Baldur's Gate

Baldur's Gate is perfectly average and emminently forgettable at it's best. BG is officially the second-most-overly-hyped up piece of junk I've ever played, just behind Trespasser. (Yes, I anticipate Daikatana being good enough to beat out Baldur's Gate and only rank third in that list of luminaries.)

I mean, graphics...OK they're beautifully drawn. Sure. But for cyring out loud, when I first bought this, I was running the game on a freaking 400 MHZ P2 with 64MB RAM?! And I can't measure the frame-rate during combat in terms of frames-per-second, how about seconds per FRAME?! And you know why? Because of the beautiful art-work...oh sure, you can clearly make out every single leaf on that tree there. Never mind that even a Cray supercomputer would be brought to its knees because of this. The hell with your ultra-detailed trees, I want at least a semi-playable game! Which, thanks to the horrible frame rates, BG was not. After upgrading to a P3 with 128MB RAM, sure, it ran pretty well. But certainly not flawlessly, and I will never understand how someone can say functional gameplay is a good tradeoff if you get pretty graphics.

So soundwise - it sucks, period. Dialogue features the most horrific voice-acting ever. After the ninetieth time hearing the phrase "Are you ready for more lessons, my child?" I was ready to take a chainsaw to my CPU. And that was TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE GAME! Spoken dialogue is limited to one-trite-phrase line per character type. No, that's not an exaggeration. Why even bother? 99% of the dialogue is written, why not 100%, a la Final Fantasy? At least then I could say that at least the sound was only lame instead of horrible. Oh yeah, and all the other sound effects and music are wack, but at least they're not overly-repeated one-liners and stuff, so they're...well...OK, not necessarily passable, but not completely abysmal either.

Difficulty - heh, well, if my frame-rate didn't tank every time I tried to move my mouse, then I guess I'd have an easier time with a REAL-TIME D&D GAME...why don't game developers notice something? D&D rules do NOT translate to good real-time games! Because D&D isn't a real-time game system! OH MY GOD IT'S THE REVELATION! Anyway, before I start sounding completely incoherent, I'll just state that the difficulty is real damned high thanks to you not being able to handle combat adequately...

Which brings me to Fun Factor...uh...why is it so hard again? Well, think if Diablo were so slow that you got a frame-rate of two seconds between every frame. So one moment you spot a skeleton in the distance, so you try to move the mouse, and then...well, two seconds later, the skeleton has carved you to shreds before you get to click on it. Nice. Well, with Baldur's Gate, this happens ALL THE TIME thanks to the horrible game engine that not only is slow, but is a COMPLETE AND UTTER DIABLO RIP-OFF. Yeah, click on the enemy, click on the enemy, click on that spell, click on that door, wait three seconds for the screen to unfreeze... At least you can pause the game in order to issue orders to your characters, but that doesn't completely save you from watching your magic users get slaughtered by kobolds because A: you have to revert to real-time mode to get anywhere, the game won't advance on a turn-by-turn basis, and B: once they had cast their one magic missile, they stood still and essentially invited the enemy to shove the sword down their throat. The game was simply unplayable as a result.

Gee, should I get Diablo and the Hellfire pak for a total $30, and enjoy a terrifically fun game that'll last me for hours on end due to infinite replayability, or should I get Baldur's Gate for $55 and be driven to near-suicide before the installation program finishes?! Tough decision... OK, I'll be fair here - Diablo doesn't have much of a plot beyond 'kill things, get things, boost stats, repeat ad naseum', but I think it says something that I ENJOY that kind of plot as opposed to Baldur's Gate's 'kill things, get things, boost experience, see plot develop with some dialogue, repeat ad naseum, all with a horrible frame-rate'. I suppose if you just 100% get off on storylines that are at about as intricate as Starcraft's, sure, Baldur's Gate has something for you - but then again if you don't have NEXT FREAKING YEAR'S hardware you're not going to see the ending unless you play it 24-7 for years on end. I'm sorry but after having played Final Fantasy 7 (superb plot with a super-fun game that may not bear playing a second time but still is awe-inspring) or Diablo (awesome action with super-easy interface and immensely replayable), I cannot at ALL dig BG.

Oh yeah, speaking of FF7's lack of replay value - I guess I can't comment on Baldur's Gate's replay value because I don't know...as I NEVER replayed it. I barely got through maybe 5% of the game, then, realizing I was hopelessly bored, I uninstalled it. Thankfully the uninstallation was a lot more smooth and quick than the game's framerates, so props to Bioware for allowing me to erase this from my hard drive as quickly as humanly possible. The game irritated me so much that serious, that's the most fun I had with it. Remind me never to toss the receipts of game purchases in the garbage again, because even under threat of nuclear attack, the Best Buy customer service clerk will not let you take the thing back without the receipt.

This game would be great if:

A> the framerates were smooth, even at the expense of having 'only' Diablo-quality graphics (which by the way were pretty darn good). On an ultra-fast computer it's playable, but trust me, the minimum requirements on the box are probably "minimum requirements to ensure game doesn't crash due to lack of memory" because you certainly can't play the game or anything with them...hell, my pretty good P2 couldn't play it well at all...
B> it's interface wasn't so close to Diablo's, heck, if it didn't so closely resemble Diablo in almost every imaginable category besides "how cool is it"...
C> it, being an AD&D game based on AD&D rules, didn't try to become a 'real-time' AD&D game, since the rules assume that you're not conducting the game in real-time, and...
D> it was just plain somewhat good otherwise.