Dragon Age 2

I just finished playing Dragon Age 2 on my computer, and now that my 22 hour stint is over, I can safely say another hour of my time won't be wasted on this game.


Dragon Age: Origins has become one of my favorite fantasy RPGs of all time. Playing it reminded me of some of my other favorite games like Dungeon Siege or Baldur's Gate. It was downright amazing. Sure, there could've been a few improvements, as with any game. The combat seemed slow at times, there weren't any stamina potions, and sometimes it was simply too hard. It was just so damned expansive and fun that the small faults could be easily ignored, so it's one of the best RPGs ever. Now, Dragon Age 2 has come to save the day and fix the problems with the first game, and by god did they try.

Plot
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Dragon Age 2 is set during the events of Ferelden's blight from the first game. The hero, Hawke, lives in Lothering when Darkspawn start wrecking up the place. He and his family escape, making their way to Kirkwall. They come in as refugees and have to climb the tower of success, lest they always live in the slums, or with their uncle. The game takes place through a decade split into three separate acts, but you wouldn't notice if the cut scenes that tell you what you're doing in the meantime didn't exist.

Dragon Age 2, like Mass Effect 2, pushes the save game transfer aspect quite a bit. In Mass Effect 2, choices you made in Mass Effect 1 played a huge part in many encounters, and there were multiple allusions to past decisions you made. Here however, you play an entirely different character, so most of your choices don't really crop up in the story. Even when they do, they just go over your head and you don't notice or care about them. They did find a way to shoehorn you into a meeting with a character from the first game though. I'm pretty sure it did nothing for the plot too, so I suppose Bioware was just doing some fanservice.

The blight takes a backseat this time in the plot, in that it never really presents much of a problem besides causing you to move into Kirkwall. Darkspawn never threaten anything in the game, and you often don't see them. The blight is talked about every now and then, but it doesn't affect you after 5 minutes of playing the game.

The game doesn't have a plot at all. It felt like all you were doing the whole game was side quests. I was waiting for a huge conflict to start, to give me a sense of what I will have to achieve in this game. Then 18 hours passed until I figured out what they were leading up to. In Dragon Age: Origins there was the blight. You had to kill the Archdemon. You knew what the goal was from the beginning, so everything felt like it was leading up to something. Helping the Dalish and Mages to get their support, saving Arl Eamon. You knew the reasons you had to do the thing you did . To fight the Darkspawn and kill the Archdemon. What about Dragon Age 2 though? There's no clear goal in this game. What is it all leading up to? Nothing. It doesn't lead up to anything. There is no straight road, no major plot. The first two acts feel like they could've been DLC for Origins, and it's not up until the third act that the major plot development happens. I didn't see it coming, and yet, I didn't care. I didn't feel what the game wanted me to feel.

The game also decided to have a plot point which removed one of my characters for the entire game after the first act. One of my best characters too. I never got to play them again after that until the last battle. It sucked.

After all was said and done, what could you do now? What was the epilogue? Nothing! Same thing happened after the end of Origins. All you could do was just stand in camp and wait for DLC to be released so you could leave. Why? What if I want to go walking around a bit? Can't do it. What if I wanted to beat up the gangs at night in Kirkwall? Nope. It seems a bit nit picky, but I don't see why they restrict you to the Estate in DA2 or the Camp in Origins.

Now that I'm done clamoring on about the stupid plot, or lack thereof, let's get on to the more game side of things.

Gameplay
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Right click to attack, move with WASD, and use spells by clicking on them or pressing a number. Sounds simple enough. The cool down times for everything is amazingly retarded though. 30 second cool down for a health potion? Really? Now, there's only one type of health potion, so you can't cheat by using a lesser health potion, and then a greater health potion, so you don't need to worry about using only one type of health potion in a row. No more of that, one potion every 30 seconds. You can cast heal though. Too bad it's a 40s cool down. What the hell happened? Group heal is all but gone too. Only one mage, Anders, can do it now. It use to be that all your mages can cast it. It's only Anders now though. Screw that guy. He's like Aeris without the whole dying part. To make you even more mad, you have to active a sustained spell, in which you can't cast any offensive magic, before you can cast group heal, or revive. So there's a 2 or 3 second window in which the starting animation for Pancea, the sustained healing ability, has to be finished until you can cast group heal. Then you have to deactivate it to attack with an offensive spell. In the time it takes you could be killed if you waited too long to do it, which happened to me too often.

Maps are another weird thing that's happened to this game. I'm not sure about Origins, because it was never a problem, but maps go away once you leave the area in Dragon Age 2. In the game, you seriously revisit the same places hundreds of time. Each place is recycled for different quests, and each time, your map is blank until you explore the area. That's fine if the place was new, but you've been there HUNDREDS OF TIMES. Why take it away? The level design makes everything confusing, especially on the wounded coast, so you need the map to know where you're going. The map is reset each time you go there, so you always get lost. It's really annoying.

You can't use any armor you pick up with your companions now. Now, you can't mix and match. You have to buy specific armor, or find a set on their companion quest. There's only 5 upgrades to their armor, which really feels like the game is strangling me. It feels very restrictive, and is a huge setback. I like freedom, it's nice, but this game doesn't seem to agree.

Odd glitches would happen with the game too, like my characters would stop attacking the enemy and just idly stand by me with their weapons sheathed while I'm getting raped by a bunch of spiders. I figure that the glitches in the game will be resolved in later patches, but they were infuriating when they happened to me.

Graphics
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How the game looks at its best, I don't know. My good graphics card got blown up a month ago, so I couldn't run it in DirectX 11, but I can run it in DirectX 10 right? Nope! Only DX9 or DX11. Gay. So I could only keep it on medium, because high and very high is reserved for DX11 cards for some reason. So I can't talk about how crap the graphics are, but I can talk about other graphical things.

Animations this time around get a lot more fluid and are really improved. Something that I do enjoy about this game is the fighting animation. It does feel smooth and faster paced than the last game. Mages would just shake their stick at a problem in Origins, but here they actually do some kind of spinning/shoving their stick in the ground move. It looks decent enough and is an improvement on the previous game. They did change a few things I was disappointed at, like making Winter's Grasp a shooting ability, rather than an instant attack. Now you have to wait a second or two for it to hit them, but let's not get into gameplay again.

The text in this game is another thing that really makes me mad










I'll admit, it looks interesting for awhile, but when you realize that all the text in this game looks like this or worse, it really makes me mad. Who thought it would be a good idea? Seriously? Some amateur came up with the design of the game, because everything just fails so hard.

And the User Interface, oh god the UI, I don't know where to start with it. Look at these pictures. Ignoring the graphics of the actual game, which UI looks better?

Origins:

DA2:


Sure, the change may have made it more functional, for consoles, but all the nice artwork that was present in Origins, the old medieval look, is just gone now. All the icons just look too futuristic to be in Dragon Age. The health and stamina/mana bars change size now as you upgrade it. Good, that's something that I can agree was stupid in Origins. Too bad it's just one improvement under a whole dump truck of failures.

I'm just so disappointed and sad at this game. I truly felt that it had potential. Sadly, the game just reeks of laziness.

Aliens V.S. Predator

"Wowie!" My friend says a few weeks ago. "You know what would be a great game to play online?"

"I don't care" I say.

"A game that came out a year ago, and is made mainly for consoles!" He responds.

"I'll only play it if you gift me it." Thinking I out smarted him.

"Alright!" He says.

"Ugh."


Aliens V.S. Predator is a game made by Rebellion Developments, who are known to gamers from their many AvP knock-off games. Outside of that, the only games I recognize of note worthiness is the "Gun" PSP port and "Rogue Warrior", which is a horrible fucking start.

In AvP, you play as an Alien, a Predator, or a Marine, during the same plot events. The Marine Spaceship "Marlowe" has been shot down by an unknown species, and it has fallen onto a planet where Humans are discovering ancient Predator ruins and experimenting on Aliens. Predators are pissed off that the Marines are screwing around on one of their hunting grounds, Aliens are pissed off because their Queen is being held captive on the Marlowe, and the Marines are pissing on themselves in the corner.

Now, I love Alien and all of their sequels, and I love Predator and.. well, its sequel was shit. The movie Aliens V.S. Predator did a Freddy V.S. Jason sort of thing where two otherwise good franchises cancel each other out when paired together. I hated AvP, and I wasn't really looking forward to this game, as hinted by my discourse with my friend. The concept sounds great on paper! Different game play elements for each species. The sneaky Alien, waiting to pounce on its prey. The violent Predator, able to cloak, fight head on, and use ranged weapons. The Marine, ready to find the auto-target gun and piss off the Predators and Aliens.

Each campaign has the same major plot easily summed up with the question: "The Marlowe is down, what does this mean to me?". For the Aliens, that means they're going to try and rescue their Queen. For the Marines, it means he wants to go save his buddies. For the Predators, they just want to blow up the cadavers of their comrades. Fuck saving people I suppose.

The Alien campaign starts off interesting enough (Which I won't spoil because it is a unique way to start off a campaign), and then proceeds to fall flat on its face. It isn't that bad but it gets stupidly hard. As an Alien, the biggest advantage you have is staying in the dark and creeping around, which barely works. All the NPC Marines seem to have infrared vision, because no matter where you are, they're probably going to see you. I was sneaking around in a vent at one point, and I emerged out of it into the darkness of the ceiling. Just then, a Marine, on the total opposite side of this huge hangar, saw me out of the corner of his eye and proceeded to blast my ass and various other parts of my body off of me and back into the vent I was still crawling out of. That is bullshit. There were no lights around me. I was on the ceiling. He was on the other side of the room, on the ground. He didn't have the auto-target gun. I was doing everything right and he just used his telescopic vision to locate and kill me in a matter of seconds. I had quite a few moments like that, and it is just totally stupid.

On to the Marine campaign.

The Marine campaign is Doom 3. That's all I need to say. It's Doom 3. The environment, the weapons. It's Doom 3. They try to be creepy with all the darkness, but it isn't. It's Doom 3. Was Doom 3 scary? Of course not. It had those surprise scare moments, but that doesn't make it scary. Amnesia: The Dark Descent is scary. This is just people going "BOO!"

And finally the Predator campaign.

The Predator campaign has you running around killing Aliens and getting destroyed by Marines. I don't know why these Marines kick the ass off all the other species. I can't do that against my friend online. He can't either. You know how easy it was for Arnold and everyone else to spot the Predator in its movie? Of course not! It wasn't easy. I have no idea why it's so easy for everyone here! These guys can spot you out of no where. Even your little plasma gun thing runs out amazingly fast, so don't count on that. Proximity mines? Ha! The whole campaign is just hard and really retarded.

But how is the multiplayer? I would like to know too! I sat on my ass for 20 minutes, searching for a game. You know what I came up with? One game. Two people in it. This isn't a multiplayer experience, and I don't think we'll ever see one come out of this on the PC. It just feels like a console port, and I won't be surprised if it is. I played with my friend and the game was horribly unbalanced. I kicked his ass so many times with the Predator no matter what class he was, and he did the same thing when he was Predator. Is this why nobody is playing multiplayer? It might just be.

This game is just stupid. Plain fucking dumb. It has a fun concept, yes, but it fails on all levels. The NPCs are idiotically difficult, the auto-aim gun is way over powered for online play, and the online play isn't even there anymore.

Want to play the game? Play Thief, Shadow Warrior, and Doom 3.

Dead Rising 2

Since I haven't updated my site in a long time (Apparently I've tried, because I have like 10 posts that are drafts which will never see the light of day), and I want to get back into reviewing things, there's going to be a wave of reviews coming. To start it off, I'll review a game that I played a lot over the past two months.


Capcom has finally made their sequel to Dead Rising, a game where you screw around killing zombies in a mall, with the game Dead Rising 2, a game where you screw around killing zombies in a casino.

Dead Rising was a great game. Being able to run around and create mass genocide with things you found laying around a mall is amazing. Me and my friend played it for so many hours (until one of us decided to kick the console while I was playing it so it scratched the fucking shit out of the game and caused it to be unplayable back in 2007 and since then the only fucking part I can play is the beginning, taking pictures of zombies, and it pisses me off to no fucking extent.) just killing zombies and ignoring the case timer running out. There were a few things that made me mad about it, and it is by no means a perfect game. The aiming was shit, case timers would go way too fast, and some of the bosses were just plain hacking. I was hoping that they would fix those problems. Well, suffice to say, they didn't, but I'm not disappointed.

Dead Rising 2 picks up five years after the zombie outbreak in Willamette from the first game in the series. Since then, people decided to get rid of their new zombie friends by making 'Terror Is Reality', a game show that has people killing zombies in various ways for cash. Unless you want to trudge through the derelict 'Terror is Reality' multiplayer mode to see them all, you're only going to see the main event, Slicecycles. This is where we meet our protagonists, Chuck Greene, and his daughter, Katey Greene, who has to take the zombie-ism suppressant Zombrex, lest she wants to reenact a scene from Quarantine. Our hero is trying to win the cash prize from the show to keep Katey from biting his face off, when in a surprising twist, another outbreak occurs! Our protagonist heroically hauls his ass to the nearest panic room with Katey, who still needs her Zombrex, so it's up to Chucke Greene to go get her some.

Capcom has made a great sequel with this. Out the window is picture taking for upgrade points, and now, you just kill zombies with weapons you glued together. The weapons you combine together a lot of the time don't make any sense, and are made solely for the spectacle of seeing it, and with that comes very very strange combinations you won't think of. As an example, would you think to combine a tennis racket and a tiki torch? I didn't until I got the combo card. I barely ever got combo cards anyway. The only ones I would get were from leveling up or the occasional one from an escort mission. I only got two from posters, and even those I could barely make half the time. All the combos I made I found online, or within the combination room itself. All the combo rooms have a few things kind of hinting what you should make. Like, a bow and some dynamite right outside its door. Well, we all know what that is from. Rambo! Of course, with a bow, you have to shoot it, so we come back to our old friend aiming.

Although the aiming does feel a little bit better, as I can tell from my memories of the first game (Which I would play, but oh no, it had to go and get fucking destroyed), the problem with the bosses is still present. The game is a bit more merciful with its sharp stick and doesn't shove it up your ass as fast this time because the main cases are generally easy if you have any idea of what to do. The side mission bosses are where the game just likes to twist and push that stick until it's coming out of your ears. I understand why they're hard, don't get me wrong, but I felt there should've been more boss battles I've could've done on my first play through. I tried a lot of them, the Chef, the Pink Chainsaw guy, and I couldn't beat any of them on my first time around. The only ones I could beat were the ones to get Zombrex or the actual main case bosses. I like a good challenge, but you just have no inventory space to cope with the low health you'll have fighting the side bosses.

Although it may seem I'm complaining a lot, I really like this game. They pulled a Terminator 2 on us. It may not be that much more creative than the first, as most of the game takes place in a mall (Oh, I'm sorry, a 'plaza'), but it still feels new and different, especially with the introduction of vehicles. Just don't expect to be driving them because you'll never get the money to buy them without playing online, which nobody does.

Now that Dead Rising 2 is out and about, we can look forward to the new DLC, Case: West. Will it be Back to the Future 3 or will it be Matrix: Revolutions?