by Kenneth Andrews

Created on: July 05, 2009

Although Baldur's Gate is easily the funkiest RPG computer game I've ever played (this is admittedly not too hard as it's a genre that I generally sneer at, with only Ultima Underworld 2 and Ultima 8: Pagan breaking my embargo), I must warn you severely. This game will take over your life. You will get up in the morning, load it up to try and level up your main character before breakfast, and then wonder why it seems to be dark again all of a sudden and your watch is saying it's time to go to bed.

In this probably epic tale of a young chap finding out he's a Death God or something, there are so many quests, sub-quests, amusing routines that you repeat over and over again (like the exploding ogre) and bits that are dead hard and force you to reload a million times, that you should only really start the game if you have the free time to finish it.

In other words, if you are unemployed, a student, or just plain waiting for death, this is the perfect game for you.

For those unfamiliar with role-playing (like me! I rock!), you basically have to create your own character, whose life story is then cunningly integrated with the main plot of the game. In a breathtakingly pointless piece of PC gibberish, women are just as good at men as everything, oh yes, and people who think otherwise suck. Despite the fact that the game takes place in a cod-feudal setting and women are portrayed as mindless ditherers setting you stupid sub-quests to find their errant son/husband throughout (I don't know why they bother, you always find the stupid sods dead in a ditch somewhere).

The character creation process is painless. You select various skills and stuff, and you may as well do it at random because you can always retrain your character in the course of the game, and because you have to reload if your main character dies, you tend to keep him out of the fighting anyway. The only tricky bit comes when you have to accept the dice rolls for 'attributes' like dexterity, charisma and stuff. The brick-thick manual explains what all these things do, but who can be bothered reading that? Make sure you've a fairly high constitution score is my best advice on this as that determines the number of wounds you can take.

The game itself is great. You wander around, and there's a lot of random minor characters with silly names full of apostrophes. They tend to speak in silly film quotes (peasants say 'You talkin' to me?' in a cod-Taxi Driver stylee) or high melodrama ('I am death come among you!')

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