Welcome to Coffee Talk! Let’s start off the day by discussing whatever is on your (nerd chic) mind. Every morning I’ll kick off a discussion and I’m counting on you to participate in it. If you’re not feelin’ my topic, feel free to start a chat with your fellow readers and see where it takes you. Whether you’re talking about videogames, Robinson Cano switching agents from Scott Boras to Jay-Z, Mark Cuban saying that he’d give Brittney Griner a shot with the Mavericks, or T-Mobile’s awesome (and mentally unbalanced) CEO, Coffee Talk is the place to do it.
On one of my trips to Asia, I was on the back of a motorcycle taxi and got caught in a big rainstorm. I asked the taxi driver to pull over and ducked into the nearest bar. To my shock, an ex-girlfriend — one that I never thought I’d see again — was in the bar, also taking shelter from the storm. What followed was three excellent days between two people that knew each other intimately. In the immortal words of Journey, it was “the joy of discovering you.” That experience and that joy reminded me of my last three days with Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition for Mac OS. I knew the original intimately, having played through it 18 times, and so far it has been an absolute pleasure rediscovering this brilliant game.
Right now, I have two Baldur’s Gate EE games going on. First up is R.Pad, who is currently a level four thief, but will eventually be dual-classed into a fighter-thief. I’m playing this game straight up, without any cheat codes. Then there’s Lord Ra Ra (which is what I will legally change my name to when I marry Stefani Germanotta), the level six assassin (screenshot is a day old). He gets the benefit of the cheat console — stats jacked up to god-like levels and any weapon/item I can think of. It’s fun plowing through the game and relearning the maps as Lord Ra Ra, while using that knowledge to chart an optimal course for R.Pad.
There were a lot of habits I had to relearn during my first few hours with the game. Like many videogames released in the ’90s, the difficulty can be unevenly brutal and you can really screw yourself over by not saving every few minutes. While I love the deliberate pause-and-play combat, it’s something that I haven’t experienced in years. Today’s videogames are all about keeping you in the fantasy and moving things along at a brisk pace. Battles that let you pause several times to thoughtfully plot out strategies are considered passe. While it’s atypical in 2013, I found that it’s something that I still very much love (like the way my ex uses her…never mind). In fact, aside from the (still) moronic pathfinding, I’m loving everything about Baldur’s Gate EE.
Have you ever found yourself in a similar situation? Have you ever rediscovered a game that you haven’t played for more than a decade and found it just as captivating as the first time you played it? Now please excuse me as I have to get back to my Baldur’s Gate bliss.
Metal Gear Solid is like that for me. Unfortunately Sons of Liberty and SnakeEater are unplayable due to me not being able to easily wire my brain to standard instead of inverted axis. Down is up damnit!
I’m buying this game when I get a new iPad.
What do you think of Snake getting a new voice actor?
“That’s not Solid Snake!”
Seriously I will miss his voice. I’d hope to have Japanese voices with English subtitles as an option in lieu of what I’m used to hearing.
I do wonder why they chose not to use him. As far as I can tell this is the largest deviation as far as voice acting is concerned in any popular story driven franchise.
If anybody else is going to voice Snake besides David Hayter, it should be Clint Eastwood.
Mine are LoZ : a link to the past and ocarina of time