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Baldur's Gate
Interplay
The Review:
Baldur's Gate is a Role Playing Game (RPG). Like most of them, it is set in a magical world, habited by the usual orks, goblins, wizards and fair maidens. Unlike most of them however, this one boasts to be genuinely playable, fun, frantic at times, accessible by even those who don't know the first thing about RPGs, and overall downright addictive. Can Baldur's Gate possibly live up to these claims? Read on and find out.
The starting introduction is totally gripping. The graphics in it are amazingly realistic and the sound effects are stunning. I won't spoil it for you, but I will advise you to turn the lights off, pump up that volume, and feel that noise!! Enough of that. In Baldur's Gate, you don't know what you're going to have to do at first. But then the storyline sets in. You are the son of Gorian and you are going on your way as usual one day, when Gorian hands you a packed bag and tells you to leave without an explanation. As you say your farewells around the town, people start trying to kill you. For no apparent reason at all. Then you soon find out that there is a bounty on your head and every bounty hunter in the country is out to get you!! Venturing outside Candlekeep (your home village) for the first time, Gorian accompanies you where upon you are stopped just upon leaving by a group of fierce looking warriors. Gorian uses his magic to fend them off while you made your escape. Turning around you see Gorian cut down by a mysterious black knight. You turn away and head out into the unknown . . . .
The graphics are splendid. The game is set in a kind of isometric viewpoint. The effects used really help to absorb you into the game, especially the rain effects which is one of my favourites. The effects for thunder are also enthralling. The dramatic lightning effects caused by spells are also beautiful. Fighting is played on the same screen, and s is not to detailed, or gory.
The game itself is set in TSR's Forgotten Realms world, which will be familiar to anybody who has played any AD&D games. I myself used to do the old Pencil and paper role playing games with a group of friends, and I have also read some Forgotten Realms books, which are also great. As a result of this, I already knew some of the area, or at least the names of towns and forests.
When you start you can make make your own character, from a massive selection of parameters, such as several different races, such as humans, elfs, dwarfs, gnomes and many others, and 26 different classes, ranging from fighters, paladins and thieves, to mages and priests. You also get to choose from different alignments, which also effect how people will treat you in the game. For example, if you are an evil person, then nobody will talk to you or like you, although you may make friends among the more evil and sinister of the Sword Coasts inhabitants.
The gameworld and its quests is totally non-linear, as you can choose where you want to go or which quests you want to take up as you travel the planes and towns of the Sword Coast. The gameworld is also massive, with a total of 10 000 massive (and I mean massive) scrolling game screens, spread over a massive FIVE CD's.
One neat feature abut this game is that when you get people to join you on your quests, you have total control over hem, and they are effectively just like another version of you, as they can go up levels, and you can change who carries what, and who gets what armor. This is great as it means you don't have to put up with your friends doing stupid things in combat, as you decide exactly what they do.
Moving on to combat, that is also handled excellently in my opinion. No longer do RPG fans have to put up with annoying turn based combat, while everyone else gets stuck in to real-time games. As the combat is in real-time, you can give your hero's one command, and they will keep carrying it out until it is complete. No more do you have to keep on clicking on attack every turn. Another neat thing about the combat is that it lets you pause the game easily, and indeed you must in order to be effective, by simply pressing the spacebar. This lets you plan your attacks almost as if it was a strategy game, but not quite.
Overall, I would say that this is the best traditional RPG around, as it is thoroughly enjoyale and addictive. It also has easily the biggest playing area I have ever seen. All this means that it will be a very long time before you even take the CD out of the CD drive. Brilliant. Buy it Now.
97%
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Hardware Needed
On the box it says that it will run on a P166 with 16 Meg of ram, DirectX 5, 300 Mb of HD space, quad speed CD-ROM drive, Win 95/98, 2Mb SVGA video card.
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