Commodore 64

The Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight

Does this game really belong in the automapping group? The back cover of the game box says the mapping in this game is really HARD. Bard's Tale 3 says on the back cover that it has a NEW auto-map feature. Wikipedia calls BT3 the first automapping game, not BT2...

Confirmed. Tales of the Unknown: Volume I - The Bard's Tale doesn't have auto-mapping either. Both should be removed.

Or the dude thought it meant manual map-drawing. Duh. :p

Oh man, there sure is no auto-mapping in BT2. One of the most grueling 8bit moments from my youth comes from this game.

I had spent several hours working through a rough dungeon (note: no saving in dungeons) and was on my way out, my party down to its last reserves. The dungeons had some horrible effects on certain squares, including magic removal, spinners that randomly changed your direction, anti-light zones etc. It didn't help that your compass was a spell and not an item. Eventually I ended up out of magic and light, stumbling around in the darkness, getting spun around. The only way I made it out was by counting steps between hitting walls and correlating it to my meticulously drawn graph paper map. I think it took me as long to get out as it did to clear the damn place.

Never again will I have the patience for that kind of nonsense in a RPG.

Thumbs up, man!