Entry #91
- Listening to:
- Chopin, Ballade No. 4 in F minor, op. 52. Beautiful, soft
music; rhythmically fascinating.
We have been playing a lot of
Planescape:
Torment recently. This is a so-called
role-playing game. What this really means is that it's
an adventure game (complete with exploration, puzzles and the like)
combined with a
"real-time strategy" aspect when your
party of characters gets into a scrap. Here the mix is very good;
there's not too much combat, but there's enough to make things tense
as we sneak around the world looking for clues to explain our
situation. At the moment, we're learning stuff at a gratifying rate,
and the world really does seem to be opening up in front of us.
Compare this with Riven, which has no
combat at all, and much less internal state. Riven is
very good, and we enjoyed it a great deal, but its strength has a lot
to do with the beautiful screen-shots and the elaborate nature of the
puzzles. I'd much rather play either of these games than Diablo
II, which gets reviews (for example, at
Games Domain) suggesting that it's completely mindless. Give me
plot any day of the week!
Comments