Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance Preview

To say that these previewers were impressed would not be accurate. I’ve experienced first hand the glee that they felt after playing a vastly superior game for the first time, only to day dream about it for hours later. The game this time is the out-from-nowhere RPG for the Playstation 2, Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, and PC.ign offers their first impressions in a lengthy page preview with very nice looking shots following. A pleasant waft:

Once I was able to pull my eyes off of the TV for a second or two, I really took the time to scrutinize the graphics, and to my delight, I could find nothing wrong with them. Let me repeat that again: I could find NOTHING wrong with the graphics. 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 TV’s. The result is a beautifully anti-aliased game.

This was just one of a number of paragraphs with the theme: this game is soooo cool. So I have one question. If you don’t yet have the Playstation 2… did you count it out?