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.

Infection

I've not posted in a week or so because I had to prepare for finals. Also, coincidentally, I haven't had much to say about gaming. Now that finals are over I bought and have been playing Prototype like it's my fucking job. I rented Prototype about a year ago and played through it super fast. I thought at the time that I played it so obsessively because it was a rental, and had to go back in 4-5 days. I realize now that I played through it so fast because it's addictive and incredible.
     I feel a little strange bit of guilt saying that its so great because it was a big deal when it came out. It shouldn't deserve the hype it got on it's release because it's little more than a Grand Theft Auto clone. A clone that has super powers. Don't misunderstand me though. I love this game. Activision essentially took their Spider Man 2 game, which was total crap, and over hauled it to make Prototype. Prototype is so derivative of other games (GTA and Spider-Man) that I feel like it should have no merits of it's own, but I cannot stop playing it. And this is after already playing the game to it's completion. Not to belabor the point, but Prototype has so much working against in my mind that the fact that I'm giving the game a virtual "Thumbs up" should communicate that this is an amazing game. A little short, but unadulterated fun!
     Other than that I want to blab on about a couple up coming games. This year is going to be a big one for games that make me excited like a little girl. Mass Effect 3 is supposed to be out near the end of the year! Some people poo-poo ME and ME2. Those people are fucking dumb-dumbs. If YOU didn't like ME or ME2 than I'm including you under the dumb-dumb umbrella. Mass Effect 2 might be my favorite game ever. And I'm putting that up against titans such as Chrono Trigger and Metal Gear Solid. Needless to say, I'm highly anticipating Mass Effect 3. Another big 'un is Skyrim: Elder Scrolls V. I only got into the Elder Scrolls series in the last 4-5 years. I played through the majority of Morrowind and loved it, I played the fuck out of Oblivion and it took Morrowind and kicked it in it's dated-graphics ass! I don't have anything more to say about it. Finally, a game that is already out: Portal 2. I want it so bad it hurts. If anyone reading this has $60 to spare send it to me immediately and I will buy Portal 2. I hope against hope that there will be a tie-in to Half Life 3 because ***SPOILER ALERT*** Half Life 2 Episode 2 had Aperture Science show up at the very end ***END SPOILER ALERT*** Regardless, I got to play a little bit of Portal 2 last week and it certainly delivered on the Awesome-ness. Rant Status: Over

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.