Baldur Bother

Why am I even bothering? *wry grin*

My Tales of the Sword Coast CD was fubar, and I couldn't bear the thought of *ahem* obtaining a new copy the slow download way. So I poked my head into Tec-Drome the other day and found the 4-in-1 pack labeled at $32.90, which promptly got slashed to $26 because I am the memorable breed of female gamer who buys PC games 5 boxes at a time.

Eh, it's the price of an expansion, and a couple extra copies of Baldur's Gate can't hurt. The 11 CD changeovers were giving me nightmares anyhow.

Install went without a hitch and I was finally playing Baldur's Gate I.

Except the resolution was a teensy stretched out. And the thought of patches and fixes lovingly constructed by fans got in the way of any progress. Rather not face savegame incompatibility down the road, y'know.

Turns out navigating the morass of patches, fixes, unofficial tweaks, mods, total conversions is an infuriating minigame in itself.

To save my sanity, I decided I wouldn't install any major game-changing mods yet. I've quite forgotten what vanilla BG1 plays like. Or vanilla BG2 for that matter.

The two official patches for each game (expansion version, not regular!) was easy enough. Except for the fact that they're mirrored on practically every mod site out there, confusing the issue. Nevertheless, I just grabbed them from the Bioware source, installed, and opened up the games to make sure they still started up. (Whether it would mysteriously crash halfway through the game is an exercise in unknowability.)

Then there were the fixes and tweaks and text "improvements" to contend with. Obviously, I don't want crappy bugs left in my game. But which fix came before the official patch, and which one add fixes AFTER the last official patch? *boggles* I ended up picking a few at random. There was also a text improvement which claimed to add some helpful information about various obscure quests (usually solved via walkthrough consultation) and item descriptions, which I liked the sound of. Goodness knows if one fix overwrote another though.

Game still ran after installation of abovementioned fixes. Oh good.

The low resolution was still a bother. There was a widescreen mod v2.1 for all Infinity Engine games though. So I ran it. After squinting through the install, getting one error message, reinstalling again, I opened up Baldur's Gate to find the savegame compatibility trashed. Ah well. Rolled character again. Started. Oh, nice, huge widescreen resolution. Very pretty textures and background buildings. Where is my character?! Eep, that tiny speck in the middle of my screen. (So sue me, I rolled a dwarf.)

There was also the problem of a known issue with BG1 and the widescreen mod, where most of the GUI did NOT expand accordingly. So all inventory interactions, save/load game options are done squinting at a tiny rectangle taking up 1/5 of my screen's real estate in the upper left corner. That is not really very fun.

Ditto for conversations, which suddenly take up a tiny little rectangle in the lower left hand corner, instead of filling up the whole bottom bar. If you're playing BG1 as an RTS, for the tactical combat, and not for story/mood/atmosphere/roleplaying, it would be great. But it left me with a bit of a hollow feeling not to be able to distinguish my character from another without squinting really hard.

So I uninstalled the widescreen mod and went back to the old resolution, which centred everything less annoyingly, but made everything look like it came from the Quest For Glory 1 era. (Maybe it did, for all I know.)

Dismayed at not being able to have my cake and eat it, I started casting about for other options. Turns out there are way too many of them. There's an Infinity Explorer and Shadowkeeper I used to use for reading dialogue and editing savegames which is still in existence. There's some other strange programming language/compiler thingmajig called WeiDU whose function I'm still unclear on, except lots of mods seem to use it. There's BG1Tutu and Easytutu which utilizes the BG2 engine to run BG1, with windows, linux and mac versions, for american, uk, canadian, european and other international versions, with and without throne of bhaal expansion, unsoweiter. *groans confusedly*

I'm now trying out the latter. Hope it works. :(