Murdoc

Picked this up finally to check it out. Only a few hours into it so this isn't any form of opinion, but more a first reaction. But I'm starting to think this is one of those games people really like because of the old-school toughness of it. I don't mind dying a lot, but having to re-do content over and over and over again is starting to kind bore me a little. I do like whatever it is it's doing as a toned down quiet game, it's kind of Otagi meets Kings Field mood. The messages are neat, but one of them, killed me! I go to read one and it's like "Watch out!" and I die from some dude to the left. As annoying as that was, it's pretty funny as I'm sure it was intended as a trap; why not put the message 5 feet back so I could anticipate?! So that's kind of neat, so I stopped reading a lot of messages; lesson learned.

Yeah it's bigger, but it's not 42 inch tv big, but I might cave for that.

Ran into the exact same situation, Korax. I always find that when I enter an encounter I play it cautious and when I die and realize the enemies were for real, the next time I just unleash every spell I have, take a potion and do it again until everyone is dead... I'm not sure why I even give people the opportunity and just not do that every time, I'd probably die less.

That;s really disapointing, I love Zelda, I just don't like small screens. As much as I liked twilight princess, I just can't get enough of the cell shaded wind waker look and seeing all the awesome stuff going on in phantom hourglass and now spirit tracks just makes me go "Argh nintendo!" Can always hope one day they'll just come out with another windwaker style for the consoles; Im pretty sure two zelda games in different styles could exist at the same time.

I thought mages started out pretty powerful and ended really powerful. I found parts a lot more difficult then my warrior, but that was mostly because I couldn't turn Alistar into a good tank(not sure what I was doing wrong) but when I had a good meatshield things went alright, but did rely on the party a lot until the end. Yeah playing an elf mage was a little dissapointing and this kind of goes for all races; theres not a lot of difference really. the mage overrides race most of the time and found the mage background to be kind of poor, I mean with all the backstory of the chantry and stuff and even specific dialog worrying about the apostate traveling with you being a problem with templers, it never came up. Sure I'm a grey warden, but does a templer know that? You'd think it would come up and that templers/chantry would react differently to me. Honestly, the game made the most sense as a dwarf; I think they had the best startings and the dialog trees made more sense coming from a dwarf that doesn't know anything then any other background; they also pointed out I was a dwarf more then anyone pointed out I was a mage or elf. A quibble everyone has anyway, but hopefully can be improved in the sequels.

Yeah I'm not a mmo person either, I just really wanted to play torchlight with friends so this might be close? Maybe not. And yeah, with any hang ups I had with Torchlights art(none really just it wasn't diablo, lol) I have actual issues with it. Should have also worded my original post a little better by not saying giving money to them instead of runic, but rather first while I wait for a torchlight mp.

Got to see this during my stay at Rockstar and, yeah, it's basically grand theft horsey, but that's alright with me. It was a bit rough at the time, but had a lot of nice details and really cool features; basically the western game I've been waiting for. They were using a lot of the Leone stuff as reference which is a good sign too and that theme is obviously present in the trailers. A little dissapointed they changed the main characters appearence from when it was announced; he was a lot more Bronsonesq before and now just young google looking d-bag. Oh, and I'm pretty sure the horses were euphoria as I remember commenting how awesome it will be to drive that thing into a crowd of people and into the side of a building; though it could have been me lamenting that it wouldn't work that way.

I know I have more then a few examples, but can't think of any until irish mentioned Mass Effect and the Faunts. You know that theme song from Super Marios Bros? Whenever I hear that it totally reminds me of Super Mario Bros.! Seriously though; Once beyond Hopelessness from Flaming Lips amazing soundtrack Christmas on Mars reminds me of Mass Effect. So much infact, I decided to play it in my mp3 player at the same time I had the Faunts song going on their myspace page, and let me tell you, it goes together pretty well depending on the timing. I'm sure a proffessional could make a better actual remix of it though.

http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/51734/Mythos-Returns-To-North-America Interesting, but should I feel bad for giving these guys money instead Runic?

I'm seriously wondering if they will ever release these for the wii or something. I don't have a ds so I'm missing out on so much, but it just pains me that I'm missing out on windwaker style zelda games

I need to get a few final thoughts on this game to lay it rest after having a few days to sit on it. Some of it may be repeats from previous posts and I can't say I'm going to organize this post in any reasonable fashion. I will block out plot spoilers and any major things, but not for general game set up so BEWARE OF SPOILERS. I'll start by talking about the game, then go into the plot spoilers of cataloging what went on for me; should have continued to update since the freshness of it might have been funnier, because my game wasn't really evil, they were just odd choices. Game: OK this game literally took over my life, it came out on the third(I think I got it on the 4th?) and it's already December, I played every weekend, all weekend and pretty much every night of the week. I literally ended October and woke up in December. Bioware games tend to do that to me, but it usually a couple weekends, so I can't praise the amount of content enough. Too much content. I'd love to play it again, but considering it takes a literal month out of the year from me, I don't see it happening. Instead I used various save points to go back and see what happened in different decisions. I won't be able to get the full scope of it though and how they could all add up, nor will I have a chance(maybe going back to it in a couple years) to try out playing lady macbeth on alistar there; if that is even an option(wouldn't see why not since the males get a list of love interests). Combat Inconsistency I played a warrior for a good 10-12 hours and didn't really have much of a problem; but on my full game as a mage the classic Bioware frustrates certainly returned, especially by the end. I know it must be nearly impossible to tune a game list this when there are so many variables, but I don't get how I'm the hand of god one battle and the next I get shot down in a minute. Sometimes it's a lack of concentration on my part thinking I can breeze through things, other times I'll be playing the battle multiple times until I get it right. Also, Bioware does an awesome job at making you feel godly by the end, but I feel they tune many of those enemies at the end to be overly easy making it a breeze to fly through; which is on one hand cool, but gets old pretty shortly. I know I was constantly tuning the difficulty in the options from easy, normal, to hard in the later half of the game; they almost should just give me a hotkey for it. Characters: I loved my crew in Mass Effect and one of the only facts I know about ME2(I'm on media boycott because I want the game to be fresh) is that I won't get them which worries the hell out of me because I'll compare all bioware characters to them until they come up with some better ones. In Dragon Age there seems to be a lot of them and the fact that I can't get some or can tell them to leave kind of makes me wonder why those options are even there; just to give me options? Peferably, I'll always chose more content over none, so why the choice? I realized in the end, too, that I killed a few people that could have joined me and didn't even realize it. That stuff is neat, but again why? I don't need options like that, I can chose to ignore them in my camp if I want, but at least I have the option to always go back and use them. Not if they are gone or dead. Also this was an odd Bioware game in the sense that in past titles I felt each party member was as important as another and you really decided who you took a long and talked to a lot. While some characters are obviously better then others (and I think most people will always stick with those) there wasn't a lot of clear distinction. In Dragon Age though (and this may be a wrong perception based on my experience) there really was a distinction in the party members, there were 2(maybe 3?) main characters and the rest were sidekicks. They seemed to have more ties with the plot, had the most dialog, etc.. so that was kind of an odd experience. Production Value/Presentation/DLC: Going to repeat myself a bit here and I don't mean to bash the game since it's of high quality in the subject, but I can't help feel uneasy about it by the end. It's a huge game, the graphics are adequate, menus work, music is alright, cut scenes are alright, etc, etc. But it's kind of the same stuff as every other Bioware game, they have a formula for presentation(and in gameplay/story, but I'm not discussing that since I haven't tired from that) that they haven't really broken out of nor have they improved. I think other games like Mass Effect used that formula better, mostly because of the art direction was more fresh(but equally as unoriginal as DA) and the sound design really worked to give it a more coherent package. But, and these are minor things, but the conversation systems seem a bit jilted, the popping a cutscene in after a bit of a load, jerkiness of animation, hard cuts between conversations and finished a conversation. Really small things, but pretty much the same issues I had with Kotor; so they've had 6 years and 4-5 games to kind of improve it and haven't. Again, a small thing, but if they could just smooth that process out to get rid of the early 2000 "gaminess" it'd be a great improvement. A side note would be, I think about Twilight Princess, the cutscenes had no talking, it was their first stab at a "maturish" looking game and I can remember several scenes from it that were masterfully directed, smooth transition into them, amazing shots and animation, really set the mood and feel of the entire game. Also any modern FF, while I'm not big on story/characters/gameplay with it, they know their stuff in presentation department and it took them a lot less then 13(or whatever they are on now) games to do it. I mention this because it was(as far as I know) their first try doing it(not a zelda game) and they did it in a memorable way, so come on Bioware, step it up in the presentation department; I stress this because I haven't see much improvement over their games, so I don't think its any sort of mandate of theirs. Art Direction: Mentioned it before, the thumbs mentioned it; fuck lotr. The game was conceived like 7 years ago, so I can understand at that time lotr was awesome and everyone was digging it back then and after playing it you can get the sense it started out as that game and slowly started to become it's own awesome entity. OK, again back to Mass Effect (I'll do this a lot because I think its Bioware's pinnacle for this type of game and all games will be compared to it) Mass Effect's art direction was basically a break down of the design Syd Mead, so in principle it was no better then going out and breaking down the direction of LoTR; the only difference is the execution on Mass Effect was better and I think Syd's art, while reference by everyone, was never fully exploited like it was done in ME, making it very new feeling, even to those familiar of his work. DA was called a "dark fantasy" or something, and yeah int eh context of the narrative and fiction, it was, so I can't help but think if it took the art direction of Diablo, how balls out amazing my experience would have been. Diablo's designs are rooted in classic fantasy and not crazy imaginative, just something about it seemed to fit the world DA wanted to be more then the LOTR stuff. DLC: I hate DLC. Not on the principle of charging me money for stuff, but on the principle that it is almost never satisfying to me. The GTA stuff? Yeah sure 20 bucks and you get a little story, but I'd rather have paid them 60-70 dollars for a full game of Lost and the Damned; the "snack" that is DLC just isn't enough even if it's done well. Dragon Age has a scary integration into DLC and I'm sure by next year most games(if they are smart) will have similar systems implemented. I will also say there is a likelihood that I will be buying DA DLC assuming I still have it on my computer by the time new stuff comes out, not to mention there will be the mods, etc... What I don't want, and this is a bit of a spoiler, is main quest continuations in DLC. DLC feels cheap to me(I got one for free with the golem quest, and something wasn't right with it)and just like a bunch of fight missions with maybe a few pieces of dialog. Since most of my love for these games comes out of the conversation trees, I don't want to see what my party members are up to by having one last battle with them, I'd rather that just be explained in the coming sequels so it can be done properly. So yeah, guess I had a lot more to say on it then I thought, so sorry about that. I'll leave the tale of my experiance for another time or never, depending which comes first.

Sorry, what I ment was theres a lot of games with sucking blood, but what I ment was like how LoK did it, having to grapple on to people is just gay, but sucking their blood from across the screen was cool/fun. Also, yes I remember the load screens in that being horrid even for its day. But the voice acting keeps it going, for such a cheesy world and hammy dialog, the cast really was probably the best at delivering it for that era... I followed the entire series, soul reaver 2 being the second best in the series(though sadly you need to play the others to get it) and remember it had a particularly good soundtrack and lip syncing for it's time. In fact the guy that plays Kain plays a character in Dragon Age... thats how you knew he was evil right away, lol.

I am instantly reminded of this : )

Not much to add other then something I thought of when reading this thread; but anyone remember Oregon Trail? Wonder why a game like that wouldn't work, it was literally about trying to survive to go from point A to point B and, from what I remember, the only condition of winning was actually getting there alive. Yet instead of combating a horse of zombies, terrorists, or nazies; it was hunger, disease and the elements... yet I can't think of any modern game that has tried to employee a oregon trail style of design... am I under thinking this?

I was a super fan of legacy of kain back when it came out for whatever reason there was. I haven't played it for a long time, so hard to say if its worth trucking through, but I played it start to finish twice because it was a lot of fun. The story is hammy, but as a teenager used to crappy voice acting and most of the crap stories outside of adventure games, so it was cool to see someone take a more mature tone to a game that was about manipulation and choices between bad and, well bad, which I didn't get see much back then. The world itself was typical, but kind of deranged in the same sense Diablo 1 was(can't remember if it was before or after Diablo) but just so few fantasy games really pull of the classic ye'ol england fantasy but with a great dark mood and some weird interesting stuff in it. The designs of course were fairly terrible 1995 pc fantasy game though. The gameplay I thought was cool as you just get more fun/neat powers as you go along, spells, shapeshifting, etc... the sucking blood never gets old and still no one has used this for vampires since then(it was fun!) So if you can get over graphics, maybe worht playing until you get bored, again, hard for me to say as it would be a nostalgia trip at this point. ____________ To add; yeah pretty much all the snes/nes classics still hold up, wolfenstien, lucasarts library... it gets more sketch when things go to 3d, and not just becuase of the graphics but gameplay as well for some reason. I got FF tactics on the pstore because I remember playing it and loving it, but never beat it in the time I rented it in. The graphics are pretty solid and the game is alright, but god damn, am I horrible. It took me like 2 days to get through what I remember was 2 hours of gameplay because I keep losing every battle at least twice every time. I'm sure the game has held up, just my strategic mind has not. Considering I was playing more puzzle, strategy games back then and haven't touched one in a decade now, I suppose that had an affect on things; that's kind of dissapointing.

Sure it conforms(more then less) to the Bioware typical rpg... like some of the quests I've done in both mass effect and kotor before, and a few of the characters are pretty much other ones from their games; but so what? They're good at doing it and it's fun. I have a lot to say about the game, but its been awhile so not really sure where to start, probably will in a later post. I finished it last night, so unfortunately a lot of what I have to say are spoilers, but I'll comment on this. Any ending in this type of game always sucks simple because it ends; thats not to say dragons age sucked, its pretty much what I expected, but the production value/presentation of it felt really poor, which kind of has this lingering effect on me. Bioware has this type of game down pat on the gameplay side of things, but I'd really like to see them work harder on presentation as it's the same thing for all their games and some times it's more polished then other(mass effect certainly was) but then to see such a long game that was faily consistent take kind of a dip right at the end is mildly dissapointing. without getting into specifics on the fiction and events would anyone that has played to the end care to comment ont his; am i being too picky about

Why would they ever make sequels to zelda for the last 20 years? Same reason I'd like to make a Zelda game. Really, when a game approrpriates a style of game or a theme from a nother game we throw down a hammer, but if a game does it to a movie we don't bat an eye, we just smile and go "oh I see what your doing, nice one" So, what's the big deal? Dragon Age is great, but its lotr heavy and aside from a person choice of that being a fault, no one cares. Halo, GoW, and every other Space marine game is basically Aliens 2. Braid is essentially a Mario game without the Mario license as well. And yeah I agree, their intentions are pretty unclear. I call it somewhat of a parody because of the novelty on the art direction, but everything else presented doesn't say that. My point above though is what does it matter? Zelda is a great game, if more people want to make me a zelda game, whether they divert from the source more or less, why would I complain? I'll wait, try it and if it's awesome and still awesome even when not original(coughDRAGONAGEcough) then that's a good thing for us all.

I'm not sure if it's fair to call it plagarism. I mean I have some pretty liberal views about copyright, but if I want to make a zelda game, why couldn't I? Though if I went that far I'd probably have lofty enough goals to come up with my own story and such, but from the sense I get from this is kinds of a spoof/tribute game? It could even go farther and play off a lot of the common knowledge of zelda and try to twist that up a bit or make fun of it a bit (though I think windwaker and twlight princess already covered that ground) At least thats what the art direction is telling me, so I assume the music/story setup is just giving a nod to it. Kind of a neat idea for art; not expecting an amazing game, but something to keep my eyes on.

Dwarf City done. Wow, it's finally over, my character had somewhere around 6-7 injurys by the time I got out of there, honestly, that could have been the game I would have came out pretty happy. We walked outside for the first time in a week and the dwarf felt a little weird about the sky, after the cut scene was over I looked up and felt frightened... I was down there for far too long. Also, on the technical side about the DLC golem after the dwarf city

What would those be again? It sucks people losing their jobs, but I'm really the other way around with Pandemic, I like who they are(what they represent and goals) I just don't like what they do 99% of the time.

Another thought(and more pissing on the parade) Irish Sabateour? Would this be considered mildly racist or just sterotypical or other? Anyway, if they had balls(they don't, ala no swastika) take the sequel with the irish guy and put him in ireland resisting his own f@#$ing occupation, then at least we have some gta level controversy without doing gta controversy with hookers and sex.

I went on a giant rant this morning about how dumb I think this game looks from a concept standpoint, so I'll try to keep this as a short version and aybe a little less angry because at the end of the day I'll just ignore it. Well, it started when I heard this was a franchise and how it might come to EA Montreal after they shut down pandemic(rumor by someone, no idea who) So, I guess they could do different occupations or something, whatever. Anyway, I really don't dig the look of the game, and using the art direction from Schindler’s list is not only fifteen years too late, unoriginal, pseudo-pretentious, but just kind of insulting. When I say insulting I don't mean to Schindler’s list or WW2 in general, I just mean that if it's a successful marketing ploy to make this game special or "high class" when everything about the gameplay doesn't relate to it and again, stale, stale, concept for direction. When Gears of War takes the style/feel of Aliens 2, I don't really care (well I do, but in a different way) because their mood fits their game. Trying to give it the visuals that would appeal that looks like it’s for the hipsters and highbrow crowd when your game is about a guy swinging around Nazi occupied paris like king kong taking out the entire German army just frustrates the hell out of me. The video honestly didn't help; "It’s a personal intimate story" Ok so I guess if you made a game about a saboteur trying to eject nazi regime from his country wasn't enough, you needed to make the main character foreign and after one particular nazi to make it a personal story, super, glad you had the balls to not use the swastika either. Actually I'm just going to stop there because I'm about to write a big turd post. To end on a postive note, it has production value feel, thats a plus. edit: cleaning up the language, probably still fairly incoherent.

Lol, Errik I just came on in the middle of my game to say fuck the dwarves but you beat me to it. It's passed the point of not ending, it's actually pretty hilarious because they are consistently not helping me, getting me to do all the work, then taking credit or benefiting from the work I already do. And yeah I think there were like 2 health potions and maybe(big maybe) injury kit in all of dwarf-ville, so cleaning them out wasn't hard. But I swapped out characters just so they don't all have 3 massive head injuries by the time we get out. I like the blood splatter, but a step further would have been to show my team just wrecked, a step further from that would be having them not be able to say their lines correctly and coughing up blood. Somehow I think when I talk about this game 5 years from now it'll be,"Oh yeah, that one where your entire team dies in the deeproads... what a weird ending."

I started over last week and decided to go to the places where i hadn't been first, all I have to say is f@$#% F#$%ing dwarves. Jesus christ, the most incompetant race in this world, they can't do one damn thing for themselves. The dwarf city is literally an entire game on it's own with all these tasks that usually end up in a grueling 1-3 hour dungeon crawl where I'm getting the crap beaten out of me. Top that off with them not getting any new goods into the city(I've cleaned out the supply on health potions and crafting goods for health potions) and it's just endlessly going on. I thought the other places I played in my previous game where a little more balanced, the dalish forest felt like a gauntlet, but the dwarves have them beat hands down. Also in context of the story, if i was a dwarf(was in my previous one) or at least a dwarf noble why would I be helping one of these guys do what they want to do when I'm doing all the work? I'll just do the work and take the prize for myself, because damn it, it's a lot of bloody work.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/11/13/science/AP-US-SCI-Shoot-the-Moon.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=water%20moon&st=cse Idle Thumbs Bioshock sequel premise begins! You get the water and the moon in one game.