Bard’s Tale! Slortar, weren’t there 3 of them? 6 characters, a special creature slot, and recharging in the sun…
The old C-128…
Sword of the samurai. Great game. I still have it infact, only it will no longer run on my computer. It’s tragic and I am displeased greatly by this turn of events. The company that made it went out of business I think, it’s either that or they are to rude to return my telephone calls.
Yup, three Bard’s Tales.
1: Tales of the Unknown, 2: Destiny Knight, and 3: Thief of Fate. There was also a Bard’s Tale Construction Set- basically, the tools that Interplay used to design the games, so you could design your own dungeons.
Spell points recharging in the sun, six characters, and a special creature slot that you could fill with a Stone Elemental in the first game by pressing ‘z’. Those stone elementals saved many a newbie party of mine…
If you want to play classic games and not have to worry about getting Mo’Slo to work properly on a 1 Ghz processor, you can find cheap systems at places such as Computer Renaissance and other second-hand-computer stores for very resaonable prices ($50 for a complete system, et cetera). I keep a 386 and a 90Mhz pentium on hand just for old games.
Star Raiders always gets the props from me, but this time I also want to draw attention to Epyx’s [Crush, Crumble, and Chomp!
For those who haven’t heard of it, it’s essentially a movie monster simulation. You build a monster “inspired by” Godzilla, The Blob, Them!, or what-have-you, then go rampaging through New York, San Francisco, Washington DC, or Tokyo. You have different mission objectives, but most of them focus on trying to stay alive as long as possible, eating humans while the National Guard and assorted Mad Scientists do you in. And the build-your-own-monster feature just makes it even more terrific.
Never understood why nobody’s remade the game for today’s computers, really. The upgraded sound and graphics would be trivially easy in this day and age…
The first title was, in fact Tales of the Unknown Volume 1: The Bard’s Tale.
The original plan was for the other titles in the series to be given names like Tales of the Unknown Volume 2: The Archmages Tale
There is a nice shot of the original box, which was about the size of a 45 rpm book and record set, at http://www.ggc.u-net.com/t41.htm. Strangely enough, the page’s header also has the title inverted, even though the picture below it clearly shows the correct title.
Cripes, the nostalgia of this stuff! I remember playing Radar Rat Race on my 64 … and the Bard’s Tale, I played that for hours. Got the second and third ones, too. That wine really “Goes down” well, wink wink nudge nudge. Just seeing the VIC-20 mentioned takes me back to plugging in a cartridge and playing Space Invaders on that 20-column TV screen.
I’ve been tempted to set up my C-64 or 128 again just to play some of the games, but I’ve settled for putting an emulator on my 1 GHz PC. (“Okay, I know you have 128 megs of RAM, but just pretend like you have 64k, all right?”) The game I’ve been fiending for the most, which no-one else seems to remember, is M.U.L.E. Love that theme song. Aztec Challenge was a fun one too.
And I remember the original Sim City, on the 64 … none of that newfangled 3d crap. Just three kinds of zones, black blocks to show how much your stuff had grown, and Godzilla. Gauntlet, too, was much simpler back then … hooray for the valkyrie! 
Dragonblink
Yeah, I had that too, TRS-80 Color Computer 2. A L is easier to type fast than A R, figuring that out helped a lot - but I still never got past the third level.
First computer game I ever played was several years earlier, on a TRS-80 Model II in 1981 - Rogue. I was playing video games a long time before that, though. In fact, one of my earliest memories was playing a primitive arcade game at the airport. 1975, I was 3, my Dad had to hold me up so I could see the screen and push the button (yes, the game had one button).
As great as the C64 was - Yie Ar Kung Fu along with Manic Miner - the Amiga still, in my mind, was the finest moment in gaming history…
Today’s super consoles may pack enough power inside them to allow third-world countries to plot the over throw of the Western world but they just dont have the playability of the old Amiga.
Best games of all time:
Elite (the ultimate space-trading combact game - rumours of an internet based version for the PC and Mac where everyone can trade and destroy one another look set to come to fruition)
Any game from CinemaWare - Rocket Ranger, They Came and Ate Us, King of Chicago and Wings to name but a few.
FA/18 Interceptor - just enough realism and loads of fun
In fact I could go on for days…best thing to do is get yourself an emulator for your Mac/PC and download some ROMS - although these should be for back up copies purposes only 
NETHACK!! When I played it on the ol’ AppleII+ it was known as Rogue. I am completely addicted. http://www.nethack.org
It was re-introduced to me by my brother, who learned of it from DrMatrix. I spend so much time on it that I don’t know whether to hug him or to punch him in the nose.
I actually still have the original box. It was cool. The blurb on the inside cover (IIRC) brags about over 500 kb (!!!) of code.
If you’re curious there are a few good Bard’s Tale sites out there:
http://www.adventurersguild.org/
http://www.bardslegacy.com/ is an attempt to create an updated rpg with Bard’s Tale style gameplay. Very promising looking if they ever get it done. The art is very nice.
Ah, yes–I remember typing in the Wumpus code with the help of a couple of my friends on the school’s TSR-80 Model III. We then made sure we left it turned on until I managed to scrounge a cassette deck to store it (I had to rebuild one from the scrap heap at the TV shop).
What a game.
Lynn, I tried to order a copy of the Infocom masterpieces set not long ago, and found that they were no longer available. Back to scavenging, I guess…
Triskadecamus,
I remember that “trek” game. My dad and I used to play it at his work. When we finally got bored we tried attacking our own space stations.
-Waneman
I had an IBM PC Junior that we had to have the DOS or BASIC cartridge in to even run any software. There were 2 games that were awsome on that one. Kings Quest and Lode Runner. Both of those games were on one 5 1/2" floppy disk!! I cant remember if it was Kings Quest 1 or Kings quest 2 that had the Batmobile comeing out of a cave. I remember trying to figure out how to get it to come out. I also remember how difficult it was to get the game to do what you wanted it to. You had to type in instructions EXACTLY as the computer expected them, or else it was a no go. Anyone else remember KQ?
Damn you all. Now you’re making me get urges to troll E-bay for old computer systems.
And lately I’ve been putting time into Ultima IV–it was released as freeware back when number 9 was coming out, so it’s even out of that ethical grey area that other abandonware resides in.
I had an Amiga 2000 back in the old days, great computer and all that, I got the game lemmings and spent most of my life at the time trying to get to the last level. After many dead lemmings and pounding my head into the keyboard over and over I got the the last level. You can see where this is going, I never ever EVER beat that last level, I tried I swear I did, my monitor finally gave out (up?) 2 years ago and I’m still going crazy knowing that I’ll never beat the last level, the worst thing is now you all know this, and I’m sure one of you out there beat the last level (with no problems whatsoever).
Just thinking about it makes me want to cry…
::walks away, head down, sobbing::I am gonna roll off a few that I know ppl love and will be going “Damn can’t believe I forgot that”
M.U.L.E. - Come ON! Everyone remembers this classic. Hell I know of at least 2 people that power up old Commodores to play this still.
Archon - The epic chess shoot em up. Drove me nuts trying to beat the damn computer opponent. (He always wiped me out with that crackshot unicorn)
Racing Construction Set - Loved setting the gravity to moon and making huge ramps.
Wishbringer - Infocom ruled. Plus they helped me learn to fear the word “Grue”
Hehehe… I used to be able to beat Archon in something like 6 moves, using teleport, time reverse and the elemental. I think I would summon and elemental onto one of the spots adjacent to the queen and kill whatever was there (either the blob or the dragon). Teleport a unicorn onto that space and beat off whatever attacked it. Kill the queen. Grab the rest of the power points with the djinn, phoenix and some other beastie I don’t recall. It might have been longer than six moves, but I recall that I couldn’t come up with a quicker way of winning.
Anyway, my personal favorite and still on my hard drive and emulator is C=64’s Paradroid. You were some little robot control device on an abandoned ship and had to cruise around taking over progressively stronger robots until you defeated them all. You could either take control of them or attack them with your host robot’s weaponry, provided it had any. To take over a robot, you waged a duel on it’s circut board, firing colored shots down some little split booleen paths until time ran out and you saw who had the most colored squares. It was pretty cheesy, but very addictive. I never did defeat it until I got it on the emulator and my friend was watching me play it. Got to the last little robot… shot it… and… the game starts over. Sheesh.
Another favorite was the Adventure Construction Set. I won’t bother with a detailed description, but you could either make your own adventure games with monsters, treasure, various mazes and zones and an outdoor world or you could have the computer generate one (which was always really lame, but better than nothing). I made some pretty detailed adventures on that thing that I was rather proud of. The biggest problem with it (besides the queer graphics) was that it literally took ages to load a game and if you wanted it to make a random game, you’d best go grab some dinner and a movie while you wait.
Not really vintage in the same sense, but I just bought Master of Monsters and the original Road Rash for my old Genesis off eBay.
“Oh boy! I have a… um… Loc? What the hell’s a loc? And what’s this Marmaid? And why is it firing a Brust? Who translated this thing, anyway?”
I didn’t see Jumpman mentioned. I don’t think the graphics were great even for the time period, but I spent hours with this game after school.
The Infocom games have been mentioned a few times, but I really liked Enchanter. I finally got rid of the floppies and bought the Zork series on cd-rom. Some of the Zork games are so frustrating though, I never did figure out how to open a door in (I think) Zork II. Remove clown nose.
CRYSTAL QUEST
CRYSTAL QUEST
CRYSTAL QUEST
CRYSTAL QUEST
CRYSTAL QUEST
man-o-man was I good at that game. The mouse wasn’t part of the computer, it was part of me. My eyes glazed over, I didn’t have to scan the screen I knew by instinct where each and every nasty little beasties was. The entire screen could fill with them and I’d just squirm right by them. My dad would bring by friends to show off my abilities. I remember reading an article in MacWorld about it wondering if there was life after level 40, when I had already gotten to 118. I was so good it became pointless to play. sigh … good times
I also used to enjoy Hunt the Wumpus which I bought for $5 for my TI-99 at a flea market in Denton, TX in 1984. But my true love at the time was Tombstone City. I mean you have to love a game that has three levels of difficulty. Easy, novice and INSANE