Baldur's Gate

The Good
I loved EVERYTHING about this game. The musical compositions rate up there with Carl Orff, sounds like music from something like a Braveheart battle. The music written for this game is classic in itself. I have the intro theme on CD and listen to it as though I would other music. The game was an instant jaw-dropper for me and my AD&D buddies... for once, it felt as though we were instantly submerged in a real-life forgotten realms campaign. The rules and modifiers follow the paper N' pen game to a T. Extremely accurate.

Nothing was cheesy about this game, just a serious hardcore RPG for hardcore gamers. The path is somewhat linear but enough freedom to allow you to explore areas that you would get horribly reamed if you weren't strong enough (Something most RPGs today don't let you do). The atmosphere of the realm is such a beautiful recreation of the Paper N Pen game, some recognizable characters appear such as the almighty human form of Paladine AKA Fizban... the infamous and deadly drow elf, Drizzt.

This game was so addicting to me and my friends, we literally cut the outside world off for a month after buying this classic. I believe it was the first gamed developed using the old engine and its a shame they quit using it because these games blow the new NeverWinter Night style games out of the water. No polygon 3d engine will every produce colors and the hand drawn background art like in this game. The game is huge, many many hours of exploring, fighting and town wandering.

The game has a full day cycle where you can tell if its getting close to sunset or morning. The great thing about this is like the Ultima series, different events happen during the day and night. The town of Baldur's Gate is almost like 2 different towns depending on whether or not you go in at night or day.

I loved everything about this game... timeless. A perfect recreation of how the paper n pen game WOULD look if you could actually see it.

The Bad
Setting up the pause features can get a bit annoying, sometimes you want it to pause after certain events, others not. You have to go back in and change it every time you want to adjust it.

If you didn't do the full install, prepare for some disc swapping. 5 to be exact. Why was it on 5 discs?? The whole game can be compressed and fit on 2.

Much too difficult to play without using the pause features. Especially when you're trying to control 6 guys, 3 of which are spell casters, trying to fumble through your spells, cast them, aim them... it would be much too hard fighting in real time.

Some poor AI path-finding code. I think they addressed this in a patch but there are still some problems even after the patch. If you click to walk too far ahead of the character, the characters will start walking very stupidly, running in to walls and each other. VERY VERY frustrating in combat!

Characters can block each other in tight quarters!! Very annoying. And some of the scenes and areas are too small for 6 people to fight in. One could argue that this is a realistic factor but the AI sometimes makes dumb choices in those events.

Mages you encounter and have to fight are extremely difficult in my opinion, especially towards the end of the game. As though a high level mage should be difficult, sometimes its ridiculous.

The Bottom Line
One of the best RPG's EVER EVER created... a faithful recreation of the Paper and Pen version of AD&D... a MUST PLAY for any RPG fan...a MUST MUST MUST play for fans of the paper n pen version of AD&D!

The Good
The fantasy, D&D world was well placed in this game. Though I never played the D&D pen-and-paper games, this game was still a good experience for any RPG fan, though a bit confusing at first. I liked the fact that you could export your character and start a new game using your exported character. It had the same feel as New Game + in Chrono Trigger. The character interaction between members of your party was a nice touch...for instance, if you do a good deed, one of your party members may comment, "That was a noble deed." or they may even talk among themselves and verbally compliment one another based on your reputation. It added a kind of personal feel to the experience, rather than a bunch of people blindly following a leader around.

The Bad
Even though you level up, your characters don't become that powerful. This can be a good thing to some people and a not-so-good thing to other people. The spell system can be cumbersome to figure out the first time and I wish damage could be displayed (for weapons and spells) as actual amounts instead of dice rolls. I realize that D&D calculated damage using dice rolls, but it's confusing to read damage as 3d6 instead of 3-18.

The Bottom Line
A great RPG overall. Well worth the time and money spent on it.

The Good
First of all this was the first good D&D based rpg we had in years and it's a tremendous comeback. It sports great graphics, great sound, an easy to use interface and an epic rpg world in which to interact. The storyline in the game is actually very good, sure you can complain that in the end it all comes down to "kill Gonzo" but it's one heck of a wild ride till you get there! The plot makes some great twists and bends and it includes remarkably well constructed political conspiracies (which c'mon, how many of us thought of seeing that in a D&D game?), sideplots, plus the usual quest for ultimate power.

The battle system is really love or hate. It makes the mistake of taking the middle road between action and strategy, it's part real-time, and it's part strategy turn-based. So essentially what you have here is something that the grognards will hate because it's too fast and simple, and the Diablo-lovers will hate because it gives them a headache (no offense guys! ;)). Personally I thought it was great, providing the right balance between action and strategy. Besides quite simply it makes the battles fun, which is a requirement in a game that has so many of them. There's also the issue of party members and their reactions which are incredibly realistic, they react both to you and your other companions in very life-like ways according to their alignment. You can have fights break out in your party, discussions or insults flying at any moment as poor Viconia had to endure, etc, etc. Every possible party member feels realistic and behaves in a very life-like manner instead of just being walking inventories.

Ultimately the game provides lots of engrossing roleplaying, with hundreds of npc's to interact with, lots of detailed and vivid locations to visit, killer production values, and a great storyline. Plus it has the option for those ultimate freaks to place your picture and voices to replace the ones that represent you in the game! How cool is that?

The Bad
Well first of all I completely agree with the previous reviewer that the D&D rules suck. At least on computer games. They are far too redundant and complicated at the same time for a platform where all the hassle of having a dungeon master is eliminated, plus I never liked the far too generic stats (strength is for fighters, intelligence for mages, dexterity for thieves, etc.) The racial distinctions don't work that well, plus there is no point in picking a human since the game imposes an experience cap on you, meaning there's a limit to how strong you can get.

The storyline, for as good as it is is left hanging in the end. You kill Sarevok, see him die and that's it, roll credits, everyone go home. What happened to you? What happened to everyone else? Sure, we learn that in Baldur's Gate 2 but would it have killed them to provide a proper closure to the plot? There's also the fact that there isn't that much variety as advertised in the game. As the popular saying around the net goes, you only need "4 fighters and a six-pack" to get through this game, and it's true. Most of the game is geared towards fighting and cracking heads, and you only need an assortment of potions to get you out of the eventual tight spots. Plus a lot of the subquests are of the 'Fed Ex" type which as you can tell, don't exactly require a lot of thinking.

Last but not least I REALLY hate when game designers take the patronizing posture of limiting your savegames and their usage. This has been forever an issue that the hardcore community has always defended with their "it makes the game more realistic" thing and the rest of us loathe since it's akin to telling us how we should play our games. Nobody tells me when or where I should save, ok? If I want to be able to save every 10 seconds I should be able to do so, just because I want to. And for those of you macho-types that defend this conception and do it so on the basis that is more "realistic" and "challenging", here's a tip: DON'T SAVE. But let whoever wants to do it!

Returning to BG (sorry for that) the game allows you to save anywhere you want, but actually makes the insult of penalizing you for using those saves. Whenever you load a game, all the creatures that were around you respawn, which would be nice if it were a controlled respawning (since you may want to return to do some hack & slash in order to gain experience), but as I said, this is done to penalize you for loading games, so the respawnings are usually ridiculous AND cumulative, which make it downright suicide to save and load on dungeons. On the worst of cases you may have fought 5 kobolds in a corridor on Nashkell but if you re-load for whatever reason you will have to face 10 kobolds and 3 commandos, re-load again and we are talking 17 kobolds, 8 commandos, etc. etc. Lovely, isn't it? Your only answer whenever some bad thing happens to you in a dungeon is to then quit the game and re-load, or re-load and get the hell out as quickly as you can.

The Bottom Line
In the end Baldur's Gate is a great game. Sure, it receives a fair amount of hate because it isn't perfect (but is hailed as such), but let's be serious here folks: Baldur's Gate is a great rpg, and probably the greatest D&D based for it's time. Sure it brought a lot of hoopla with it's "isometric-ness" that surely has all the Wizardry fans in the world screaming in horror, but it is still a great game. Besides where else can you play with a space hamster??? ;)