Baldur's Gate shipped for the PlayStation 2

Black Isle Studios, a division of Interplay Entertainment, has announced the release of Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance for the Sony PlayStation 2. The game takes place in the popular Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting of the Forgotten Realms, where a Thieves' Guild civil war is brewing in the city's depths. Dark Alliance plays from a third-person three-quarter perspective and features new spell effects and other powerful new abilities.

"We developed the game from the ground up to take full advantage of the sophisticated PlayStation 2 technology," said Ryan Geithman, director of Snowblind Studios, the game's developer. "Our goal was to push the hardware to its limits, thus creating stunning environmental effects and highly detailed characters never before seen on the console. We feel we have achieved that goal with Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance."

The game will be available at retailers later this week.