Yes, I realize this game is a good seven years old, now. But, this weekend I found myself bored again because i need to reduce my porn surfing habits because I've reached that threshold of critical mass where if you've seen one chick getting boned, you've seen 'em all. So I dipped into the wife's PS2 game collection again, having not learned from God of War last time. I didn't find much of a selection as most of them were JRPGs and those things can go fuck themselves.
I have played one of these things all the way through, Great Greed for the old and pathetic black and white Gameboy and if I never deal with random encounters and turn-based combat ever again it will be too soon, not to mention the plot which fits somewhere between "retarded preschooler" and "moon logic." Watching the wife play through the Final Fantasy series and others cemented this opinion.
So, one of my few options was Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. This game had several strikes against it before I even picked up the box.
First of all, it's based on Dungeons & Dragons. Put simply, I would like to have nothing to do with Dungeons & Dragons anymore for the rest of my life. I have cast my last polyhedral die. More to the point, whenever one of these role-playing games gets turned into a video game, they always retain, and sharpen the focus on the most tedious aspects of those games, namely all of the stat keeping, level-upping, skill purchasing, equipment management and such. Pretty much anything that gets written down on a typical character sheet. I hated dealing with this shit in the paper and dice game. Somehow I doubt that turning the process into computer code will suddenly make it fun.
The second strike is that, judging from the pictures on the back of the box and recalling when the wife played, the game could probably be summed up rather neatly as "kind of like Diablo." Diablo was a big hit for Blizzard Entertainment in 1997. I even received it as a gift from the wife back then. She's the one who played it, though. I have no patience for the damned thing, as my past review of Fate can attest. But, most of that could probably be shouldered by the horrible mouse controls, which is still the worst device for game playing ever invented. Since the PS2 lacks a mouse, maybe it'll be alright. Right?
Yeah, we'll see.
So, the game starts up and after a brief character selection sequence which gave me a choice of three decidedly uninteresting characters (although I don't know why I'm complaining as I always play the chick, regardless), I was thrown into the opening cinematic-o-rama. I should be grousing up a storm over this lengthy section right at the beginning where I have nothing to do but sit and watch, but for some reason I'm not. I may have simply resigned myself to this as these action RPG games always have heavy cinematic and dialog scenes, especially at the beginning because god forfend that we won't know what the hell is going on. But, after watching it, I'm not sure if I know what's going on, anyway, but I am positive that I do not care.
Essentially, upon arrival in Baldur's Gate, a quasi-medieval city that sort of reminds my of my old neighborhood in Queens, I'm immediately accosted and robbed by a pack of thieves. Interestingly, one of the thieves is wearing a spiky Darth Vader helmet that indicates he's a bad guy, and a fairly major one at that. I suspect I'll have to fight this booger before the game ends and that the computer will cheat like a little ***** during said fight.
Unfortunately, before these ruffians can kill me and spare me the trouble, the night watch shows up and scares them off. Based on the dialog that comes later, why they didn't kill me anyway with a quick slash of the dagger is puzzling, but I guess I can't split hairs over this shit.
Incidentally, there's apparently an option for two players in this game so you could play with a buddy. So when the thieves sneak up and klunk you in the head, there are two of them just in case you are playing with a buddy. I'm shrugging over this as the gameplay doesn't really lend it to fun two-player gaming, unlike, say, Battletoads for the NES where you can keep smacking your friend against the wall of the Wookie Hole. Also, with two players, that means only one character would be left out. I'm still ticked by the lack of selection. I would have thought that at least four characters was some kind of minimal requirement. but since the three we got are all so uninteresting, maybe it's just as well we don't have six bland character to choose from.
The night watch send me to a nearby tavern which, as is always the case when I travel and check into a hotel, turns out to be haunted by the ghost of an elf chick who sings every now and again. I may be utterly alone in this, but I hope this ghost does not figure into the plot at all. It would be nice if it remained an unsolved mystery by the end of the game, just a bit of color to give the whole fantasy land a feel of magic and mystery, like there are all kinds of things going on the world that have nothing to do with the plot.
Anyhoo, eventually the barkeep addresses me, and she's a blond with ample cleavage and a bare midriff. but if you've seen on ample cleavage and bared midriff, you've seen 'em all. She finally gets me on the plot, proper. Something to do with a thieves' guild war and rats in her basement. Talking with the characters amuses me somewhat. The camera position is first person and the animators tried to give the NPC's movements and gestures that utterly fail to feel natural. I'm not sure if it's the 3D texture-mapped polygon puppets the characters are made of or just that the movements are too exaggerated to take seriously or what. Also the dialog is excessively cheesy. I ate it up with a whole box of Ritz Crackers. In a feeble attempt to keep my interest and pretend to be interactive, there are points in the conversation where I can choose a response from my character. At least once or twice, there was only one choice for a response, which makes me wonder why they bothered. Humorously, when waiting for my response, the character I'm speaking to keep wiggling about like one of their ass cheeks fell asleep and they're trying to wake it up while not attracting attention. Overall, most of my complaints about this segment and just the chirping of angry crickets. There is all of this infodumping that needs to go somewhere so that you know what it is you're supposed to be doing. That's kind of important in a game like this. It's not like Crazy Taxi where I'm pretty sure the point is to drive the car. With an RPG you need to know who you're killing where and for what. In this case, it's to kill rats so I can get the key to the sewers. (You'd think there'd be an easier way to get into the sewers. A handy grate or stand in a toilet and pull the lever, perhaps, but whatever.) However, what irritated me is how the dialog and my options were kind of on rails. For instance, above the fireplace is a stuffed Beholder. Having played D&D since the early 80's, I knew what a Beholder was and did not care how they got a stuffed one but the dialog options eventually forced me to ask about it. I find that a bit off-putting. Why bother giving me options when eventually you're going to force me to cover all of the bases anyway? This could be especially annoying when replaying the game as I wouldn't want to sit through most of this shit at all and just get to the game. There may be a button to skip all of this dialog, but I didn't find it.
Anyway, after talking to Cleavage McMidriff and her portly male friend who had the key to the basement, I head down to the meat of the gameplay here, the combat. At first, the combat was easy and I seemed to get the hang of it right away. But then I happened on the first of the giant rats and I learned that they were a tad harder than the barrels, boxes and clay pots I had been fighting earlier in that
1) they move and
2) they fight back, the bastards.
My complaints about the combat are near-identical to my complaints about Diablo and Fate and probably a score of games like them. mostly that the baddies tend to swarm all around me so that I wind-up getting gang raped in the middle of a big, old dog pile. It's like how the wife tends to snuggle up next to me at night so that I'm right up against the edge of the bed and have to sleep on my side for fear of teetering off the brink and there's all of that space behind her, why doesn't she use that? Also, I sometimes have a hard time pointing myself at a given baddie properly and swing my rusty dagger at the empty space on either side of them while they nibble my tits off at their leisure. Fortunately, I was crafter here and fought things through the doorway I had just opened to avoid that clusterfuck effect. But, that bimbo who does stuff when I push buttons lunges forward a step when I press the attack button so the doorway strategy becomes moot when I eventually lunge right into the room and into the middle of a clusterfuck. Fortunately, they were just giant rats, so they couldn't hurt me too badly, but I could see this being a problem later against competent foes.
The reason why this is such a problem is because baddies make a beeline right for me and once engaged, they don't back off or move about much, so I wind up like Lindsay Lohan swarmed by the paparazzi when she's trying to go grocery shopping. Maybe some kind of movement pattern would be a good idea so that it doesn't always become some kind of clusterfuck and combat can have some kind of method besides just standing where you are, no point in moving since all of the baddies are thronging about you anyway, and mashing the attack button. maybe I'm just an embittered so-and-so, but I've played three of these Diablo clones now and this clusterfuck effect has happened in all of them. I hold little hope that there are any that don't have it.
The barrel breaking sort of annoys me a bit. Granted, it's an action RPG staple and a handy way to deal out power-up, items, and just plain gold. i can't really complain about that aspect since my character was robbed right off the bat and had no money, gaining a few gold by committing senseless vandalism is as good a way to earn some extra scratch as any, not to mention healing potions and such. Although I question the wisdom of someone who keeps a longsword in a clay pot. It's undeniable that it's a feature that works and even I was enjoying breaking things to see what I could get, but at the same time, I can't help but think that there must be a better way.
Graphically, the game looks nice. The flickering torchlight effect works fairly well, but the rippling water effect on the stagnant sewer water is impressive. One thing I will complain about is the walls, which are opaque. This means that stuff in a room near the bottom edge of the screen cannot be seen as the wall blocks your view. I missed a couple barrels that way. There is probably a means to adjust the camera, but I didn't bother finding it.
Anyhow, once I'd killed the rats and went back for the sewer key, I went back down and found myself against baddies that were somewhat more difficult that barrels and rats: Kobolds and giant spiders. Fortunately, I'd acquired a few healing potions and I needed them, but I wasn't used to keeping an eye on my health at this point as it wasn't a problem thus far and I was eventually killed. I could have just loaded a saved game and continued playing, but I didn't save the game as the wife has the memory card completely full. It probably needs to be cleaned out a bit as she hasn't played much in the last couple years. But, I got a decent enough sense of the game.
Overall, I liked the game, despite it's faults. I certainly enjoyed it better than God Of War or Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows. God Of War tried to mix things up a bit with quick time and button mashing events in the combat, which I found detracted from my enjoyment rather than adding. Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows, on the other hand, was repetitive to the point of tears. Granted, most baddies seemed to go down with one hit, but you get positively mobbed until you destroy the monster generators which seem to take forever to break, and there are always more of them.
But Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance works well enough for what it is. It could be better, but then, not every game can dispense marshmallows. The one major embuggerance that I didn't get to were the jumping puzzles. I remember the wife got extremely frustrated by them and was gleeful that they were absent in the sequel.
Some fans of the PC game Baldur's Gate have complained about the change in gameplay for this game from that title. But these people enjoying playing games with a mouse, and are therefore not to be trusted.
So it's not a bad little game. I'm just not in any hurry to sit through the opening again, is all.
I have played one of these things all the way through, Great Greed for the old and pathetic black and white Gameboy and if I never deal with random encounters and turn-based combat ever again it will be too soon, not to mention the plot which fits somewhere between "retarded preschooler" and "moon logic." Watching the wife play through the Final Fantasy series and others cemented this opinion.
So, one of my few options was Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. This game had several strikes against it before I even picked up the box.
First of all, it's based on Dungeons & Dragons. Put simply, I would like to have nothing to do with Dungeons & Dragons anymore for the rest of my life. I have cast my last polyhedral die. More to the point, whenever one of these role-playing games gets turned into a video game, they always retain, and sharpen the focus on the most tedious aspects of those games, namely all of the stat keeping, level-upping, skill purchasing, equipment management and such. Pretty much anything that gets written down on a typical character sheet. I hated dealing with this shit in the paper and dice game. Somehow I doubt that turning the process into computer code will suddenly make it fun.
The second strike is that, judging from the pictures on the back of the box and recalling when the wife played, the game could probably be summed up rather neatly as "kind of like Diablo." Diablo was a big hit for Blizzard Entertainment in 1997. I even received it as a gift from the wife back then. She's the one who played it, though. I have no patience for the damned thing, as my past review of Fate can attest. But, most of that could probably be shouldered by the horrible mouse controls, which is still the worst device for game playing ever invented. Since the PS2 lacks a mouse, maybe it'll be alright. Right?
Yeah, we'll see.
So, the game starts up and after a brief character selection sequence which gave me a choice of three decidedly uninteresting characters (although I don't know why I'm complaining as I always play the chick, regardless), I was thrown into the opening cinematic-o-rama. I should be grousing up a storm over this lengthy section right at the beginning where I have nothing to do but sit and watch, but for some reason I'm not. I may have simply resigned myself to this as these action RPG games always have heavy cinematic and dialog scenes, especially at the beginning because god forfend that we won't know what the hell is going on. But, after watching it, I'm not sure if I know what's going on, anyway, but I am positive that I do not care.
Essentially, upon arrival in Baldur's Gate, a quasi-medieval city that sort of reminds my of my old neighborhood in Queens, I'm immediately accosted and robbed by a pack of thieves. Interestingly, one of the thieves is wearing a spiky Darth Vader helmet that indicates he's a bad guy, and a fairly major one at that. I suspect I'll have to fight this booger before the game ends and that the computer will cheat like a little ***** during said fight.
Unfortunately, before these ruffians can kill me and spare me the trouble, the night watch shows up and scares them off. Based on the dialog that comes later, why they didn't kill me anyway with a quick slash of the dagger is puzzling, but I guess I can't split hairs over this shit.
Incidentally, there's apparently an option for two players in this game so you could play with a buddy. So when the thieves sneak up and klunk you in the head, there are two of them just in case you are playing with a buddy. I'm shrugging over this as the gameplay doesn't really lend it to fun two-player gaming, unlike, say, Battletoads for the NES where you can keep smacking your friend against the wall of the Wookie Hole. Also, with two players, that means only one character would be left out. I'm still ticked by the lack of selection. I would have thought that at least four characters was some kind of minimal requirement. but since the three we got are all so uninteresting, maybe it's just as well we don't have six bland character to choose from.
The night watch send me to a nearby tavern which, as is always the case when I travel and check into a hotel, turns out to be haunted by the ghost of an elf chick who sings every now and again. I may be utterly alone in this, but I hope this ghost does not figure into the plot at all. It would be nice if it remained an unsolved mystery by the end of the game, just a bit of color to give the whole fantasy land a feel of magic and mystery, like there are all kinds of things going on the world that have nothing to do with the plot.
Anyhoo, eventually the barkeep addresses me, and she's a blond with ample cleavage and a bare midriff. but if you've seen on ample cleavage and bared midriff, you've seen 'em all. She finally gets me on the plot, proper. Something to do with a thieves' guild war and rats in her basement. Talking with the characters amuses me somewhat. The camera position is first person and the animators tried to give the NPC's movements and gestures that utterly fail to feel natural. I'm not sure if it's the 3D texture-mapped polygon puppets the characters are made of or just that the movements are too exaggerated to take seriously or what. Also the dialog is excessively cheesy. I ate it up with a whole box of Ritz Crackers. In a feeble attempt to keep my interest and pretend to be interactive, there are points in the conversation where I can choose a response from my character. At least once or twice, there was only one choice for a response, which makes me wonder why they bothered. Humorously, when waiting for my response, the character I'm speaking to keep wiggling about like one of their ass cheeks fell asleep and they're trying to wake it up while not attracting attention. Overall, most of my complaints about this segment and just the chirping of angry crickets. There is all of this infodumping that needs to go somewhere so that you know what it is you're supposed to be doing. That's kind of important in a game like this. It's not like Crazy Taxi where I'm pretty sure the point is to drive the car. With an RPG you need to know who you're killing where and for what. In this case, it's to kill rats so I can get the key to the sewers. (You'd think there'd be an easier way to get into the sewers. A handy grate or stand in a toilet and pull the lever, perhaps, but whatever.) However, what irritated me is how the dialog and my options were kind of on rails. For instance, above the fireplace is a stuffed Beholder. Having played D&D since the early 80's, I knew what a Beholder was and did not care how they got a stuffed one but the dialog options eventually forced me to ask about it. I find that a bit off-putting. Why bother giving me options when eventually you're going to force me to cover all of the bases anyway? This could be especially annoying when replaying the game as I wouldn't want to sit through most of this shit at all and just get to the game. There may be a button to skip all of this dialog, but I didn't find it.
Anyway, after talking to Cleavage McMidriff and her portly male friend who had the key to the basement, I head down to the meat of the gameplay here, the combat. At first, the combat was easy and I seemed to get the hang of it right away. But then I happened on the first of the giant rats and I learned that they were a tad harder than the barrels, boxes and clay pots I had been fighting earlier in that
1) they move and
2) they fight back, the bastards.
My complaints about the combat are near-identical to my complaints about Diablo and Fate and probably a score of games like them. mostly that the baddies tend to swarm all around me so that I wind-up getting gang raped in the middle of a big, old dog pile. It's like how the wife tends to snuggle up next to me at night so that I'm right up against the edge of the bed and have to sleep on my side for fear of teetering off the brink and there's all of that space behind her, why doesn't she use that? Also, I sometimes have a hard time pointing myself at a given baddie properly and swing my rusty dagger at the empty space on either side of them while they nibble my tits off at their leisure. Fortunately, I was crafter here and fought things through the doorway I had just opened to avoid that clusterfuck effect. But, that bimbo who does stuff when I push buttons lunges forward a step when I press the attack button so the doorway strategy becomes moot when I eventually lunge right into the room and into the middle of a clusterfuck. Fortunately, they were just giant rats, so they couldn't hurt me too badly, but I could see this being a problem later against competent foes.
The reason why this is such a problem is because baddies make a beeline right for me and once engaged, they don't back off or move about much, so I wind up like Lindsay Lohan swarmed by the paparazzi when she's trying to go grocery shopping. Maybe some kind of movement pattern would be a good idea so that it doesn't always become some kind of clusterfuck and combat can have some kind of method besides just standing where you are, no point in moving since all of the baddies are thronging about you anyway, and mashing the attack button. maybe I'm just an embittered so-and-so, but I've played three of these Diablo clones now and this clusterfuck effect has happened in all of them. I hold little hope that there are any that don't have it.
The barrel breaking sort of annoys me a bit. Granted, it's an action RPG staple and a handy way to deal out power-up, items, and just plain gold. i can't really complain about that aspect since my character was robbed right off the bat and had no money, gaining a few gold by committing senseless vandalism is as good a way to earn some extra scratch as any, not to mention healing potions and such. Although I question the wisdom of someone who keeps a longsword in a clay pot. It's undeniable that it's a feature that works and even I was enjoying breaking things to see what I could get, but at the same time, I can't help but think that there must be a better way.
Graphically, the game looks nice. The flickering torchlight effect works fairly well, but the rippling water effect on the stagnant sewer water is impressive. One thing I will complain about is the walls, which are opaque. This means that stuff in a room near the bottom edge of the screen cannot be seen as the wall blocks your view. I missed a couple barrels that way. There is probably a means to adjust the camera, but I didn't bother finding it.
Anyhow, once I'd killed the rats and went back for the sewer key, I went back down and found myself against baddies that were somewhat more difficult that barrels and rats: Kobolds and giant spiders. Fortunately, I'd acquired a few healing potions and I needed them, but I wasn't used to keeping an eye on my health at this point as it wasn't a problem thus far and I was eventually killed. I could have just loaded a saved game and continued playing, but I didn't save the game as the wife has the memory card completely full. It probably needs to be cleaned out a bit as she hasn't played much in the last couple years. But, I got a decent enough sense of the game.
Overall, I liked the game, despite it's faults. I certainly enjoyed it better than God Of War or Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows. God Of War tried to mix things up a bit with quick time and button mashing events in the combat, which I found detracted from my enjoyment rather than adding. Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows, on the other hand, was repetitive to the point of tears. Granted, most baddies seemed to go down with one hit, but you get positively mobbed until you destroy the monster generators which seem to take forever to break, and there are always more of them.
But Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance works well enough for what it is. It could be better, but then, not every game can dispense marshmallows. The one major embuggerance that I didn't get to were the jumping puzzles. I remember the wife got extremely frustrated by them and was gleeful that they were absent in the sequel.
Some fans of the PC game Baldur's Gate have complained about the change in gameplay for this game from that title. But these people enjoying playing games with a mouse, and are therefore not to be trusted.
So it's not a bad little game. I'm just not in any hurry to sit through the opening again, is all.
