So, back in December of 1999, I wasn’t playing many games.  I was playing game, one, singular, that being Everquest, which both my wife and I were hooked on at the time, so I wasn’t looking through the shelves of software stores for anything else to play.

Even if I had been looking for something else, this cover is not one that would have attracted me:

It’s… a dude with blue facepaint and dreadlocks.

Not exactly appealing.

Anyway, I’m not going to come out and SAY that atrociously poor choices in box art lead to the eventual failure of Black Isle studios and Interplay, but come ON now.

But I digress.

As years went by, though, I kept hearing people bring up this game when they were swapping top-ten lists, so I figured I should look past the box and maybe consider giving it a try one of these days.

Problem was, by the time I decided to give it a play, Interplay was long dead, the rights to the game were in Limbo, and even though it sold several hundred thousand copies, it was bloody hard to find for reasonable money.

I eventually DID chance into it via Amazon Marketplace for the princely sum of eight dollars, and then, uh, well, didn’t actually play it.  That was back in March of 2008, for reference.

Looking back at March of 2008, I was playing Half-Life 2 for the first time, a little Kingdom Hearts, some Maid Uniform and Machinegun, some Shikigami no Shiro, Prey, Eternal Darkness, Triggerheart: Exelica, and finally finishing Lemmings.

So I WAS playing some quality stuff at the time and don’t feel TOO guilty about putting Planescape: Torment aside.

The couple of years since then, however, well, those have been a little bit shameful.  I knew I SHOULD get around to playing it, I just didn’t want to devote that much time to a single game.

Turns out, oddly enough, that if you don’t actually sleep much you can finish it in a few days.

I gotta say, it was worth the hype. I didn’t know much about the Planescape setting before I started – I stopped playing D&D before they came out with that weird Second Edition thing where all the rules changed, though I still own my old Fiend Folio and it seems like an awful lot of the Planescape races found their origin in that book – so it took me a while to warm up to the environment, and the first few hours of the game were VERY draggy as I was wandering around Sigil looking for Pharod, but once my party started filling up and the world started expanding it rapidly turned from draggy into enthralling.

And as I occasionally say here, that last sentence should be taken out and shot.

Atrocious run-on sentences aside, it was quite fun and is one of the few games that I’ve finished and immediately wanted to start over, make a few different choices, maybe do a little more side questing, take my time with it a little more… but I’ll put that off a little while.  It’s not going anywhere.  🙂