Tech: Baldur's Gate 3 review

I've said in the past that the first two Baldur's Gate games were the closest anyone's ever come to reproducing tabletop D&D on a computer. The latest title in the series, Baldur's Gate 3, carries on that tradition despite two big changes: being made by Belgian developer Larian Studios instead of BioWare, and being released for home video game consoles along with the PC version:

If you've played any of Larian's Divinity series, the engine and game mechanics of Baldur's Gate 3 will be pretty familiar.  You'll guide your party through turn-based battles, explore environments strewn with collectible, movable, and destructible objects, and generally have the freedom to do whatever you want. For the first two "Acts" (about 30-40 hours worth of gameplay) of Baldur's Gate 3, the game is pretty good about adapting to your actions, even if you do wild stuff like killing quest givers and stealing artifacts. This is doubly impressive given that my friend and I played through the campaign cooperatively over the Internet.

Things start to go off the rails in Act 3, however.  There are big sections of the map that were left unfinished due to time constraints, and the game- and quest-breaking bugs start to proliferate. Even if you don't encounter showstopping crashes, the game itself runs worse, due to the CPU-intensive crowds of NPCs wandering the Act.  It's still fun, but the frustration factor takes a little of the shine off of what would otherwise be one of the best RPGs ever made.

Rating: 90/100 (95/100 if you are looking for a co-op story-based RPG, because those are rarer than hen's teeth)

Books: Pappyland

In Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last, sportswriter Wright Thompson chronicles a very different kind of superstar - Julian Van Winkle III, the bourbonmaker behind one of the world's most sought after whiskeys, "Pappy Van Winkle's Family Reserve." Bottles of "Pappy's" sell for thousands of dollars, and have been the subject of counterfeiting, robberies, and other mischief through the years. But behind the high-dollar glitz is a simple story of a family trying to make good bourbon in hard times.

If you're looking for in-depth treatise on whiskey making, look elsewhere. Pappyland is more of a memoir, of Julian, of the author, and of the bourbon business. Nostalgia for lost fathers and lost times seeps through its pages, punctuated by epistolary segments from Julian's family. It's slow at times, but still worth savoring, like a bourbon sipped in a dimly lit lounge after dinner.