Baldurs Gate
I bought Baldur's Gate yesterday for about $25 at MCenter. The knowledge that BG2 was OS X native lured me into the store, but that game was also twice as expensive. BG runs OK under classic mode. My main complaint is that there's no obvious way, perhaps no way at all, to background the game; to get to anything else on your machine, you must save and quit. Enh. This game has a 1998 copyright date on it; this was well into the days when many, perhaps most computer users expected to have one window on their desktop dedicated to continual information flow from the Internet. Then again, this was back when very few people had broadband access at home -- I didn't -- so the idea of isolating one's machine from the Net for awhile wasn't completely alien. But now, the game asks me to forget about my incoming email while I'm playing. Foo... if I wanted to do that, I'd go play a human-enabled RPG.
Also, having a broken CD drive latch makes a painful experience out of playing games that rely on disk swappage. Sigh. I'll fix it when next I get money, maybe.
I distinctly remember reading a magazine review of a computer game some dozen or more years ago which opened with the reviewer sighing about the 15 floppies that poured forth from the box upon opening, and his prediction that games would have to start moving toe CD-ROM as a standard format pretty soon. Well, that happened, of course, and it's been the norm for a long time -- no longer do you see boxes with 'Super CD-ROM Graphics!!!' splashed across them. So then: where are the DVD games, eh eh eh?
Anyway: I am so far interested in how the game's story seems to be evidence of a feedback loop from Japanese CRPGs, which of course are based around the game mechanics of earlier Western CRPGs. But compared to, say, "Pools of Radiance", this game plays a lot like a "Final Fantasy"-type game. You start off with a single, young protagonist (though you get to make any flavor of AD&D2E PC for this, where a J-CRPG would just hand you one) under the tutelage of an elderly master, when Disaster Strikes, and you must Flee the Village where you have spent All your Life, and then the game's master baddie shows up to stomp the both of you. (Dollars to donuts says that the master baddie actually isn't the endboss, who is a much greater evil than the master baddie is working for.) You flee, and quickly make Quirky Companions, and so on. This is like every pre-1990 Jackie Chan movie I have ever seen.
Right now I'm at a part where a bad guy is killing me repeatedly. Maybe I should have not picked a 4-HP gnome illusionist as my hero? No matter; the frequent death reminds me of the more important things I've been lining up for myself. Let's see what else I can do today.
Also, having a broken CD drive latch makes a painful experience out of playing games that rely on disk swappage. Sigh. I'll fix it when next I get money, maybe.
I distinctly remember reading a magazine review of a computer game some dozen or more years ago which opened with the reviewer sighing about the 15 floppies that poured forth from the box upon opening, and his prediction that games would have to start moving toe CD-ROM as a standard format pretty soon. Well, that happened, of course, and it's been the norm for a long time -- no longer do you see boxes with 'Super CD-ROM Graphics!!!' splashed across them. So then: where are the DVD games, eh eh eh?
Anyway: I am so far interested in how the game's story seems to be evidence of a feedback loop from Japanese CRPGs, which of course are based around the game mechanics of earlier Western CRPGs. But compared to, say, "Pools of Radiance", this game plays a lot like a "Final Fantasy"-type game. You start off with a single, young protagonist (though you get to make any flavor of AD&D2E PC for this, where a J-CRPG would just hand you one) under the tutelage of an elderly master, when Disaster Strikes, and you must Flee the Village where you have spent All your Life, and then the game's master baddie shows up to stomp the both of you. (Dollars to donuts says that the master baddie actually isn't the endboss, who is a much greater evil than the master baddie is working for.) You flee, and quickly make Quirky Companions, and so on. This is like every pre-1990 Jackie Chan movie I have ever seen.
Right now I'm at a part where a bad guy is killing me repeatedly. Maybe I should have not picked a 4-HP gnome illusionist as my hero? No matter; the frequent death reminds me of the more important things I've been lining up for myself. Let's see what else I can do today.