Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance (Xbox) - Let's Play 1001 Games - Episode 593
14Let's hunt some sewer monkeys!
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I'm Gaming Jay: Youtube gamer, let's player, fan of retro games, and determined optimist... Join me in this series while I try out EACH of the video games in the book 1001 VIDEO GAMES YOU MUST PLAY BEFORE YOU DIE, before I die. The game review for each game will focus on the question of whether you MUST play this game before you die. But to be honest, the game review parts are just for fun, and are not meant to be definitive, in depth reviews; this series is more about the YouTube gamer journey itself. From Mario games to the Halo series, from arcade games to Commodore 64, PC games to the NES and Sega Genesis, Playstation to the Xbox, let's play those classic retro games that we grew up with, have fond memories of, or heard of but never got a chance to try! And with that said, the game review for today is...
Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldur%27s_Gate:_Dark_Alliance
Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance is a 2001 action role-playing/hack and slash video game developed by Snowblind Studios for PlayStation 2 and Xbox. It was ported to GameCube by High Voltage Software, and to the Game Boy Advance by Magic Pockets. The game was published for PlayStation, Xbox and GameCube by Black Isle Studios, a division of Interplay Entertainment, and distributed by Vivendi Universal Games. The Game Boy Advance version was published by DSI Games. CD Projekt was developing a version for Microsoft Windows, but it was ultimately cancelled.
The game is set in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting of Dungeons & Dragons, and the gameplay is based on the rules of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, which were released in 2000. It is the first video game to implement the real time application of the new rules.[7] It is also the first game in the Baldur's Gate series released on consoles as opposed to a PC and/or Mac.
Dark Alliance was well received on all four platforms, with the PlayStation 2 version going on to win the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences award for "Role-Playing Game of the Year" (2001). A sequel, Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance II, was released in 2004 for PlayStation 2 and Xbox. A third game was planned, but was cancelled early in development due to legal problems, and the closure of Black Isle Studios after Interplay went bankrupt.
Dark Alliance was first revealed on November 7, 2000, when Interplay confirmed to IGN that a PlayStation 2 game based on Baldur's Gate II had entered production, following the cancellation of the Sega Dreamcast port of the original Baldur's Gate. Little was known at this time other than the fact that Interplay would publish, and BioWare, developers of the original Baldur's Gate, would not develop the game. Instead, the game was to be developed by Snowblind Studios.[21][22] The game was officially confirmed on February 15, 2001.
The game utilized a new game engine; the Dark Alliance Engine, which was built specifically for Dark Alliance, and would go on to become the foundation for other games on the PlayStation 2, such as Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel[26] and The Bard's Tale.[27] Graphically, the Dark Alliance engine is a major improvement over the engine used by the original PC Baldur's Gate games, the Infinity Engine. Infinity was only able to render 2D sprite characters and static environments. The Dark Alliance engine, on the other hand, made use of the PlayStation 2's advanced GPU, allowing for such improvements as dynamic lighting, real-time shadowing and 3D models of characters and environments. IGN wrote of the E3 presentation, that "none of the problems that are commonly associated with PlayStation 2 games, such as low-res textures, flickering, or aliasing problems, are to be found here. It's hard to think of a game that pulls off the much-fabled anti-aliasing as well as this game does. Dark Alliance uses a technique similar to what a large number of Dreamcast games did to pull off their clean look: they simply render the scene at a much higher resolution, anti-alias it, then drop it down to a more acceptable resolution for TVs. The result is a beautifully anti-aliased game".