Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition

Baldur's Gate 2 is my favourite game of all time, so with that being said, the only question is: is it worth buying the enhanced edition over the regular, far cheaper version? New Content: BG2EE adds a handful of new companions with personal quests, including a single class thief, a wild mage, a monk and an evil paladin. With the exception of the evil paladin none of these are going to make your party on merit, and the writing isn't good enough to make you want to use them for role playing reasons. The single class thief will also have an extremely tepid romance(?) with a female protagonist. All in all, nothing that hasn't been done better by the mod community. Speaking of mods, not every one has been updated to support EE yet (Item revisions/spell revisions are the ones I'm missing most at the time of writing) so check before buying if you've got favourites. BG2EE comes with widescreen support out of the box as well as a trick that you can't replicate with the basic game and the widescreen mod - customisable font sizes and interface scaling. Having properly sized sidebars is a good thing. No reason to buy this over the standard version other than better widescreen support? That would be true except for one small detail - the standard version doesn't run properly on my laptop. This does. Enough reason for me to buy it - but I still waited for a heavy sale (elsewhere) before buying. As for the bugs the other reviewers have mentioned: haven't noticed any myself, but I'm mostly holding off playing more than a quick run through the campaign while I wait for more mods to become compatible.

For the longest time I held out playing this game, had no idea what I was in for. In fact it has lead me down a path to play it's former and I look forward to a future one made by the same minds. As far as rpgs go, this one is a staple. It's bread and butter. A classic story not to be found anywhere else. Dragons, check. Battles that make you reload, check. Dialog and banter worthy of my ears, check. Some banter does get repetitive, but it becomes comical in a personal way. I love this game, and if you take from an old gamer like me, you will too. Fin.

Ignore the haters with an agenda, this is perfection: Remastered and Enhanced in game form. If you REALLY dislike the added companions there is a fantastic mod that removes them. Aside from that, this is unquestionably the perfect way to play BG2.

You can import your character and (most) equipment from the first (excellent) game to this masterpiece. Currently replaying BG1, next will be Siege of Dragonspear (haven't tried it yet), then Baldur's Gate II Shadows of Amn, and finally the included Throne of Bhaal expansion. Hundreds of hours of superb content, not to be missed.

Play the original AKA the real video game of Baldur's Gate II.