Game Collection: Purged

I made a rather rash decision yesterday. I sold the vast majority of my game collection back to a local imperialist game-trading company. I got  a surprisingly large amount of store credit for everything and left with Portal 2, Dragon Age: Origins (Ultimate Edition), and a new controller cuz my 360 thumbstick has been twitchy for a long time. In this case "a long time" means "since I bought it. A word to the wise: sped the extra money and buy a new controller, don't buy used.

So far Portal 2 is really fun. Valve has built on the concept significantly so that it's not just a longer version of the first one and the story has taken some surprising (and fun) twists so far. I haven't touched multiplayer yet, but I hope to do some of it tomorrow. I don't really want to rant about it because there are probably a million and one sites that expound how great it is. I will probably write at about it at length once I've done some multiplayer and have finished the single player which seems like it is going to be pretty short. It's not like the first installment which you could only call a full game if you had the most jaded sense of humor, but I'm going to guess that it will clock in at around 10 hours for a full play-through.

Dragon Age seems pretty good for the hour or two I've played. However, I think I had some misconceptions about it before I got it. I expected to be playing a Mass Effect clone in a fantasy setting. I think it would be more appropriate to say that Dragon Age spans the gap between Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect. On top of that, considering the game is less than 2 years old (according to google) the graphics look disappointingly dated. That may not be the case if I has an HDTV, but I'm playing it on a tube television. That's not really a complaint, it's just that Mass Effect looks so good that I was expecting the same caliber of quality throughout Dragon Age. But, like Portal 2, I'll probably have more to say once I put a little bit more time into it.

My friend bought Descent: Journeys in the Dark the other day. As you can see above, it's an extremely elaborate boardgame. We had a good time, but no one had played before so we played this very complex boardgame and tried to learn the rules (rule book is like 30 pages) at the same time. It was fun, but it took forever because no one knew the rules or the strategy. The game is like an adaptation of an old-school Dungeons and Dragons dungeon crawl. What that means is that one player runs the dungeon and wants to kill the adventurers. The other players control said adventurers, they work together and try to kill all the monsters in the dungeon and steal all their stuff (gold, potions, weapons, etc.). It's a good game, but I think the intense learning curve would turn off players who are not pretty intense gamers.

To conclude, my EVE online subscription expired. Will I be renewing it? Maybe, but Portal, Dragon Age, and Lost Odyssey to play, so the jury is still out on weather I will come back to EVE or not.