Chewing the Holiday Fat.
By Lowbrow 2 Comments
Hello, my fellow followers of the Bomb!
Ok, first things first, I'm shitty at updating me blog. I get it, what can I do. Nothin'.
Shit I did over the holidays:
Fixed my busted ass computer.
On the 26th, I re-downloaded ARMA2 off my steam account, because I just wanted to screw around with the editor. I figured a fully loaded attack chopper at my becon call + me with a sniper rifle on a distant Island + a full squad of enemy on an opposite island with no escape = fun. So I started doing that, but the game froze up, screen went all weird. Rebooted, started up Arma2 again - freeze up again, this time much much faster than it did the first time. Then I noticed that my computer was making a lot less noise than was normal.
Well ladies and gents, that means, through experience, Graphics card was overheating, the lack of sound I was alluding to was the lack of a functioning fan cooling the piece of shit (out of anger, not previous performance) graphics card.
This happens on a Saturday, the day after Xmas, and I have the entire next week off of work. Goddammit, I was planning on spending the entire week working on my hermit technique, locking myself in my room, microwave burritos, soda, beer, and most importantly, not shaving.
Luckily for me, right after xmas means tech deals. Managed to procure myself a new card for 75 bucks, that was a generation better than mine. Ordered it, didnt come into my possesion until that Wednesday. So, I needed something to play until then, didn't I?
The Badest of the Bad
So, it was like 20 bucks at Best Buy, and my girlfriend is always looking for game idea's for me for the holidays. I figured this would be a good deal.
So the single player is fun, not stellar. Blowing out walls in buildings is pretty fun too. But seriously, for all the work they did on that engine, couldn't they work in an "open door button"? Do you really need to start whacking at it with your knife until it spilnters into a million pieces to get through? It seems to me it would help alot if you're trying to stealth through some parts. You know, instead of blowing a gaping hole in the wall of a building your trying to infiltrate quietly.
Then again, Bad Company isn't really about being subtle now is it?
Now the online multiplayer is something that I'm torn on. Its a combination of abject frustration and awesome fun.
Does a squad of 3 snipers and 1 assault class help to take down a tank who blasting the shit out of your Gold container from halfway across the map who sabot rounds? FUCK NO THEY DON'T. In fact, a lot of the time you're sitting there like an asshole waiting to lose. I always make it a point to switch classes for the approprite situation. Tanks are other light vehicles close, time for the AT class. But wouldn't it be oh so nice to have 2 or even 3 guys spawn on your squad with that same AT class, all blast the tank at the same time, so that instead of the tank looking for the one smoke trail back to little old me waiting for my lengthy reload animation to finish up, he sees three smoke trails, decides he's screwed hauls ass and dies a horrible death! That my friends, is teamwork.
Spaghetti & Meatballs provide the optimum amount of carbohydrates for extended assisnation campaigns.
Therefore, you wanna stock up on them carbs.
Carbs = Pasta = Italy = Ezio Auditore da Firenze stabbin you in between you armorz biatch.
I liked the first game a lot. While other people may have been complaining about the redundancy of the gameplay modes (which admittely, it was redundant) I was too busy getting all glassy eyed at the expansive, beautiful city-scapes and just the technology platform the game was running on in general. The story of Desmond Miles was quite intriguing throughout the game, and by the end of the game, I was dying to find out what exactly the world that Desmond inhabits actually looked like.
Everything about this game is better. Less time spent out of the Animus, and when you are out, it feels like its for better reasons then just saying "Hey lets take a break", and Impression I got from the first game. A much greater variety of side missions to complete, from running down a punkass theif to steal the money that they stole, to tracking down some poor woman's cheating husband and seriously fucking him up in hand to hand combat.
Honestly, I have absolutely no idea why, but the fisticuff in this game are totally awesome. Beating these guys up is one of the most satisfying things in the game, at least for me. Punching a guy in the stomach and finishing him off by kneeing him in the face just makes me smile. This game is great, if you haven't yet gotten the message - almost done with my last artifact to get access to Altair's armor set, and after that, I'm off to the finish line.
You should play this game if you haven't. Double hidden blades means double the fun!
You had me at dark, ritualistic sex.
Top to bottom, I had a blast.
Note - I played this on my PC - because I mean common, a traditional Bioware RPG, this is a PC game, and I wanted to play this game the way it was meant to be played.
Dragon Age is a strong game all around. The classes (for the most part, at least) seem well balanced. I really liked the direction they took with leveling and class evolution, IE: Archetype, skill points, specializations. I have never really been into DnD and to be honest, with Neverwinter nights and the other games that Bioware would apply the DnD liscense and logic engine to, for some reason, I always felt a bit lost when it came to leveling up your character, choosing appropriate skills, so on and so fourth. But with DA:O - the interface is clean, the game makes it easily apparent what putting points into one skill over anothter will actually do for your character with handy tooltips. No more having to paruse a 200 page game manual to figure out whether or not you're fucking up character development.
Your Dragon-Fu is weak
Ok, so no game is perfect right? If it was, I would be playing that game instead of all of this imperfect shit. But everything has its flaws, and Dragon Age is no acception.
So what about DA:O disapointed me the most?
The loot to be honest.
I preordered the game on the steam. That means that I got two special rings, the Grey Warden's Keep quest, the Shale quest, the Dragon Armor (which by the way, looks fuckin terrible), the ability to get a kickass weapon made out of an asteroid based on a random encounter. I don't think I left anything out.
I was really let down by the fact that by halfway through the game, I had an armor set, a sword, and a shield that I never took off, because I never found anything better.
Most of the best equipment I had in my inventory was either garnered specifically because I had downloaded the DLC, and all of it was aquired somewhere around halfway through the game. To me, this kind of sucks. I love getting loot in RPGs from beginning to end. But everything that gets dropped (save a few items from some named enemies in the game) is total useless trash. I really would have liked to see them throw some better loot leading all the way up to the end of the game. Sadly, the games loot by and large was kind of a let down for me.
My Dragon-Fu is strong!
Strongest aspect in the game is the character driven morality system. In Dragon Age, few choices are black and white, no matter how much it might seem that way. A simply choice one way or the other may have consequences you might not even see coming, and that's damn refrreshing to see from an RPG. There is no morality tracker at all. There are no points you get for finishing a quest in a good way or a bad way. There is only choice, consequence and outcome. Descisions you make however, bring about really problematic choices regarding characters who have really strong opinions about what you are about to do.
Example:
You: Hey, there's this little kid sleeping in the street. Maybe I should go buy him a blanket, poor litlle guy.
Party Member 1: Aww, that's really sweet, I hope he'll be alright - +20 "relationship" points for us!
Party Member 2: This is rediculous, children are plagues! It would have been better to eat his tasty tasty soul! - 20 relationship points.
This was a horrible example of one of these choices, but an example none theless. But some of these choices come totally out of left field, and leave you with a choice that might range from a drop in favor, to a character saying "fuck this noise, you're all a bunch of pussies!" and leaving your party, never to be seen again, to a person being so against a choice you have made that they'll try a fry you, forcing you to kill them, and they stay dead for the rest of your adventure.
Some of these choices were so not obvious, not black and white, but instead grey and a more fucked up shade of grey, it literally had me pacing back and fourth in my appartment for 15 minutes trying to decide what the hell I'm supposed to do. The Characters themselves make these choices hard, because they are all so well written and all have such a different backstory that's well fleshed out, that you don't want to even risk pissing them off and have them leave when you've already spent so much time getting to know what they're about. You can almost predict what choices you make might make them angry, not because they're transparent, but because they're all pretty complex, but you get to know them well enough to know they have convictions. You start to figure out what makes them tick.
My fingers are tired.
This blog has taken too long to write. Thanks for reading all, I'm outta here.