What can change the nature of a man?
I finished a computer game this week. Now, this may not sound like a big deal to most people, but I rarely finish a game. I buy tons of them, and then they sit on my shelves while I play Elder Scrolls games and surf the web. I bought Half-Life 2 when it came out and I haven't even started it yet - because I never quite finished the original. The Baldur's Gate 2 collectors edition sits above my monitor in virgin splendour.
So I've decided that I have to stop buying a game, playing it for three hours (or not at all) and then giving up. I have to finish the games I have. The first game I picked to complete (walkthrough assisted if necessary) was Planescape: Torment. I played it through to about half-way 6 or 7 years ago, got stuck because I ran out of cash, and stopped (probably in order to play more Morrowind). I remember really loving what I had played though, so I rolled a new Nameless One (more or less the same as my first one) and started over.
What a great game this is even now. You could complain about the graphics, but I think the old Infinity Engine holds up well. In any case, PS:T is primarily a text-based RPG with a GUI interface. All the really important events and discoveries in the story take place in the dialogue window. Apparently the game contains 800,000 words of descriptive and dialogue text. It took me at least 3 weeks to get through the game. The story is pretty gripping as well, at one important point I had one of those nights where you 'just finish off this section' at 1 o'clock in the morning and then look up to find that it's 4 and you have to be up in 3 hours. Pretty much all I'd done those 3 hours was read.
I like RPGs and I don't mind grinding too much, but there's actually very little of it in PS:T. The vast majority of your experience points come from conversation and quest completion, so if you talk to everybody about everything (which you should do anyway because that's how the story gets told), and do all the side quests, you should level up enough. Granted, my party wasn't the strongest and fightiest because I tended to stick with characters I'd got attached to rather than trade in the thief for a tank or something. As a result, there was some legging-it though more monster-ridden sections later in the game, and the party was very dependent on its priest's healing spells. I still managed to complete without too much difficulty, because the game isn't that combat focused.
I really enjoyed the game-world too, and found myself thinking in the Chant (the in-game slang) IRL quite quickly. Chatting with zombies, negotiating with rat-gestalts, getting new tattoos - the whole environment is really involving. I didn't really want to leave the Hive.
PS:T meditates on various philosophical subjects such as mortality, identity, the nature of reality etc. It would be hard to say much without giving away aspects of the plot, which I don't want to do, because you should play the game and find out yourself. I also found it quite emotionally involving, and got very protective of my party members. Did I cry at the end? Nearly.
So I've decided that I have to stop buying a game, playing it for three hours (or not at all) and then giving up. I have to finish the games I have. The first game I picked to complete (walkthrough assisted if necessary) was Planescape: Torment. I played it through to about half-way 6 or 7 years ago, got stuck because I ran out of cash, and stopped (probably in order to play more Morrowind). I remember really loving what I had played though, so I rolled a new Nameless One (more or less the same as my first one) and started over.
What a great game this is even now. You could complain about the graphics, but I think the old Infinity Engine holds up well. In any case, PS:T is primarily a text-based RPG with a GUI interface. All the really important events and discoveries in the story take place in the dialogue window. Apparently the game contains 800,000 words of descriptive and dialogue text. It took me at least 3 weeks to get through the game. The story is pretty gripping as well, at one important point I had one of those nights where you 'just finish off this section' at 1 o'clock in the morning and then look up to find that it's 4 and you have to be up in 3 hours. Pretty much all I'd done those 3 hours was read.
I like RPGs and I don't mind grinding too much, but there's actually very little of it in PS:T. The vast majority of your experience points come from conversation and quest completion, so if you talk to everybody about everything (which you should do anyway because that's how the story gets told), and do all the side quests, you should level up enough. Granted, my party wasn't the strongest and fightiest because I tended to stick with characters I'd got attached to rather than trade in the thief for a tank or something. As a result, there was some legging-it though more monster-ridden sections later in the game, and the party was very dependent on its priest's healing spells. I still managed to complete without too much difficulty, because the game isn't that combat focused.
I really enjoyed the game-world too, and found myself thinking in the Chant (the in-game slang) IRL quite quickly. Chatting with zombies, negotiating with rat-gestalts, getting new tattoos - the whole environment is really involving. I didn't really want to leave the Hive.
PS:T meditates on various philosophical subjects such as mortality, identity, the nature of reality etc. It would be hard to say much without giving away aspects of the plot, which I don't want to do, because you should play the game and find out yourself. I also found it quite emotionally involving, and got very protective of my party members. Did I cry at the end? Nearly.