the dungeons and combat, some new items, and made the thief class more useful by bringing the Thief of Fate abilities into the earlier games. Also, all bard songs from all of the games are available throughout the trilogy now.

The original games were at times punishingly hard; here they have made them a fair bit easier now by adding an in-game auto-mapping system and the ability to save anywhere. (And it's also easier because, in the pre-internet days, it was necessary to create maps on graph paper; now, they are widely available on the Internet.) I appreciated the reduced difficulty for the Remaster as I've already beat the games and I don't have as much time as I did as a teenager — however, I'm happy to say they also have a "Legacy Mode" that sticks closer to the original difficulty for those who desire it.

Lastly, I'll note that the development team is actively involved in Steam discussions about issues and working to resolve them when they arise, which is always nice to see.

I'm an old-school fan site webmaster for this series, and I've been playing The Bard's Tale IV for almost 7 hours so far... I'm really enjoying it! It's a bit more like some RPGs that came after The Bard's Tale, like Eye of the Beholder and Lands of Lore, but I think that's a _good_ thing. The turn-based combat system seems original, and about the best I can imagine to try to recreate the original games' combat in a modern format.

A couple of things I'm really fond of right off the bat: 1: the music! I love celtic music, and this is the real authentic deal — I would buy this on a CD even if I never knew it was a BT soundtrack! 2: I'm also pleased so far by how they have incorporated references to the original games... heck, almost right off the bat they have you navigating the original map of post-Tarjan Skara Brae even... lots of names and weapon names used that a new player wouldn't notice, but we who played the original recognize. It's far more faithful than I thought it would be... while still incorporating the whole new Scottish mythology that Brian Fargo picked up while touring Scotland to develop the 2004 Bard's Tale console game (voiced by Cary Elwes). I'm really impressed so far, and I'm a hardcore fan of the originals.

I enjoyed this beautiful platformer about an Inuk girl and her fox. The Inuit tale and narrator set the stage for the action and enhance the mood... though the platforming itself is nothing mindblowing and somewhat linear, it was an enjoyable few hours.