Last night my girlfriend and I tried something we’d never done before. Let me tell you all about it. Someone recommended Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance (PS2)
to me, they’d played it start to finish and it was a great game. I figured she’s pretty open-minded, and she likes a couple other games on the PlayStation 2, so let’s try it. She was open to the idea, but the problem is it’s the fist time she’s played anything in a Dungeons & Dragons or Bard’s Tale genre.

In case this isn’t your bag either, let me explain. Any time you start a new campaign (a campaign is a related series of adventures) in Dungeons & Dragons or the many others like it, you get a wimpy new character with a knife that has to go out and kill something even wimpier. Something diminutive like a goblin, an imp or a rat. A giant rat. Or a bunch of giant rats, maybe thirty of them that live under the Inn that you start the game in. Well, it’s not always exactly like this, but in Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, that’s precisely the way it starts. In D&D the purpose is just to gain experience points which bring you up to the next level where you actually stand a reasonable chance of surviving a fight with a sentient being.

Really, D&D starts you out as a real wimp. I once played a game that came from TSR and we tried to stick right to the rules. At least I did, no re-rolling stats that I didn’t like and no begging plenary indulgence of the dungeon master when things didn’t turn out my way. Anyway, the game starts out this time with all the characters in the hold of a ship. The ship lurches and the first die roll of the game is to se if you get hurt then roll 1 to 4 points of damage. My character died. Seriously - the ship lurched and the character fell over and died.

So back to Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, I guessed that was the idea with the rats, kill them, get a little loot, trade your rusty knife for a rusty sword. I don’t yet know that’s true unfortunately. We were victims of the save-point debate. The first hint was the incredulous “We have to do all that over again?” Then it was “Well, I’d like to keep going, but I don’t want to have to just keep going through that.” I really see her side of it. We’re adults, our time to play is precious and wasting it on tripping a trek down a dark dank hall to get mauled by smelly thugs five times over doesn’t sound like fun. On my own I might mess around with it more, but only because I’ve grown up trained that you have to work around deficiencies of any game you play. Her perspective is fresh - if this game isn’t entertaining, then there are others that are.

That aside, I don’t think the exceptionally high-polygon barmaid at the beginning of the story helped put her in a receptive frame of mind in the first place.

I’ll be playing more of the game, it does look interesting to me, but I think I might be finishing up that sewer scene by myself.