Let us step back in time just a wee-bit...

It is roughly a year ago, a bright-eyed, eager little Amiga head stands in the magazine department of Wegmans and reads his favorite computer mags while the little woman runs the gauntlet of grocery mayhem. Don't act like you've never been there, I've seen you from the corners of my eyes. Flipping merrily through the pages of a computer gaming periodical that caters mostly to the MS-DOS world, he suddenly pauses at a full page glossy ad. Big,bold letters and shimmering screen shots pound at his retinas. The ad reads "The Bard's Tale Construction Set". He passes the meaning of the words around his brain for a moment or two. Then it sinks in...He can build a Bard's Tale adventure, excellent! He reads on, "YOU", the ad screams, "create the monsters to inhabit your dungeons! ...create your own cast of ghoulish dungeon denizens by importing Deluxe Paint files." By now his palms are sweating. He hopes and dreams that someday soon this program will find it's way to the Amiga community and vows to purchase the program and create the most amazing adventure ever. Yes, he WILL use Deluxe Paint to create, as the box states "...eye-popping animations". He returns the magazine to the rack and skips to find his better half and tell her the wonderful news.

Return with me now to the present.

A day off from work and a trip to Industrial Color Labs, how could life get any better. I drove up expecting to browse a bit and to possibly lick the screen of a new Amiga 4000 once or twice. After touching every new piece of hardware in the building, I sauntered over to the shelves of software. My eyes scanned the assorted titles, "got it.....got it.....looks good ...looks stupid...got it..WAIT A MINUTE!" My eyes locked onto a title and we stood there, frozen in time, staring at each other. Yes fellow Amigians, there it was, The Bard's Tale Construction set. One copy. My copy. I felt a bit weak in the knees as I plucked it from the shelf and whisked it over to the register like some sort of mad animal guarding fallen prey. I purchased the software and sped back to my home, dreaming the whole way of the magic that would be played out on the old Amiga that night.

But all was not well.

Upon opening the box I immediately began scanning the manual. Uh oh, it's all in MS-DOS terminology. Hold on though, they usually include a reference card for the Amiga. Ah yes, here it is. Good thing too because all those MS-DOS commands really looked confusing. Lots of strange file names with unusual three letter suffixes tacked on the end. Glad I don't have to deal with all that. Lets see what the Amiga reference card says. Wait a minute, here's those weird file names again, what the heck are they doing in the Amiga reference? I don't have to deal with all that rubbish. I've got an Amiga. Oh well, I'm sure it will all work out.

WRONG.

The first thing I tried to do was run the sample mini- adventure to get my feet wet and re-familiarize myself with the Bard's Tale game system. The program comes on three disks, one start-up disk and two data disks. When the start-up disk is booted you see a cute screen with all the dungeon editing and creation menus listed. Where is the sample adventure? The only way I could get the sample game to load was to exit the program that I just spent precious time loading, and run the sample game from shell. The sample game lets me pick my party of happy-go- lucky slobs, outfit them with assorted goodies, and then venture off into the unknown only to lock up the entire system after about five minutes of combat. This happened several times, so I tried to rationalize it out. "As long as the game creation tools work and I can build my own games it is worth it, right?"

WRONG AGAIN.

So I went back and played about with the editing tools a bit. The tools are VERY awkward to work with and sometimes your saved results are not retrievable. The game requires either a hard-drive or dual-floppies, yet will only recognize df0: for storing and loading data. So here I am flipping through three program disks and one save disk with my internal drive, while my external(which the Amiga documentation says I need) sits and spins away the hours unused. After several hours I finally got the editors to work and save about 50% of the time. By now I am having serious doubts about the program. So I tried out the print features. The manual boasts that you may print out your various files for easy editing. You may print out lists of custom made ITEMS, SPELLS, MONSTERS and DUNGEON LEVEL MAPS, for ease in editing. Sounds good.

Yeah, right.

The program would not print a single file to my printer. By this time I am starting to feel depressed. Is this what I waited a year for? With moist eyes and a heavy heart, I forged ahead. Now it was time to try my luck at importing a DELUXE PAINT file. I drew a gruesome little beastie with DPAINT, animated it and added some cool touches to it. DELUXE PAINT worked flawless (as always) and in no time at all this amazing and powerful Amiga program and I had created a masterpiece monster. Now to transfer it to Bard's Tale. I consulted the Amiga reference card and it says that I should save my picture as a brush (no problem) with one of the crazy three letter suffixes on the end. This I did and DPaint never complained once. Now I must transfer the file to the same directory as the IMPORT.EXE file. So I began a search through all the disks for anything that resembled this file at all. I came back empty handed. There is no file like this anywhere in the program. So much for importing DPaint files. By now I was whimpering like a whipped dog. I had come to the decision that the program would have to go back.

And yet there was hope.

I had some time to kill so I went through and played with the editors a bit more (I'm a glutton for punishment). I tried to build some custom spells and Items. The program disks are called "start-up", "data A", and "data B", yet occasionally I would be asked to insert "BTCS_TWO" or some other disk. After a bit I figured out which disk was which but I still think it would be easier to give each disk the same name as on the bloody disk label!!! The program would also say things like "Please insert the disk that has the BARDGAME.exe file on it". Well how the heck should I know which disk the files are on. I exited the program (since it will NOT multitask) and grabbed shell. I inspected each disk for the file until I located it. I also made a note of what files were on what disks. I got back into the program and this time it didn't even ask me for the stupid disk or anything!

Confused?

Well, at this point I'm beginning to wonder if anything at all will work on this muddled array of confusion. I tell myself to try one more thing. I'm going to attempt to draw a title screen for my game with DPaint, (HEY, the manual says I can!). I load up DPaint, and spend some time making a good basic title screen. Nothing fancy, just a little LoRes tidbit. The program says to rename my file to USRSCR.PIC and place it in the BTCS directory. This I do and this works O.K. (shell don't fail me now!). Now back to the manual."... your picture will automatically be loaded by the BARDGAME file", it says promisingly. Sorry, not even close. The program looks upon my lovingly created picture as if it's a dead vole and loads up a screen of jumbled, chaotic, frightening images a second or two before the program locks up yet another time.

And so...

To make a long story short (too late), I called Industrial Color Labs and told them my problems. Well, just my computer related problems that is (hey, this is long distance). They told me to bring the program back and they would give it a serious reprimand. I have decided to return it for a refund or possible credit towards a program that has actually been created FOR the Amiga. I hope I have no problems returning it because I don't want to be stuck with this piece of ka-ka. But I shouldn't have a problem because the people at ICL are tops.

RATS!

If you've ever waited a year for something, only to have your hopes and dreams dashed to pieces on the hard cobblestones of life, then you understand where I'm coming from. Bard's Tale Construction set is a slap in the face of the Amiga community. What could have been a powerful tool turned out to be only a sad MS-DOSish nightmare of trouble. I feel let down by INTERPLAY software who normally put out some decent programs. If you want to build a good dungeon, go out and invest in a huge amount of stone, mortar, and brick. It will be much less aggravating than using The Bard's Tale Construction Set.

Dr. Torgo