"Spectacular, unique RPG despite some pratfalls"

Bard's Tale IV never came out, but there were two worthy claimants to the unofficial title: Dragon Wars and Centauri Alliance. Michael Cranford was a big cheese in the production of CA, but he was from Broderbund for this one, and Dragon Wars was rolled out but Interplay/EA who were responsible for the original Bard's Tale. The two games couldn't have been more different in plot; one is based on Babylonian mythology, and one(guess which) is stuck in the year 2314, fifty-seven years after a historic cross-galactic treaty. However, there have been rumors of treachery in the upper ranks of the galactic government, known as the Council. A powerful weapon that helped forge the treaty, the Fractyr Fist, has been split apart, and the pieces have been scattered across the galaxy. There are even rumors of fake parts having been produced. You need to assemble a team of eight adventurers(it's easy and fun to scan through ''applicants'') to go and reclaim it. Of course, there is a ''restricted area'' that proves critical; Keppa Var, which reportedly contains ancient artifacts, has been closed off until further notice. Hmm! Whether or not Centauri Alliance is the ''true Bard's Tale IV,'' its box was certainly the coolest I've ever seen--a hexagon with a starship and a bug-looking creature(Arcturan.)

The world(ahem) of Centauri Alliance is similar to previous Cranford-directed productions; you can walk around with a 3-d view although with a low-level compass spell it may be handy to toggle to a newfangled overhead view that shows the auto-map compiled no matter which view you're in. Although transport between planets is rather tedious(there's a long hyperspace sequence you're not allowed to skip over each time you move around, and with the way the three destinations per town, oops spaceports, are organized you may need to take four trips between one place and another!) and there is no outside world, they are all 16x16 graphs with walls, so the towns and dungeons won't blow you away even if the dungeons wrap around. Each has an armory as well, and most have something else that make them useful, but it is only on Lunabase where you can train; training itself is interesting, as your experience points start high and go to zero when you're ready for the next level. Each time you advance a level, you can choose which skill to improve, which decides how much you need for the next level. It's a function of the skill itself and your level of proficiency; you can go up to ten, and once you've got a degree of proficiency in basic skills, more advanced skills open up. In this way one character can improve relatively worthless skills quickly to get to the maximum hit points or (see below) PSI for his race while another tries for a ten. Examples of skills include combat(sidearm, thrown, and melee with master following,) technical(hardware, bio, weaponry and later on, ancient) and metamorphosis.

They nicely circumvented a little problem with converting tales of enchantment to the future; well, it turns out people have figured out how to use brain power(called PSI) to cast the equivalents of spells, and there are Mind and Body PSI that are followed by Matter and Energy, as well as a separate metamorphosis ability. What's extra neat about PSI is that there can be life(standard) as well as PSI attacks, so if someone's just cast a powerful spell, he's a bit weak, which seems more realistic than spells for their own sake. Other less tricky conversions include gold becoming credits, bows becoming guns, which have different ranges(shop owners actually IDENTIFY weird items' purposes in this game, including which guns use which power packs, an incredibly useful improvement.) Body armor even has limited shield use, which protects you from damages. Of course you have laser grenades and the like, but you had better have the right skills to use them. You can even buy robots as NPC's in a shop(they seem to freeze the game occasionally in combat, alas,) a nice addition to random monsters dropping by to join your party. Strangely, this game even has treasure you can just sell, whereas early RPG's didn't. There is still the slightly unrealistic general gripe that your party can hack up some pistol shooting thugs with broadswords, but this game is tough enough as it is.

The place, monster and weapon names have the Bard's Tale feel along with added sophistication. For places, the dungeons aren't terribly strong, but there's Kevner's World with a medieval dungeon which probably takes up a little too much of the general plot, but it sure is fun to shoot ancient beasties with high-tech laser rifles. Veladron II has abandoned spaceports that are good for fights, and Port Minkar and Kasdran redeem their uselessness by sounding cool. There are other cool names as well, and they are original transitions from the usual RPG staples; the race names are Human, Praktor(can change into dangerous monsters,) Manstrak(like trolls,) Arcturans and Valkyryns(elves/gnomes) and Donsai(dwarves.) Temples for healing and Roscoe's Magic Emporium are lumped into biocenters to heal life and PSI points. There's a command base that doubles as an adventurers' inn to back-up your players, although you can save them anywhere in their exploits.

So these are the innovations; there are a few downers in playing that I'll speed through. The first is a one-off; there's an item called the Mattermit Pass which allows you to do something in certain locations. If you enter the location and leave, the pass loses a charge, and it's not fun to get the charge back. I've mentioned how congested space travel is these days, but combat is not relaxing either. It's frequently too easy or too tough. In later dungeons you will spend a lot of time reloading games, even on an emulator with a fast processor, but fortunately the game cut its losses by allowing quick reloads from the last point where you saved. Combat also loses its novelty quickly. You are in a grid of hexagons--there are several formations, the most annoying of which has a single square in the middle that inevitably houses a monster you must shoot(shooting is often tougher than melee!)--so you can have several sets of monsters 10' away. It's pretty sophisticated, even though there is a whopping total of two(''animal'' and ''person'') icons for your assailants, but you do a lot of scrolling through hexagons to determine the monsters you want to attack, and of course, it isn't clear which hexagon precedes which. They got a little too cute there.

The graphics are a little crusty, too. You have a command list in the upper left, which also shows which PSI/spells are active, and the animations, walls, etc. in the center, especially your character pictures, have nice variety, but there's simply too much space left at the bottom for incidental messages(including viewing entire party attributes,) and when you compare that with the enduring party roster in the upper right, which can't display more than the first five letters of your characters' names, that white space starts to grate at you, even if the letters have a jazzy 2154 A.D. font look to them. As I once asked people to call me Big A as a joke, I varied on the theme and was able to finagle a few names: Ice-A, A-Dog, Eazy-A, Aess(token female,) Dr A, Sir A, Def A, and last but certainly not least, Big A. But Eazy did not fit on the screen, and removing the hyphen was unthinkable. After further failures(A-Fresh, as Ide-A A-Fro were too corny) I designated Eazy as the guy I'd dump if an NPC that seemed critical to the game came along.

There is one graphical innovation; this is the first game to feature real action clips during critical parts of your adventure. The text scrolling in a side box adds to it. ''You meet Evil Guy X. (one of your players, picked at random) socks X in the jaw before he can run away. X starts to deny he's so bad but after further melodrama breaks down in tears and confesses a huge part of the plot against the Council.'' The video sequence then continues to re-play. Good for a few laughs on the limited graphics, and it beats ''So-and-so found an item'' after fighting a blob on a grid of hexagons.

As for playing through the game, there's some genuine excitement. Commanders at each base often have different things to say based on how far you've gotten along, even directing you to a time-intensive puzzle that is exciting and easily solvable enough. You even explore a thieves' guild that offers you a choice of special skills if you complete the obstacle course in the time provided(this is a potential stopper as if you bring your full party and choose the wrong skill, too bad!) The medieval part is your average Bard's Tale dungeon, and there's also a distant moon, a base the enemies have taken over(monsters are im-stinking-possible) and even a hostile ship. The finish is frantic, as there are places where you are attacked repeatedly by enemy guards if you are not careful. Then you have a maze that spans several levels as you fetch items back and forth, and you have to sneak out of enemy headquarters after you've found out a valuable truth. At the end there's a shrine where the critical puzzle is shaky, and at some point it's possible to save your game in a position where you're stuck, but along the way you will have had a lot of fun, especially with the spontaneous history lessons that pop up as you progress.

So Centauri Alliance has nagging flaws, the most obvious that travel takes too long(bring a book or fix a drink--sadly, there are no skimpy stewardess spacesuits to stare at,) and after playing a while, I feel it can be too hard; even having cheated my characters past their race-determined maximums(the game's a tease. It allocates two bytes for hit points but doesn't allow over 250) I still got massacred on the later levels, where you get attacked every five squares. Still, along the way, it's a lot of fun to recover and reassemble the Fractyr Fist, and the world created is very sophisticated for such an early game, and the classic RPG concepts are very well translated to unhackneyed science fiction equivalents. Although perhaps Dragon Wars is the more worthy heir to Bard's Tale, Centauri Alliance doesn't deserve the obscurity it seems to have suffered. It's a no-lose proposition with those high-tech gizmos and ancient mystique--and that cool hexagonal box.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 11/01/99, Updated 11/01/01