Here's what I said about the fantasy role playing game Dragon Age: Origins during E3 last June:
Sure, it looks great and it's from Bioware (The Old Republic, Mass Effect), but aside from that I just can't tell how it's better than the 17,000 other fantasy hack and slashers released every year.
I've already told you that I was very very wrong. But, more specifically, I was wrong because I missed the part where it's from Bioware, which means enthralling writing, addictive gameplay, and a beautiful world packed with details to discover.
My wife and I have each put in more than 50 hours on the game and we're both still obsessed with it. Here are a few examples of why.
Characters With Character
See this girl?
She's someone who joins you early in the game. But unlike similar characters in other games, she feels like a real person. She pines for her homeland, she has an unshakable faith, and she's a storyteller. You can talk to her at any time, listening to tales of tragic love stories, or hearing about how she sees the influence of the supreme being in the world around her. Sometimes she'll start conversations all on her own.
And she's just one of many such characters, all of whom are created through some of the most passionate voice acting I've ever heard in a video game as well as brilliant character designs. If you look closely, you can even see that her teeth are brown - as they would be for someone living in such a time.
Breaking the Fourth Wall
One of the many possible subplots you may or may not run across in the game is a temptation from a Desire Demon.
She wants you to betray an in-game character - someone you don't even really know - and offers you everything from unique weapons to the unconditional love and loyalty of your companions if you agree. Any of it would make the game a lot easier to play in a very real way. All you have to do is bend your morals just a little.
It's a clever and unique way of testing how greedy you actually are and how far you're willing to go in a video game. Even the character itself is rendered in a sexually provocative way (edited in the image above) that makes you think about the nature of games vs. reality.
Epic Action Considering everything above, the game can almost surprise you with the fact that it's packed with epic fantasy battles.
You can pause the action, look around the scene, and then tell each companion to fire off a spell, hack away at the boss character, shoot an arrow at a certain enemy, and so on; so it's easy for anyone to fight a dragon. Killing one is something else altogether.
It can lead to one of those definitive, unforgettable moments in a game. The kind that you ramble on about to your friends. "So then I was the last guy left alive, and I was almost dead, and everything was covered with blood, but then I jumped up onto the Ogre's back and stabbed him and he screamed and fell and then I rescued everyone! It was so cool!"
Don't be surprised if you find yourself yelling in celebration after a big victory. While playing an RPG.
It's all made even more thrilling by the fact that you actually care about the characters and want to save them.
A Beautiful World
Many times you'll find yourself stopping in the middle of the action to just stare around in amazement at the game world. From the lava-streaked underground dwarven city to the towering ruins of the heroes' fortress, it's absolutely breathtaking at times.
Even more so when you realize that there are hundreds of stories and adventures to discover everywhere you look.
A few general things to keep in mind when playing on someone else's Xbox:
I've got like a dozen people on my Live friends list, and I like it that way. Don't add 20 people to my list after I go to bed, and then leave me to find out when teabggerINURFACE877 spams me with messages as I'm playing the next day.
Don't demand that everyone plays every multiplayer game on the hardest setting when (1) no one else wants to and (2) you can barely handle it yourself.
You're the only person in the house playing that obnoxious FPS game. TURN DOWN THE VOLUME. Tip: If people four rooms away from you are diving for cover every time you shoot, it's probably a little too loud.
You have awful taste in games. They're not fun to play, and they're even less fun to watch. Quit bringing your bargain bin crap to my house and then hijacking my system to play them for hours. I feel like I need to give my 360 a bath after you leave. Also my eyes.
Your long, rambling, outrageous stories about the things you did in games are not believable or interesting. No, no one believes that you beat that one game using only your big toe and got a special "Big Toe" achievement. Or that you unlocked Mario as a playable character. Or that the game developer called to personally congratulate you. Yes, we know you insist that it all really happened, and yet somehow we don't care.
"The Red Ring of Death," the Xbox 360 hardware failure caused by overheating, has become the rallying cry for Sony and Nintendo fanboys, anti-Microsoft crusaders, and doomsaying game store employees everywhere. It's also a very real thing.
How real? I bought an Xbox 360 on launch day, and since then I've had five "red rings." If anything, my ring ratio is on the unlucky side, even considering that various surveys have reported 30 percent to 60 percent failure rates around the world (though red rings are reportedly much more rare these days after some changes to the console's internal architecture.)
And yet here I sit four years later still playing and loving the console. Why? Because "red ring" repairs are always free, and even though it was a downer to see those lights each time, I was always back to playing games with a repaired or new console on Microsoft's dime within two weeks.
Not everyone has the same outlook. One of my friends got a red ring and went out and bought a PS3. Another got a red ring and, instead of sending it off for the free repair, cracked the console open and tried in vain to fix it himself - voiding the warranty and leaving him with no system.
The 360, its library of games, and the Xbox Live features are a great fit for the things my family and I want from a game console, and that's the most important thing as far as I'm concerned. To me, that's more than worth dealing with the red rings - only one of which has happened in the last two years.
Still, it's important to be aware that the red ring is real and to take that into account along with the things the system offers when deciding if it's the right console for you. But then it's equally important to keep some perspective if it happens: Do you want to wait two weeks for a free repair, or do you want to turn it all into a giant nightmare by overreacting?
It's just ring. It doesn't have to change your life. Unless you consider a trip to the UPS store a life-changing experience.
It's Monday, so it must be the Zombie Apocalypse. Again.
One of the most eagerly awaited games of the year for action and shooter fans, Left 4 Dead 2, hits shelves tomorrow for Xbox 360 and PC. Xbox Live members got a preview of the game via an exclusive online demo earlier this month.
Developer Valve, of Half-Life 2 fame, scored a major hit with the 4-player co-op focused original by combining the atmosphere of a survival horror movie with the frantic run-and-gun action of a competitive first-person shooter. This is more of the same, but faster, bigger, and more frantic. There are no slow, shuffling zombies here. A neverending wave of them sprint toward you - and toward a hail of bullets from you and your three companions - in a way that looks a lot more like "Saving Private Ryan" than "Night of the Living Dead."
One interesting side note: The story sees its four characters cross the Southeast, from Louisiana to Georgia, over the course of the game. So, yes, the zombie apocalypse will be coming to Alabama.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 roundup... and a disclaimer
Gaming for me has always been about escapism, so I've never been able to get into ultra-realistic modern military shooters like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The last thing I want to do after spending all day editing stories about people dying overseas, terrorism and such, is to go home and play those types of things on my Xbox.
Obviously I'm in the minority: Despite controversy over a gameplay segment that asks you to participate in an airport massacre alongside terrorists, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 shattered records with $310 million in sales in the first 24 hours that it was on store shelves.
A bit of that money will go to a good cause: The game's producer announced just before Veteran's Day that it is donating $1 million to establish a foundation to help out-of-work veterans get jobs.
As for the actual game, here's what the reviewers are saying:
IGN:"For those planning to check out everything Modern Warfare 2 has to offer – online competition, full co-op Spec Ops mode, as well as the campaign – you’re looking at a no-brainer purchase. For the strictly single player crowd, however, Modern Warfare 2 is surprisingly short, and doesn’t live up to the standard set by previous Call of Duty games." - 9.5/10 Read the full review
The Associated Press:"If you're into online combat, "MW2" is a must-buy. I just wish Infinity Ward had taken the time to write a more coherent story for the single-player adventure." - 3/4 Read the full review
Gamespot:"Modern Warfare 2 nails the three pillars of play--campaign, cooperative, and multiplayer--to earn its place in the pantheon of modern shooters." - 9/10 Read the full review
1UP:"It might not have fixed all the problems from the first game, but there's just so much quality content packed into this game that it will almost certainly be one of the most-played games in your library for a long time to come." - A Read the full review
I have no problem sacrificing for my child. As every gaming parent knows, there comes a time when it's necessary to play a game just because the kid has his heart set on it. (Besides, it's not like anything else came out this week.) Still, sacrifice is one thing... Spongebob's Truth or Square is bordering on cruel and unusual punishment.
The shoestring plot of the game involves series villain Plankton forcing Spongebob to relive some of the more memorable moments from the TV series. But this time there's a twist: Instead of being funny, those scenes are now frustrating.
The interface is built for a kid. It's colorful and nostalgic, with the characters and settings from the TV show very well re-created, and it's fun and easy to explore the world and accept missions.
But the gameplay itself isn't built for a kid - not because it's especially difficult but because it's so poorly designed that it's almost unplayable. The 3D camera hates you, your family, and everything you stand for, and seems to actively try to ruin the game for you by always managing to lock into the worst possible position. That's made even more frustrating by the fact that there's a good bit of platforming in the game, all of which requires surprisingly precise jumps. On top of that, the sequences often require you to finish before a countdown expires, or you'll be forced to start over.
My 6-year-old, who is a huge fan of the show and has no trouble with far more sophisticated video games, gave up on playing it within minutes. There are segments that even I struggled to finish. Eventually, my son asked to stop watching the game because he was so upset by how often Spongebob was dying.
I can't imagine who on earth thought this would be a good game for a kid, but they should be sent to Davy Jones' Locker.
In many ways, playing through Bioware's new Lord of the Rings-style fantasy role playing game feels a lot like the experience of reading an epic novel. The writing is mature and fiercely intelligent, the world lush, the story sweeping, and the characters true-to-life.
The appeal here isn't the kind of hack-and-slash gameplay you might expect from the genre; it's the sense of exploration and discovery, and the fact that the way you play your character shapes the story, the world, and the entire experience. There are no easy answers, no black-and-white morality, and that's what sets it apart.
It's a massive, beautiful world built on an intricate mythos that is revealed through dialogue, overheard conversations, and surprisingly entertaining in-game books that can be read through a menu screen. Choosing and customizing your character - from a human noble to a dwarven pauper to an elven outcast, and lots of variations in-between - is just the beginning. The world itself feels alive, and the experience unique to your chosen character. You won't just have to beat enemies to succeed, but poverty, racism, prostitution, and more. So despite the staggering depth of the game on even a single play-through, you'll likely want to go through it again and again to see the world through the eyes of different people.
After playing through a unique "origin story" for your chosen character, you'll get swept up into a war against a rising tide of demonic creatures. Battle plays out in much the same way as the developer's previous RPGs, like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Baldur's Gate - and that's a good thing. You can sit back and watch the battle play out, essentially leaving characters on autopilot, or you can switch between your party members, giving each a series of commands. Battles are spectacular and gory, with swords and spells flying across the screen.
Sure, the battles are fun, but what makes them so involving is the fact that you care about the characters and the outcome. This isn't just a fun game, it's a great game built on great writing and a lot of imagination - the video game equivalent of a page-turner. If that sounds appealing to you, don't hesitate to pick it up. And then good luck putting it down.
Here's a look at what some of the top game critics are saying about the latest releases:
Dragon Age: Origins (PC, PS3, Xbox 360)
Gamespot:"Like the best fiction, Dragon Age will sweep you up in its world, so much so that when you're done, you'll want to experience it all over again." - 9.5/10 Read the full review
1UP:"Dragon Age maintains and refines BioWare's moral choices, strong character development, and excellent tactical combat while adding a harsh, dark tone overall." - A Read the full review
G4:"You’ll come for the sword-fighting and spell-slinging but you’ll stay because of characters you care about and an amazing world that rewards patient exploration." - 5/5 Read the full review
Forza Motorsport 3 (Xbox 360)
Team Xbox:"Everything about this game is great, no doubt, from the leveling system to the ability to buy user-created vinyls, to the quick upgrade system." - 9.5/10 Read the full review
Gamespot:"Turn 10 Studios' latest racer is bigger and better than its superb predecessor in every way." - 9.5/10 Read the full review
Gamespy:"Forza 3 is a brilliantly engineered, if somewhat cold, racing game." - B Read the full review
DJ Hero (PS2, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii)
IGN:"Hopefully you've saved space for one more plastic instrument in your living room, because you're gonna' want to have DJ Hero on hand for your next party." - 9/10 Read the full review
Gametrailers:"DJ Hero is one of the most refreshing, original games we've played in quite a while." - 9.5/10 Read the full review
Dollhouse star Dichen Lachman scored some serious geek cred on Halloween by dressing up as the main character from the somewhat obscure first-person action game Mirror's Edge. Have a look:
If you'd like to find out why the game became such a cult favorite, Gamefly currently has Mirror's Edge on sale for $11.69, plus free shipping here.
