A Green Mushroom

A lot has been written about Dragon Age II.  There are good blog posts and reviews that discuss the overall game, but I haven't seen much said about my favorite design choice. In past Bioware games there has always been a good/evil scale that your character gets placed on.  The more you say and do good things the more you slide towards the good side of the scale.  Do dastardly deeds and verbally eviscerate others and you'll slide towards the evil end. Dragon Age II does away with this moral scale.  It's unbelievably liberating.  I can choose whichever dialog option I think fits the situation instead of feeling like I have to make my character play a part.  I love the smart-ass answers, but it's something I wouldn't have explored in the Mass Effect series because my Shepard is a good guy.  He doesn't give flippant answers.  That wouldn't be nice. My Hawke, on the other hand, is a smart-ass with a tough exterior but a heart of gold.  H...

One of the advantages of playing Final Fantasy I on the ipod touch is that I can get in quick play sessions.  I'm not slaving over the game for hours the way I sometimes do in modern RPGs and MMOs.  The ipod lets me pick up and play for 5 minutes, make some progress, save and quit.  It works well and I don't feel any RPG burn out at all. Compare that to Dragon Age II where I only play once every few days and but devote a large block of time to my play sessions.  By the end of a session I'm often burned out on DAII. It actually makes me kind of concerned for my Final Fantasy Project because the thought of going back to old school save points sounds like a pain in the ass.  The games aren't that old but not being able to save on the fly is going to be inconvenient. Part of the reason the modern, save anywhere, approach exists is the increase in technology but I think that demographics play a part as well.  A whole generation of gamers has grown up ...

My finished playthrough of Dragon Age: Origins clocked in at right around 72 hours .  Side note: I love how Steam keeps track of total time played for each game on my PC.  Anyway, my adventure is over and I feel accomplished. I mostly had a good time playing DA:O, but the dialogue and conversation system started to drive me crazy towards the end of the game.  I wanted to scream at the characters, "GET TO THE POINT ALREADY!" on more then one occasion.  Besides that, I already mentioned my gripes when I first returned to DA:O to finish up my game. After the final cutscene wrapped up, I immediately jumped into the Dragon Age II demo. I first tried it on the Xbox 360 and was disappointed with what I found.  They had taken a great RPG intellectual property and turned it into a button mashing hack-and-slash with little to no strategy. There's no way you can get me to play through Dragon Age II on that system.  I'm going to go ahead and assume it's pretty...

I've been thinking lots about grabbing Cataclysm when it releases and in the meantime I've been playing the descendants of DoTA to fill my gaming time.  In that vein I found some great articles about the upcoming WoW expansion and DoTA too.  Spinks on the front loaded nature of expansions.  Syp talks about how WoW is like an ex-girlfriend .  A great index of info for WoW players looking to come back after a break. A look at DoTA and the games it has spawned recently. A new Dragon Age 2 trailer that got me excited.