Planescape: Torment - PC

this game gets a lot of great reviews, and i guess almost ten years ago, this game was considered cutting edge with RPGs for PCs. i only bought this game two months ago, and i feel it's only okay. the graphics are a bit bland, which creates problems because sometimes your character will have to find something in the game environment but since so much on the screen is either shadowed or looks the same, it's hard to spot important things. also, the AI can be maddeningly frustrating. you "control" a group of about five players, but they'll do the most ridiculous things, like running into danger, standing and simply getting hit, not attacking. this becomes a serious issue towards the end of the game when you have to fight a lot and need your characters to be on point instead of doing things which specifically gets them hurt and killed. overall, this game is okay, the storyline is okay. it's just a blah sort of game.

This game is way too cool. The premise is you wake up on a mortuary slab with amnesia. You have to figure out: who you are, where's your stuff, why do you keep waking up after each time you die, and what do you want to do about it? The locations in the game stay constant but what your character does and says *greatly* affects what happens in the game. I had to restart the game after moving it to another PC, and there were different interactions with the characters in the game. (In one the main character was able to talk his way out of a lot of trouble. In the other, he had to fight his way out.) The tone of the game is very *dark*. You are in an afterlife and it's not a very pleasant place. There is lots of creepiness: the music, the visuals, even the written descriptions. Philosophy plays a big part in the game and story line. Your character can succeed by talking, making helpful observations, or verbal argument (if you know something about your verbal opponent's point of view). And when diplomacy fails, there is always force. (Violence is not much of a philosophy but having other options is a nice change from the traditional Hack and Slash RPG where the choices are: hack violence or slash violence.) But the game also needs a lot of system resources. 600 meg of hard drive minimally. To get faster play you can copy the CD's to your hard drive (roughly eating another 3 * 600 meg - described at a very cool game web site: plus as much free space for page/swap file as you can spare. And it will run with 32 meg of memory but it's choppy when you enter a new area. It does better with 64 meg (and even better with more). But you get some great effects for all those resources. You watch little characters move around, talk to each other, and fight each other in some pretty amazing detail. And it's been eating all my goof off time for the past week.

This is a good game, but a few warnings: 1) The story is great but I built it up in my head a little too much after reading the reviews. It is well-written, and written with the end in mind. Unlike most games which are kind of written as they go, things will make MORE sense as the game goes on until everything does at the end. Minor complaint: There were a few things that were either continuity issues, or just explained poorly IMO. Mainly to do with what order things were done by past incarnations and when they lived. Major complaint: Without giving away too much, suffice to say that there are a few characters you meet in the first half of the game who have much more information about you than they let on initially, and EVEN after you become aware of this you will NOT get dialog choices to follow this line of questioning much further. People who would know what you did, where you went, why you did it, and you can't ask. That's just dumb and really took me out of the game, I set it aside for a few days and almost didn't finish it. I would have much preferred it if meeting such people was a difficult side-quest with a big payoff in terms of story, instead of just being there but you can't use them. 2) The game is LINEAR, it's really more of an interactive novel than anything. Your main form of interaction with the game is choosing dialogue. While the dialogue choices are generally diverse and this is a fun part of the game, it didn't make seem to make much impact on the game. Your choices affect your alignment, but as far as I could tell your alignment makes a superficial effect on the game at best, and NO difference in the ending. So it's not that big a deal. Also I suspect most people will end up being "neutral good" (and I think the game encourages that alignment), so what's the big deal. Compare this to a game like Fallout, where decisions you make are constantly affecting the ending in subtle ways and how people respond to you later in the game. The other thing to consider is that your main quest in the game is figure out how to die. It can be hard to get into character when your goal is so weird. Personally I was far more interested in figure out WHO I was in my first life and WHY I was immortal and made the choices I did. You can't really pursue this goal by itself however. Without giving away spoilers, suffice to say by the end of the game, this is all covered at a high level, but not near what I was looking for. For me the whole payoff of the game was the story, so I was hoping for a little more meat than that and some concrete examples would have made the ending easier to accept. 3) Other than the story, the game is pretty bland. I HATED Baldur's Gate and the D&D combat system, which is basically just 1) attack 2) use healing potion/spell 3) use your best spells 4) repeat. 1000 battles later, it's not fun anymore, just a nuisance. Torment uses the same battle system but more like maybe 300-400 battles, so not as bad, but still not fun. Spell effects are cool but freeze the game and take FOREVER which can be frustrating if you're playing as a mage and are playing the same battle over after dying a few times. Overall I really enjoyed the game, but more for the story it told than the game itself. Playing the game will get you into the character and make the story more meaningful, but will also be frustrating since your actions are so limited. Overall my complaints were over implementation, this was a darn good game that could have been one of the best ever.

I'm giving 1 star because this is one of the cheapest packages I have ever bought, it looks like a pirated copy! No, wait, a pirated copy would look better!! All the disks came in a single case, onve over the other (which caused scratches in almost all of them), Oh and all the cool covers on the disks? horrible black and white labels! I regret buying this!

....oh well. In it's time this game was A+. It's time has passed though. It's still somewhat fun , but graphic's and the like have advanced so far beyond this I don't feel right raving on to hard on it. If it's a bargain priced game or a decent 2nd hand copy it is fun for a run through. The story and difficulty are quite good so that helps it hold up that's a plus.