There’s plenty of other examples of archaic gameplay conventions in Baldur’s Gate, and as offputting as they are for newcomers in this Enhanced Edition, I’m glad the developers didn’t try and modernise the mechanics.

Players need to use the resources-at-hand in an intelligent and strategic fashion for success in this game, and grinding alone isn’t the answer. Replaying this game for the first time I lost my first battle outside of the tutorial sequence – to a lowly wolf. Beyond that, Baldur’s Gate also features old-school Dungeons & Dragons difficulty because characters have very (very) low hit point totals, one or two hits from an equal-level enemy can down them. Naturally Dungeons & Dragons has since realised that that system is counter-intuitive and later versions of the game have shifted to a more traditional system where good armour means ++++. One of the more difficult concepts to wrap the head around with the Second Edition game is the idea that the better the armour, the lower your Armour Class score. THAC0 stands for “To Hit Armour Class 0.” At the time when Baldur’s Gate was originally produced, the Second Edition of the Dungeons & Dragons game was on the book shelves, and this system was adopted for the game with few changes. Firstly, you’re going to have to deal with such abstract statistics as THAC0.

The game itself also holds up very nicely too, though new players be warned – this is old school Dungeons & Dragons and that means a couple of things. It all comes together to form a very believable fantasy.

Characters in the squad will talk amongst one another, and indeed bicker if they’re on different ends of the good/ evil spectrum. Thousands of lines of dialogue are delivered through this game, and none of them feel awkward or amateur. The in-game visuals haven’t been updated (the only “enhancement” in aesthetic is the cut scenes), but for all their pixilation and stiff sprite animation, the environments still hold a genuine sense of wonder, and it’s more than enough of a backdrop for the incredible scripting to come to the fore. It took me all of five minutes to realise that this game has not aged in the slightest.

Baldur's Gate for apple download