It's another classic RPG Sunday.

After finishing Fallout last week, I'm moving on to the year 1998 with Baldur's Gate (though I'll be playing the Enhanced Edition, including the Siege of Dragonspear expansion that was only added much much later).

This will be my third BG playthrough altogether. Decided to roll a Shaman this time, a new class added in the EE. They're like sorcerors but for druid spells, plus instead of shapeshifting they have a bard-like dance that summons spirit creatures to fight for you. (Yes I recognize that'll make zero sense if you don't know anything about D&D. Prepare for a lot of that over these next weeks and months.)

Played the new tutorial and the good old prologue up through meeting Jaheira & Khalid at the Friendly Arm.

Imoen got killed twice on the stairs going up there. That's probably the most deadly fight in the entire game, and it immediately illustrates the difference in design ethos between this & Fallout. In Fallout, there would be a locked back door you could sneak through, plus some way to smooth-talk past the assassin, bare minimum. Instead, Bioware makes it a mandatory fight against a guy that can cast Magic Missile at level 3... generally instant death for someone with <10 hp. I'm grateful for the quick-save & quick-load there.

But now, with our little party-of-four gathered, we'll venture forth to Nashkell and the mines, next time.

Okay, so the final section of this game is rougher than I remember. I still admire the way they let each player figure out their own solution, but it ended up feeling a bit anticlimactic for me this time.

Became an initiate of the Brotherhood of Steel, rescued a scribe from The Hub, and got a suit of power armor as a reward.

(The scribe was being held by only 4 dudes, but one of them had a combat shotgun, so kind of a tough fight at level 9. Needed to take Psycho to survive it.)

Dang, it's striking how this game just rips through quests at warp speed, compared to the CRPGs that came after it. In Fallout 4, or even something like D:OS, this questline would've entailed 10-20 hours of faffing around.

Stayed up way too late exploring The Glow. This is my favorite part of this game, I think. Stresses your resources mechanically, just as it also starts to reveal big chunks of the story's central mystery.

I'm on a summer vacation, and it's got me reminiscing about my high school summer break in 1999, when I first picked up Fallout and Fallout 2 from the markdown rack at an Office Depot and played them both back to back on endless August days.

So, this Sunday I booted up the GoG version of Fallout Classic, picked one of the 3 default characters (Albert, the vault's charismatic rabblerouser) and headed out into the wasteland.

I often forget that this game is so concise. Completed the entire first half of the game in one long sitting. The mainline quest to find a water chip involves visiting 3 main locations: Shady Sands/Vault 15, The Hub, and Necropolis, with an optional sidetrip to Junktown)

The Switch version was on sale and has crossplay now, so played that for about a dozen hours during the Summer Games this year.

Game's still fun on the small screen, gang.

Completed Mass Effect 1 on Legendary difficulty

(...in a series of sessions leading up to this day, obviously, not all in one 30-hour marathon. This was a couple months before I started using this site.)

Think my PS4 clock was at about 130 hours by the end of 2020. That's lifetime, of course, but the majority of it was during 2020. This was one of my lockdown comfort games.

First session, a few days after launch