Welcome! welcome to the laziest blog on the internet. no pics or links here! just good old fashioned ramblings.

• 27Nov 09

  Dragon Age: Origins First Impressions

  Funny how with some games, you can play for 3 hours and write a comprehensive first impressions blog. With Dragon Age: Origins, after 3 hours i felt like i hadn't even scratched the surface of this behemoth of a Role Playing Game. I've now put in around 10 hours, and i feel that i have played enough to produce a good first impressions blog. In short, if your to lazy to read the rest of this, i love it, and i can't wait until i'm done with final exams so i can spend a good amount of time playing through it.

  Dragon Age feels like a Bioware game through and through, and this is in no way shape or form a bad thing. Everything feels well thought out, and unlike most games, there are very few weaknesses from what i have seen. The dialogue is interesting and enjoyable, with clearly defined good-guy and bad-guy choices and everything in between. After playing Mass Effect, it seems a bit odd that your protagonist doesn't speak during dialogue scenes, but you get used to this fairly quickly and doesn't really detract form the game at all. The game is structured in a very similar way to Mass Effect; there is a fairly lengthy prologue in which the stage is set for the story and setting of the game, then you are launched into a huge world with a list of things you are supposed to do in no particular order. To move from place to place, you select a location on a world map, and you will go there, although your journey will be interrupted if you encounter something along the way (like evil bandits who want your shiny hat).

  My biggest concern before i bought the game was the combat; i'm a fan of being able to directly control a characters attacks and so forth, but because i went in expecting the worst, i was pleasantly surprised. Combat is very involving, and at no time are you sitting back and watching your hero bash away at a bad guy. Your pausing the game, switching between characters, selecting special moves, downing health potions, and doing your damnedest to keep all party members alive and fighting rather than dead or sitting off to one side doing nothing at all. I've come to really enjoy the combat, to the point where i'm dissapointed when some of the smaller battles are over. I'm playing the game on Easy difficulty because i heard this was a tough game, and i'm glad i am, since most of the battles i win i feel like i just managed to scrape by. Rarely do i leave a battle with all party members alive.

  The only real problem (which isn't really a problem) i could find with the game is that the gameworld isn't all that original, and seems to be very similar to J.R. Tolkien's(i think thats his name) Middle earth from Lord of the Rings. I love this aspect myself, i'm a huge fan of the LOTR trilogy, and happily created a Dwarf warrior whom i name Gimli after my favorite character. The Origin story was really great, and i look forwards to playing through different origin stories in subsequent playthroughs. Visually the game looks... fine. Nothing mindblowing, but the visuals work well with the setting and don't distract from the excellent gameplay (how many times did you get killed in Crysis because you were busy gawking at the beautiful sunset over the tropical ocean).

  I could go on and on about Dragon age, i really could, this is easily my favorite game of 09 so far (barring unforeseen horriblness later in the game). I urge anyone who enjoys RPG's, or anyone remotely interested in trying RPG's to pick this game up. I would also recommend this game to anyone who enjoyed Mass Effect, since they play so similarly. Good job Bioware, another fantastic title to play and replay... and replay and replay.

  • Posted Nov 27, 2009 6:01 pm PT
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• 19Nov 09

  Computer fixed - upcoming gaming

  I finally got the call earlier this week that my computer had been fixed and is ready to pick up. As i suspected, the ram was the culprit, luckily it was only one stick though. It didn't die, i just went rogue on me and started writing all over the place, corrupting basically anything and everything i tried to install. It has now been fixed, and since getting my computer back i have already installed Borderlands and transferred all my save games/profile from my other computer. It ran flawlessly, i'm really enjoying my new moniter, the contrast and colors are so much richer than with my old one, everything seems sharper as well.

  

  I'm installing Dragon Age: Origins as i type this, i'm really pumped up to play it after all the praise it has received from critics and gamers alike. I really loved Mass Effect, and i'm excited to try a more traditional RPG by the same developer. I've decided once and for all that i am not going to be buying Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2; it just doesn't look like enough of an improvement to warrent me spending $60 on it. I'm still really enjoying Borderlands (i'm now lvl 30, still on my first playthrough), and i'm sure Dragon Age: Origins will suck up a fair bit of my time. After that i'll probably get Arkham Asylum and Risen, but that won't be for a while.

  My college semester is coming to an end, and i will have 3 or so weeks to do whatever i please; i'm hoping to get out skiing as much as possible since the mountains have been getting a lot of snow and since i live in Vancouver, i won't be able to get up much during January/February because of all the Olympics nonsense. While i hope to do a substantial amount of gaming over the holiday, i'm looking past that to the two weeks i get off from college during the Olympics. I'm not going to be able to get out much because of traffic and other such insanity, so i'm planning on becoming a hermit for the two-week period, leaving my house only for food and occasionally exercise.

  My next blog will probably be either a Dragon Age first impressions blog, or a Review of Borderlands.

  • Posted Nov 19, 2009 5:12 pm PT
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• 5Nov 09

  Borderlands First Impressions

  If you read my last blog, i'm sure your assuming that i have fixed my gaming computer. Sadly this is not the case; i spent a lot of time in the last week or so trying to fix it, and all i was able to determine was that it was defenitely a hardware problem. I formatted my hard drive and reinstalled windows, and i was still getting BSOD crashes. I took it into the shop today, i used to work for this particular computer shop so i should be able to get a discount.

  To entertain myself in the mean time, i installed Borderlands on the 'family' computer; which i beefed up with my old nvidia 8600; its only a year or so old and has a AMD quad core cpu and 4 gigs of ram, so it can run Borderlands without to much trouble on med-high settings at 1650x1050. I've reached level 11 in the game so far, and have dabbled in singelplayer and online co-op. I'll start by talking about the singleplayer.

  I wanted to become competent at the game before launching myself into the online co-op, so i played for a couple of hours just to familiarize myself with the gameplay and get some decent weapons to take online. While the story is obviously terrible, this is not the kind of game that needs a story; Borderlands is purely about the moment to moment gameplay, and if done right, these kinds of games can be far more gratifying than those which rely on a story and a script (like Bioshock). Borderlands succeeds at creating excellent moment to moment gameplay; the guns look and feel great, they feel just like they should when you fire them, and the unpredictability of which gun you will use next is fantastic. All the different weapons feel so good that i have no preference for one type of weapon over another; i'm just as comfortable staying back and sniping as i am going in close with a shot gun. This is an achievement few games have achieved in the past, and the excellent gunplay alone makes this game worth playing. After indulging in the game for a number of hours, i felt a bit tired of it, and thought, 'well, maybe it isn't that good after all. Maybe it will be overly repetative.' coming home two hours later, i could't wait to start playing again. It is the unpredictability of Borderlands that makes it so addictive, and this is in no way shape or form a bad thing.

  It is no secret that Borderlands was designed with online-co-op in mind. I am not usually a fan of co-op type games (never cared for Left 4 Dead), but the co-op component of Borderlands appealed to me, so i thought i'd give it a go. After a few failed attempts at connecting to a host, i finally got into a game where i was the lowest level character. I was level 9, while the other 3 were levels 11, 15, and 20. The lvl 15 player dropped soon after i entered, but i still had a blast playing with the other two fellows. They were pretty good about not just running off on their own searching for loot; instead we set off on a quest to kill something. We encountered a incredibly tough foe soon enough; a 'badass bruiser,' it was level 22, so none of us could kill it at all easily. We quickly found that the only the lvl 20 player could do any real damage against this thing, so we adopted a effective team stragety after a few tries; me and the lvl 11 player would distract this huge bugger, we would keep our distance and pick away at it with our weaker weapons while the lvl 20 player snuck up behind it and threw grenades and blasted it with his shotgun. When either me or the lvl 11 player got down to the 'last wind' thing, the other would revive him. We managed to perpetuate this until we killed the brute, and it was very satisfying indeed. After this the lvl 11 player left and a few lvl20 + players joined, at which point i became useless and left the game.

  But if that brief encounter was a sign of things to come, i look forward to playing the game more in the near future, unlocking new and interesting weapons, and taking on tough foes. Finally, a mmo style co-op game i can appreciate and enjoy.

  • Posted Nov 5, 2009 10:59 pm PT
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