A Green Mushroom

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...

Star Trek Online is one of the newest MMOs on the block.  There is a ton of coverage in the blogosphere and there are so many people playing it at the moment.  When bombarded from multiple fronts it is a hard game to ignore. But, how great would this game be if it had to stand on its own without the power of the IP behind it?  Would it still hold up as a decent MMO or are people overlooking flaws because they get to finally be in the Star Trek universe?  I think much of the current appeal is seeing your own character in a star fleet uniform.  Hearing the sound of a phaser (which has been burned into the fanboy mind) in battle is hard to resist. At this point it is impossible to divorce the game from the IP, but it is still interesting to think about how many people would have bought STO if it didn't have the power of the Star Trek license behind it. STO isn't the only game this applies to either.  Just look ahead to next year's launch of The Old Repub...