Intangible Loss

For starters I just got done playing a little bit of Blood Bowl. That game was clearly made for people who already understand the tabletop version. I resent that I now have a game I need to study up on just to play some single player. Once I fully understand the game I think it could be fun...ish. Team customization might be Blood Bowl's saving grace, depending on how much customization is possible, but I haven't checked it out yet because at this point I think most of it would be Greek to me.
     I haven't played a whole lot of Eve the last few days for a very specific reason. If you lose a combat your spaceship and all equipment gets destroyed. I think you can go back and loot your wrecked ship for some little trinkets that may have survived, but for the most part your baby is gone. In other MMOs like World of Warcraft if you get killed you run back to your corpse and respawn. There are some penalties for death, but they are pretty trivial. Eve has very unforgiving consequences for death. It's a game largely about resources and cold hard cash. I want to properly emphasize the gravity of losing the one thing that allows you to continue to gain resources. It is conceivably possible that, if you were a really terrible player, you could reach a point where you just lost your last ship and don't have enough money to buy one. CCP, the makers of Eve, most likely have some sort of fail safe built in, such as they give you a real crap ship if you get your last ship blown up, but my point is this (still), the penalty for death is very high. Not to sound like a crazy person, but although I'm talking about virtual possessions that, in the grand scheme of things, mean nothing whatsoever, there is a very real and frustrating sense of loss when this happens.
     Today was a day of demos. I downloaded the Dragon Age 2, Fatal Inertia, and some Gundam game demos. Fatal Inertia is a racing game similar to Wipeout or Star Wars Podracer or any number of other generic flying-cars with weapons racing game. I was sufficiently underwhelmed. Delete. Gundam was a disappointment also. A few tweaks and it might become a fantastic game, but it was clunky and slow. You pilot your big robot on a large battlefield with literally thousands of other big robots. You press X, X, X a lot, or maybe X, X, Y or X, Y, A if you're feeling a little wacky. Now repeat about 300 times. All it would take to turn this game from dull to incredible is 3 things. #1- speed up the gundam's action and movement. #2- make the generic combos flashier. #3- add more enemy variety. Gundam is a mech game. And by mech I mean giant robot. There are 2 different types of mech games as far as I can tell. There's strategic mech games like Chromehounds of Front Mission, and there are action mech games like Zone of the Enders and Armored Core. Action mech games are broken for me, perhaps forever. That's because I've already played the best one that exists and all others are now held to that standard, and always fall short. Zone of the Enders: 2nd Runner is the best action mech game. Period. The extremely tight controls and the free form combat that has your mech jumping across the screen lightning fast made for an incredibly fun and intuitive combat game. Anyone making a mech game needs to play the hell out of ZOE 2 and take liberal pages from that book.
     Finally, I played Dragon Age 2. I've never played 1, I've been curious because it looks like the fantasy version of the space opera Mass Effect. Mass Effect gets a bad rap from a lot of people. It's one of my favorite games. That's not to say that it is not problematic, but I think the good far out weighs the bad. Anyway. After played the DA 2 demo I Must go play Dragon Age. It seems like it is exactly what I expected and more. Now I am making the assumption that Dragon Age 1 and 2 are not too terribly different, and I'm inferring things from context that I didn't actually see in practice in the demo. But the combat system seems solid and easy to pick up and understand. You control 1 person primarily but can easily switch to full control of other people in your party. There appears to be character loyalty points and a good/evil point system. If Dragon Age is similar in scope to either Mass Effects this is a game I can get 100+ hours of fun out of.