When I was about 16, I had a minor operation on my foot. I was told by the nurse that I would have to have 2 weeks off of school to “recover” and be visited by a district nurse every other day. I literally had to have my feet up for two weeks and for an only-child teenager, it would usually mean extreme boredom. However this turned out to be an awesome two weeks, because I had Baldur’s Gate.
The classic RPG computer game was my saviour and was also the first RPG that I have played which led me getting into all sorts of other great games like The Elder Scrolls, Dragonage and the Fallout series.
What I love about this game is it’s simplicity in terms of gameplay, but also how much it was driven by a strong storyline which gave the game a real sense of direction. Even similarly great games like Icewind Dale didn’t have the wonderful plot that the Baldur’s Gate games had. I played it countless times and discovered new places and sub-plots each time. I took great pleasure in obtaining the best armour and weapons and working out the different possible strategies on defeating the hardest enemies.
A couple of years ago I bought an iMac and on the spur of the moment I installed a Windows partition and tried to run Baldur’s Gate on it once again. I’m not going to lie, it was awful. My high resolution 16:9 display stretched the image and a 800×600 resolution game on a screen like mine looked terrible. I was probably never going to be able to play this game again.
A while back, a company called Overhaul games started work on remastering the Baldur’s Gate game, using an upgraded engine, higher resolution graphics, new characters, quests and a better functioning multiplayer system. The new game will be available on Mac and PC as well as iPad and Android tablets. I hear that iCloud will be supported, allowing gamers to use game saves over different machines.
I can’t wait to play this game on the iPad, I might even splash out on the Mac version too. The idea of touching a character to select them instead of using a mouse to click seems much more intuitive, and I can’t wait to see the new cut scene animations and hear some of the new score that’s being provided.
The game was due to be released in September, but rumours are the release date will be November 30th. There’s also talks of Baldur’s Gate 2 being released before the end of 2013.
I hope this sparks off a resurrection of other classic games. I’d love to play Icewind Dale on the iPad, or how about Revenge of Shinobi? There was even a pretty cool X-Files game released many years ago that I wouldn’t mind seeing come back. After all, it’d be a tremendous shame for these games to be consigned to history.
Matt Keil 