PlayStation 2 Newbie: Baldur’s Gate

October 5th, 2006

So a while back on a whim I picked up a PlayStation 2 and I’ve since realized, I suck at these console games. I often feel like a crotchety old-timer, and play like one too, as my character stumbles on screen and gets blown away because I can’t make heads or tails of the confusing controls.

I’m enjoying this one game, however: Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance. Yeah, I know it’s pretty old but it’s new to me. My closest reference points are Gauntlet or Diablo.

Baldur’s Gate is cool because it’s based on Dungeons and Dragons, so you get to fight a Gelatinous Cube. Playing a video game based on a role-playing game is awesome to me, as a fair amount of my youth was spent playing TSR games like Top Secret and Gamma World, using pencil, paper, multi-faceted dice, and a heavy suspension of disbelief. All the the tedious aspects of these games are now done through programming, effectively replacing the GM.

The controls are pretty straightforward with some nice touches. I’m playing an archer character, and the targeting is much better than Diablo: a sightline appears so you can toss a missle weapon in an enemy’s general direction. The map ability that zooms in and out of the upper right corner is also slick.

Some of the graphics are pretty dated, specifically cheesy parts where you talk with characters in towns face to face. I’m sorry but the tavern owner in particular with wenchy cleavage hasn’t aged well since 2001.

I have to admit that I got myself in quite a bind in the level where you fight a giant beholder. It’s a common situation I get stuck in with “boss” characters. Basically, I saved the game just before the boss, stupidy short on arrows and health potions. It was impossible to go back to town and re-equip, so my only choice was to fight the beholder with a melee weapon, which despite my bravery, meant running in circles away from the beholder to regain health while occasionally whacking at it with my sword. I probably died about fifty times in a torrent of fire and wasted two hours of my life because of my stupid, naive saving strategy. Not fun.

On another level I ran into a similar waste of time, where I had decimated the entire snowy landscape of creatures but still needed to find some key items hidden on corpses, somewhere, in order to light a signal torch at the top of a mountain. This involved a lot of backtracking, talking to characters in the town, and basically wandering around aimlessly, angry, until I gave up and looked up a walkthrough.

Anyhow, I’m not totally done with this game, but consulting a walkthrough gave me hope as I’ve realized I’m a little over halfway through. Wish me luck.

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