This game will eat your life.

Although Baldur's Gate is easily the funkiest RPG computer game I've ever played (this is admittedly not too hard as it's a genre that I generally sneer at, with only Ultima Underworld 2 and Ultima 8: Pagan breaking my embargo), I must warn you severely. This game will take over your life. You will get up in the morning, load it up to try and level up your main character before breakfast, and then wonder why it seems to be dark again all of a sudden and your watch is saying it's time to go to bed.

In this probably epic tale of a young chap finding out he's a Death God or something, there are so many quests, sub-quests, amusing routines that you repeat over and over again (like the exploding ogre) and bits that are dead hard and force you to reload a million times, that you should only really start the game if you have the free time to finish it.

In other words, if you are unemployed, a student, or just plain waiting for death, this is the perfect game for you.

For those unfamiliar with role-playing (like me! I rock!), you basically have to create your own character, whose life story is then cunningly integrated with the main plot of the game. In a breathtakingly pointless piece of PC gibberish, women are just as good at men as everything, oh yes, and people who think otherwise suck. Despite the fact that the game takes place in a cod-feudal setting and women are portrayed as mindless ditherers setting you stupid sub-quests to find their errant son/husband throughout (I don't know why they bother, you always find the stupid sods dead in a ditch somewhere).

The character creation process is painless. You select various skills and stuff, and you may as well do it at random because you can always retrain your character in the course of the game, and because you have to reload if your main character dies, you tend to keep him out of the fighting anyway. The only tricky bit comes when you have to accept the dice rolls for 'attributes' like dexterity, charisma and stuff. The brick-thick manual explains what all these things do, but who can be bothered reading that? Make sure you've a fairly high constitution score is my best advice on this as that determines the number of wounds you can take.

The game itself is great. You wander around, and there's a lot of random minor characters with silly names full of apostrophes. They tend to speak in silly film quotes (peasants say 'You talkin' to me?' in a cod-Taxi Driver stylee) or high melodrama ('I am death come among you!!!') All the various pretty graphics depict snow showers, storms and stuff like that, but you'll turn them off as soon as you get fed up because basically it's nice to be able to see your characters beneath all the anti-aliased, dithered, pant-sniffin', polygon rendered, whatever things.

You start off in a library which is a reclusive seat of academia. Despite the fact that you can't get back in once you leave it, it's been infiltrated by an alarming number of assassins. Your guardian decides to take you away, thankfully without your intensely annoying 'best friend'.

Darn! Gorion is slaughtered by a big camp man in armour and you're alone on the road. Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, a cheery Bonnie Langford-lite voice cries, 'Hi it's me, Imowen!' Sure enough, your mischevious imp chum has followed you secretly. Bah. So much for hitting the brothels, adventurer, now you have to get on with solving mysteries, avenging your adopted father's death and all that nob.

Along the way to some big tavern place (also full of people trying to kill you, nice huh?) you meet various potential companions. The great thing about Baldur's Gate is that you can actually turn into a genocidal maniac, and choose travelling companions accordingly. Apparently, if you lay waste to one town a vampire appears and thanks you for resurrecting him by spilling the blood of the villagers. Ooh, tempting. If I knew which town it was...

The gameplay is fairly intuitive, and relies on clicking fairly obvious icons. The only trouble is that sometimes the 'Party AI' kicks in when you're trying to talk to people. Once I was attempting to pickpocket a sleeping child (hey, what can you do?). He woke up and became hostile, which damaged my reputation to start with. When Imoen turned round and killed the brat with a single arrow, my party suddenly became antichrists. The really annoying thing was that Imoen was so disgusted with 'my' behaviour that she left the group. Pfft, don't forget to write.

There are drawbacks to all this fairly uncomplicated fun. As should be expected for such a vast game, the plot is horribly convoluted. There's a complex series of villains, all under someone else's command, and it takes an age to massacre your way through to someone who can actually tell you stuff about the plot. That gets a little annoying. Things can also slow down in the heat of battle when there's a large number of people, and it takes an age to load different locations.

But on the other hand, you get to wander into people's houses and rob them blind in the middle of the night. Such wholesome fun can not be missed, and it runs on a bog-standard low-end Pentium, so there's no excuse not to get pillaging right away! I'll see you next summer when you complete it!