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Last Tuesday, Dragon Age: Origins: Awakening: Return of the Colon came in the mail, and for the last week I’ve been doing little else. (Other than harassing Josh while he tried to get WoW to work on Ubuntu, and occasionally playing some WoW myself.) I have a lot to say, and unlike most reviews it’s mostly to do with important plot shit, so this one’s going to have more spoilers than usual. If you want to avoid spoilers and just want to know what I thought: for the most part, I enjoyed it. At first Anders and Velanna in particular reminded me too much of their counterparts in Origins (Anders is like a not-shy, magey version of Alistair, Velanna is Morrigan, not just like Morrigan), but Anders at least grew on me and all the other new companions are cool and interesting. The story was decent, for something so blatantly unnecessary, and it was well-told too. I’d check it out, if you can stand all the fucking bugs.
Anyway, on to the review.
Skadi, travelling with a group of very attractive young men. And Oghren.
The game itself is set up very much like Origins, being that it’s an expansion, so there isn’t too much to say there. The new skills were nice (Clarity especially), the new class specialisations were all useful and fun, and there were some very cool new spells. One thing I noticed is that since you start at such a ridiculously high level, there’s no way you’ll be able to fit all your spells into your tactics slots, let alone onto your hotbar. This is especially bad for the mages, since they’re going to actually want to use most of their spells, but invariably you’re going to have to waste 2-5 tactics and spell slots on healing spells. Fewer, more powerful spells and abilities would be preferable to this; what’s so bad about just having abilities that improve old spells instead of adding new ones?
BioWare seems to have taken exactly the wrong from Mass Effect 2, too. You can’t talk to your party members except when you find random crap in the world to click on, which is extremely annoying. Even when you’re in Vigil’s Keep, the new equivalent of camp, you can’t talk to whoever you want. Obviously this means there are no new romance options, either (which is a shame, I really liked Nathaniel and he has a sexy voice). This really takes away from the character interactions I liked so much in Origins.
Okay, done with that? Good. On to the shit that’s really pissing me off.
Spoilers! Lots of them! You’ve been warned!
Continue reading Dragon Mage: All Other Classes Are Useless: The Sequel
Alternate title: Blizzard may not be staffed entirely by barely-functioning retards, after all.
So I was browsing the TV Tropes forums yesterday, avoiding writing my Ass Creed 2 review, when I saw a thread in the It Just Bugs Me! section about the concept of aggro and tanking. The jist of it was that he wanted intelligent enemies (which I can guarantee sounds better on paper than it would in an actual MMO — no one would play a healer if they knew they’d die first 100% of the time, even in PvE), and I pointed out how awful that would be with in games like World of Warcraft. It would be awful because of the current design philosophy: that is, fake difficulty by making every boss capable of 2-shotting a tank, so the entire encounter is based around the healers’ ability to spam their biggest heals ad infinitum. I went to the WoW official forums to get some information to add to my argument, I think. I don’t remember exactly why I went now, and it isn’t important. While I was there, I started reading about the changes they have planned for the next expansion, Cataclysm, and holy shit. Despite myself, despite how much this game has burned me in the past, I still find myself excited by the changes being planned. This may seem like a shock coming from the girl who wrote this post about why WoW sucks now, but please, bear with me. I have good reasons for feeling the way I do.
Going Back to Triage Healing
Yes, I could understand shit in that mess.
Spam healing was something they started to move towards in BC, but it wasn’t until Wrath that it became the norm for even the easiest, entry-level encounters. Playing a holy paladin was, for me, 90% spamming Holy Light and praying I didn’t have to use a GCD (global cooldown, for you non-nerds) to get my mana back at an inopportune time, because that could cause the tank to die and the raid to wipe. As I mentioned before, this is fake difficulty because it challenges no one but the healers; when I levelled my rogue to 80 I was surprised at how damn simple all the bosses I’d had trouble with as a healer were as a DPS (damage per second, used as a class type because people are too lazy to type “damage”). Damage dealing and even tanking, the hardest fucking thing to do in BC, are super easy in this expansion, so if you’re used to healing it just seems boring in comparison.
Healing that isn’t based around spamming means healers will have more time to look around at the environment instead of just staring at the raid frames, more time to do things like cleanse status ailments, throw out the occasional damage spell and use crowd control. Since the mana cost of healing spells and cleanses are going way up, there will be more need to use the best spell for the job instead of your strongest spell all the time. In general, healing will feel like its own unique creature, instead of a spam-based game that seems to be based more off what being DPS is like.
The Return of Crowd Control
Remember heroic Magister’s Terrace? (No? Well shut up and pretend you do.) Remember how fucking impossible it was when it first came out? Part of that was that you absolutely needed CC, or you would wipe horribly on even the first pull (that’s “group of monsters” for the uninitiated). Burning Crusade relied heavily on CC for its encounters; unfortunately, with the paladin tank starting to be taken seriously, people realised they could ditch the warrior, take a paladin, and go through an entire instance with no CC since the paladin was such a strong AoE tank. In Wrath, Blizzard seemed to decide that the solution to this problem was to make every tank more or less AoE capable and to make CC completely unnecessary. Which is funny, because almost every class has was given some form of CC so they wouldn’t be at such a disadvantage when looking for instance groups and when PvPing.
FFFFFFFFFFFFF-
Now, despite everyone saying they wanted this, in practice, no one did. It made instances boring and trivial; even a poorly geared group probably won’t spend more than about 45 minutes in your average 5-man heroic dungeon. Assuming that the tank or the healer is well geared, even if the rest of the group sucks they can carry them through in half an hour. There’s very little need to strategise on trash mobs (plain ol’ Joe Shmoe non-boss monsters, for those with lives) since “pull everything and AoE it do death” is a valid strategy on every single pull. It also punished damage classes that were single-target centric; while retribution pallies excelled, rogues fell flat on their faces on everything but bosses. (I know, I had one of each, and the ret pally was 500x more useful in damn near every encounter than the rogue, despite the rogue having some of the best single-target DPS and CC in the game.) With this change, we should see single-target DPS classes stop sucking at trash pulls, and more people being forced to think in instances in general. Plus, if there’s another fight like Moroes in Karazhan where Shackle Undead is needed, we may see more healers doing things other than just healing. (See above.)
The Death of the 25-Man
This is something I’m mostly happy about. Basically, 10s and 25s will be on the same lockout timer in Cataclysm, and offer the same gear. That way you won’t have to grind the 10 man, the 10 man heroic, the 25 man and 25 man heroic to get the best gear; you do either the 10 or 25 depending on what you enjoy the most. Really, I think if they’re going to make all the raids doable with both 10 and 25 people, this is the way to do it. While I may personally prefer the separate 10s/25s model that they had in BC, I really hate the current one. While they’re keeping heroics, at this point I can’t really expect them to do away with them, so why worry about it? I’d rather just having a hard regular mode, but from the sounds of it heroic mode will be unlockable very quickly (after doing regular 1 or 2 times, according to devs), so no one will have to do anything too easy if they don’t feel like it anyway. That’s a good thing, really.
This brings up the question of whether or not it’s really going to be the death of the 25, and I’m not really sure. I mean, if it was, would anyone mind? I’ve always preferred a challenging, smaller-group dungeon to one that requires half the damn server to complete. While this could mean that the 25s will be dumbed down so they’re about as easy as 10s, it could also mean the 10s will be a bit harder to compensate; I mean, I know Ghost Crawler mentioned at one point that they thought Naxxramas was too easy. They must be aware of where they need to shoot, difficulty-wise, for people to still be enjoying themselves.
I mean, really, does anyone miss Black Temple?
One thing I’m not entirely sure about is their desire to make more, shorter dungeons, but that’s pretty much been their philosophy with 5-mans since BC so I can’t say I’m too surprised. Karazhan was stupidly popular despite being long as fuck, though, so I’m not really sure what makes them think people won’t do longer instances.
De-emphasis of Arenas
Arenas and I have a strange relationship. On one hand, I think they’re awesome. They’re fun, quick PvP battles that provide awesome gear and require very exacting levels of concentration and intimate knowledge of your class. On the other, they’re unbalanced, require you to play certain class/spec combinations if you ever want to win, and create an awful PvP community. Instead of being based around an entire faction (or realm, one might say) working together to take down the evil Other Faction, it’s based around small groups of people waving their dicks around and destroying everyone, regardless of where their allegiance lies. In Cataclysm, they’re introducing rated battlegrounds, and making it so that the best PvP gear is obtainable through them, thus bringing the emphasis back to large-scale combat.
Of course, this isn’t perfect. It’s not open world PvP, battlegroups don’t really encourage you to get to know the people on your server and it’s unlikely that many people will do rated BGs with people they don’t know. However, it is an improvement on the current system. Arenas will still exist, and I doubt people will stop doing them. They may even still be more popular for the people who are really serious about PvP. However, more people who are serious about it will be rewarded for dealing with more than 1 other person for the rest of their lives, and that’s awesome.
Troll Druids
For serious. Click for bigger!
It’s Not All Good, Though
The dungeon finder is something currently in the game that I’m not too thrilled about. It’s cross-server, like battlegrounds, so like battlegrounds, there’s no incentive to network with your server. I doubt it will kill community, but it’ll make it damn hard. (Plus, I played on the smallest, shittiest, laziest roleplaying servers and I never had difficulty finding groups, even when levelling, and even when DPS. People are just whiny shits who can’t find groups because they’re horrible.)
The story of Cataclysm, from what I’ve read, is decent… if you ignore the new class/race combinations (night elf mage still pisses me off). And people say draenei were retconned in! Holy fuck, Blizzard. This is going to be awful.
Class homogenisation is something they struggled a lot with in Wrath that they seem to be having more problems with. Lots of new stuff seems to be geared towards making everyone the same, while others seem to be built to keep niches intact. It’s hard to say where this will go, but it’s one of the things I’m not too worried about.
While I hate the idea that they’re putting manpower towards updating shit that doesn’t need updating (like the old world quests), the fact that they’re still focusing so much on improving end game is promising to me. I’m less worried that they’re fixing shit that ain’t broke so they can ignore shit that is, than I think that they’re just redoing everything. It’s proof that all that money Blizzard has is going to something other than solid gold yachts, I guess.
All in All…
I’ll keep watching the proposed changes closely. If they keep along this track, though, I will be going back for Cataclysm. As much as I hate WoW, nothing captures the imagination the way it did, and I have a fuckload of nostalgia for that game. I met my husband on WoW, for fuck’s sake. If they can make it something I’d be interested in playing, I will play it.
But if they can’t, no harm done. The Warhammer 40k MMO’s being announced at E3, after all. Excuse me while I squee like a little girl from excitement.
So, about a week ago, my lovely husband reviewed Assassin’s Creed 2. He actually posted that shortly after I’d finished it, as opposed to shortly after he’d finished it. (I started first but finished last because I got distracted by Dragon Age.) He was, of course, mostly wrong, so here’s my take on the game.
The character animations aren’t the best, but Ezio is still one good looking guy. Plus, check out that nun.
Now, I never played Assassin’s Creed 1, so I have to say that the little “Last Time on Assassin’s Creed” thing at the beginning of the game wasn’t nearly enough for me to figure out what had happened. It doesn’t really matter, since the majority of the game stands alone fairly well; you play Ezio, a young Florentine man, in the height of the Renaissance, who stumbles into the life of an assassin after his dad and brothers were executed for a crime they didn’t commit. It only really got confusing when you instead played Desmond, some dude in the future, who’s using a device called the Animus to relive his ancestor’s memories. Since I have no real idea what happened in the last game, other than that he was at the mercy of some organisation/company/conspiracy called “Abstergo”, I kind of had to guess what was going on. I assume they’re the bad guys since you spend the beginning of the game busting out of some testing facility, and everyone talks like they’re the bad guys (and if the NPCs say it, it must be true, right?).
For the most part, the plot is pretty simple (minus the ending which I’ll talk about later), though. If you can get over the really stupid sci-fi shit, you may even find yourself enjoying your revenge-seeking romp through Italy… if you can ignore the awful controls.
I played this game on the 360 because it was cheap as fuck on Amazon a couple months ago. I have no idea if it’s better on the PC, but I assume it wouldn’t be given the bone-headedness of their design. It took me about twenty minutes to win the race near the beginning of the game because the controls are, in some respects, too simple; you can’t really control how Ezio free-runs, except to point him in the direction you want to go. It’s very hard to get used to judging how he’ll react to you pointing him in a direction and telling him to parkour his ass over there. Once you get the hang of it, it’s extremely easy, but there are still parts that made me rage.
Weeee!
For one thing, pressing forward makes you walk. Holding A while pressing forward will make you walk quickly (and pick people’s pockets). Holding the right trigger while pressing forward will make you run, and holding A while holding the right trigger and pressing forward will make you sprint or freerun. How the fuck did this get past the planning stage? There are very few points in the game where walking makes more sense than running, why wouldn’t that be the default move speed? Holding down the right trigger just makes my hand cramp up if I play for more than an hour or so at a time.
Of course, since you need to hold so many buttons to do the most basic things, if you want to do anything more complicated, you’ll need to press and hold even more buttons. The sword-fighting is done by selecting your sword (right bumper to bring up the weapon wheel), pressing the left trigger to select an opponent, and then either pressing X to attack, or holding right trigger and pressing X to counter-attack. If you don’t choose the “wait to counter” option, you’ll be wide open to attack when your enemies counter you, and believe me, they will. You spend more time waiting than killing, which I guess is suitable punishment for not taking the stealth route the game obviously prefers.
The much more enjoyable alternative to combat.
Really, though, the swordfighting has nothing on some of the jumping you have to do. Most of the time, jumping from one ledge to another is an automatic part of freerunning. However, if you’re standing still or want to wall-jump, prepare to tear your hair out in fury! There’s one point where Desmond dreams (or something, it’s more likely that he’s going apeshit insane) about Altair, the protagonist from the first game. In order to complete this otherwise very short and simple segment, you have to do a jump that involves going from a standstill to a ledge directly above your head. At no point in the game before this are you told how to perform such a jump. What the fuck, Ubisoft?
And then there’s the wall jumping. This is what actually caused me to mostly ignore the game and play Dragon Age, it’s that fucking frustrating. The only time it’s needed is in a semi-optional platforming dungeon, too, which only makes me wonder why the fuck they bothered with it. Anyway, in order to perform this jump, you must sprint up the wall (right trigger + A). For the second or two that you’re on the wall, you have to hold the left trigger, let go of A, point the directional stick in the new direction you want to go, and then press A again.
Let me restate that: Analog forward (hold) + right trigger (hold) + A (hold) + left trigger (hold) + A (release) + Analog [new direction] (hold) + A (tap). Who the flying fuck thought this was good game design?!
Oh, wait, probably the people who thought they were building a non-linear game. (Read: idiots.)
True, this game has non-linear bits to it, but for the most part, if you think it isn’t a linear story, you’re an idiot. Seriously. And that’s without even going into the fact that the assassinations themselves are extremely linear, which I think I’ll do right now. You don’t pick the route to the target. If you try to do something a bit different (like, say, take the rooftops in a mission where you’re supposed to blend in with the crowd), you’ll be spotted and have to re-do the mission. The only time you really get any freedom is deciding exactly how you’re going to assassinate people, and in what order you’ll tackle the side quests, if at all. It’s fucking linear, all right? It’s not a bad thing, but please, don’t go around saying how it isn’t something it quite plainly is.
Like, say, going around saying the backstory isn’t a pointless mess that the game would be better off without.
I’d like to think Desmond is reacting to being told the game’s story.
Spoilers ahead!
Continue reading On Assassin’s Creed 2: Electric Boogaloo
It’s been over two weeks since I finished this game, and I still don’t know exactly where to start. I have plenty of things to say, though, so this post might be a bit all over the place. Whatever! Here’s hoping I haven’t forgotten the entire game since I played last. Hurr. As per usual I will try to avoid spoilers in case you’ve somehow managed to sleep through the last six months and therefore never bought this game, unless otherwise noted.
ARGH FUCK THIS BOSS
Okay. Difficulty. This game was fucking hard, but in a really schizophrenic sort of way. I played a dwarf warrior, as I’ve mentioned previously. I have a new game I’ve been playing on-and-off as a mage, and it is so much easier, though I never would have guessed that by watching Josh. His first play through was as a mage, too. It’s strange, but all the bosses he had the most trouble with, I breezed through. As a matter of fact, I breezed through pretty much the last quarter (or maybe third?) of the game, once I figured out what my optimal group setup was. I don’t know if it’s just the difficulty curve, or that some of the levels are easier than others and no clues are given as to which to go to first (I did Redcliffe > Mage Tower > Urn of Sacred Ashes > Dalish Elves > Orzammar, which is hardly ideal), or if I just stopped sucking at some point, or what. As a matter of fact, by the second half of the game, I was in general having more trouble with the swarms and swarms of mobs than I was with any of the bosses, pictured boss notwithstanding.
Even if you aren’t playing a mage yourself, you’ll quickly notice that magic is ridiculously overpowered in this game, and neither of my mages ever even got Mana Clash. By the end of the game I was using Leliana, Wynne, and Morrigan for everything because having both mages was actually better than one mage and one of the many DPS warriors you get. It’s rather sad, really.
The only downside to being a mage in the Dragon Age world is that demons love you. I guess that’s a pretty big downside.
Interestingly, this game is apparently much, much easier on the PS3 and Xbox. Josh was originally going to buy the Xbox version, but since we got it like a week or so after it came out and I’d heard that it looks like utter shit on the Xbox, I was able to convince him to buy the PC version. On the console versions, since they have no top-down display, and presumably the controls suck more, “Normal” difficulty is the equivalent of the PC version’s “Easy”, and so on. Looking back on it, he probably would have been a lot less pissed off at this game if he had bought the fugly version, since he probably wouldn’t have taken like 3 hours to beat the Broodmother, but that’s neither here nor there. At least this means you get to see all my pretty screenshots.
Plus, it makes the fact that I didn’t realise it was on hard when I killed the Ogre in Ostagar, or for over half of the last “dungeon” that much more impressive. (Sadly, I realised it was on hard before I fought the Archdemon, making the remaining dungeon and last boss an absolute cakewalk compared to what I’d been getting used to.)
I am one sexy dwarf.
Much like with Mass Effect, I think the world was much more thought-out than the story itself, though I thoroughly enjoyed both in this game. It was nice to see elves that aren’t superior in every way, and dwarves that people might actually want to play, rather than say “Dwarves are fugly” and go back to playing elves. Both the elven alienage and Dalish clans pale in comparison to the sheer awesomeness of dwarf politics. Playing a good guy, I did a lot more harm than good in Orzammar, but it was still absolutely fascinating.
One thing I have to wonder: why are the dwarves mostly all pale, with red or dark hair? How would living underground create people that look like that? Wouldn’t they either be darker, to blend in with their surroundings, or albino, since they never get any sunlight? Seriously. I actually rather like the idea of albino dwarves, since then the surface-dwellers could be all tattooed to protect from the sun, which would stigmatise them even further back in Orzammar. It fits well, but no one thought of it. Really, I wouldn’t care but this idea that “It’s based on medieval Europe so everyone is white” is in every fantasy game/book/movie ever, and it doesn’t have to be. Come on, some of these people aren’t even humans! Why does it matter if they’re in a Europe-like climate?
It’s especially jarring if, like me, you choose a darker skin tone and then in your origin you’re surrounded by your melanin deficient family members. Was it just assumed that most people would choose to be pale? I like to image that Skadi was the daughter of the late dwarven Queen and a male noblehunter, because she sure as fuck doesn’t look like her father or brothers.
Ah, whatever. They’re not racist, they’re just not creative enough to think outside the status quo. I mean, if they had, there probably wouldn’t be elves or dwarves in the first place.
Speaking of unoriginal…
Story spoilers ahead!
Continue reading On Dragon Age: Origins
Well. I was going to write up a review of Dragon Age: Origins, since I finished it like a week ago, but I don’t feel like it. Instead, I wrote a short story about Tristan, the character I’m playing for the Hunter: The Vigil campaign Josh is running. These events take place immediately after our first game, in which David and Mena’s characters were extremely mean to mine, because they’re important Satan-spawn and Tristan is a basement-dwelling 4chan nerd. Enjoy!
(Oh, and for the curious, yes, his online pseudonym is a reference to Chuck, the guy who developed the game. When trying to come up with a name for him, Josh pointed me to the credits section of the book and said it’s where he looks for inspiration. I replied, “You want me to name him after Chuck?” and we all had a good laugh. I couldn’t pass up the chance after that.)
***
Please do not steal my car. This is what the sign I wrote with a Sharpie and a page torn out of the owner’s manual reads, which I placed under my windshield wiper. It’s not going to help any, I mean, I’m parked in a back alley in North Philly and my passenger’s side window is broken. Well, more like nonexistent, really. All of the body shops are closed at this hour, too, or at least any I’d trust not to strip the thing for parts. It’s a piece of shit anyway. I pop out the radio anyway, just to be safe. Can’t have them stealing something worth a pittance compared to the actual car, now, can I?
Gathering up the radio, and my camera, I head towards the door to my shitty basement apartment in this shitty part of town. Is it bad that I’m much less pissed about the car than I am at that dipshit’s attempt hack my system? So what if I hacked him first? He was keeping secrets that make the world unsafe. The only thing I’m keeping a secret is my hentai stash from my mother.
Thankfully, the apartment’s how I left it. Which is to say, a fucking mess, but it’s comforting to know nothing came and cleaned it up while I was out being a superhero. I scowl as I plug the computer’s extension cord back in. It’s going to take forever to boot this thing because that asshole had to hack into it. And break my car window. And eat my fucking gun! Well, at least I won’t feel bad about posting that picture I snapped of his freak transformation on 4chan. Serves him right. Fucker. What was his name again? Ah, who cares. Anonymous certainly won’t.
As predicted, Navi takes forever to decide it’s ready to get going. I named my computer after the ones in Serial Experiments Lain because that’s what it looks like. My whole apartment is covered in its parts, some of them online, some of them merely backups. There’s even an extra box of parts or two under my futon and a spare case next to the toilet. I’m living the dream, or so they say. The dream doesn’t pay too well, but that’s what I get for dropping out of college.
I pull out my phone and upload the photo to my hard drive, still seething at the thought of what that asshole did. And his friend just let it happen! The only time she got pissed off was when I didn’t know who she was. Maybe Twitter knows. I’ll ask.
Now that that’s out of the way, it’s time to get a good look at the photo. It’s not the best shot; I usually don’t rely on my cell phone camera but when someone breaks into your car and turns into a demon, you don’t really have much room to be picky. He’s not only horrendously ugly – only a slight difference from his regular form, there – but he’s also in the middle of eating my slide. Really, I couldn’t ask for a better time to have snapped the shot. The /x/philes are gonna love this.
The great thing about 4chan is its anonymity. Even tripfags like myself are still pretty much anonymous; there’s no way to tell who the person using the name “Wendigo” is, but it still gives a name to all my posts. This can be stupid, since 4chan hates tripfags – that is, people who use these tripcodes so other people can’t pretend to be them – but without it I’d be just some fucker posting supposedly Photoshopped images on the Internet. Enough people on /x/, 4chan’s paranormal board, recognise that my photos and videos aren’t fake to make my name worth something. Better write up a post to go with that image while I’m thinking about it.
A literal fucking wendigo, /x/. Talk about irony.
They are out there, and my broken car window and destroyed gun can prove it. Don’t let anyone blind you to the truth. Every minute you live in ignorance is a minute that you’re in danger.
Wendigo out. I’m gonna need to call my insurance company in the morning, I have a feeling I’ll be without wheels shortly.
It certainly feels good to enlighten people. Too bad being enlightened doesn’t feel as good. And those assholes tonight wanted to use that as an excuse not to do it! They think I’m an idiot who’s never faced a real threat just because I didn’t gush about it to the first person who breaks into my car at gunpoint. I’d be pretty shitty at my job if I spilled to the first person to get in my face, wouldn’t I? Seems the masses aren’t the only ignorant ones, here. They’ll all thank me one day, though, just like one day I’ll thank my fellow Twitterers for informing me that the chick I met tonight was the daughter of the rock star Ricky Moon. Wasn’t he the one with that concert going on tonight? Well, shit. Maybe I’ll reward their loyalty by finding a way to get some topless pics of her. The /b/tards will thank me, if no one else will.
Sigh. Either way, it’s about time for bed, though it’s going to be hard to sleep knowing my car’s out there and I’m firearm-free. I lock the deadbolt and prop a chair up in front of the door. Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get me, or so the saying goes. It’s not like monsters are the only thing I have to worry about, here. This is Philadelphia after all.
But, hey, at least it’s not Camden. I’m moving up in the world.
I guess there’s only so long I can avoid updating this place before I get declared legally dead. I mean, given the comments, I assume I have some readers, some of whom may wonder why I haven’t posted. I haven’t gotten a job or had a kid, so I don’t really have any sort of reason to not update, right? Well, yes, but “I don’t feel like it” seems like a perfectly logical reason to me. March has been… Well, it’s been March.
Happy Birthday to Me
This wasn’t actually taken on my birthday, but it’s recent enough. And we did go out for lunch so it’s similar, kinda.
On March 18th, I turned 21. Living in the States, I suppose that’s a big deal, but it wasn’t really to me. In Ontario, drinking age is 19. I turned 20 in Ontario without ever having a drink. I’ve had one drink since I turned 21, and even then, I’d have preferred it if it were alcohol-free. I don’t like the taste of alcohol, and I don’t like making an ass of myself, so what’s the point in drinking?
Besides, turning 21 the day after St. Patrick’s Day is a little pointless, don’t you agree?
Maschine Zeit
A few weeks ago, Josh and I finally got to check out David Hill’s upcoming tabletop RPG Maschine Zeit. My verdict? Well, I’ll have to play more of it to really get a feel for it, but so far I like it. It’s really unusual for a tabletop game, though. You know how in most games you walk into a room, roll some dice, and ask the GM what you find? Well, in this game, depending on how well you succeed on that roll, you can walk into the room and tell the GM what you find. It’s weird. When I was playing it I told them I didn’t like doing that because it was like having expectations of what you’re going to find, but that’s not entirely accurate. I don’t know exactly how to word it, but I’m the sort who likes to play games without having a specific goal in mind. Actually, no, that makes it sound like I can’t roleplay for shit. Uhm.
Basically, my character was looking for information on the people who’d died in the space station we were in. To me, it didn’t make sense to say, “I find a ticket stub saying the person who lived in this room was John Doe.” To me, it made more sense to ask, “What do I find about the person in this room?” My party mates — David and Josh, as David’s awesome wife Mena was GM — preferred to take a more direct approach, sabotaging each other’s equipment and digging up information on the scandals of the previously living. While both approaches worked, I got the distinct feeling I was doing it wrong. Perhaps with more practice I’ll get the hang of it, but for now it goes against all my RPG playing principles. (It is cool to be able to say “There’s an oil slick on the ground” when you’re in combat, though.) It certainly captures the horror movie feel, though, (ghost stories in space? Fuck yeah) and there’s a lot of character customisation, which is always good.
Plus, one of their cats had just had kittens. This was taken when they were a few days after their birth (we were over on the 10th, they were born the weekend before). I’ll get comparison shots when we’re over for D&D tomorrow.
Too cute.
Speaking of D&D…
My laziness is not just where updating this is concerned. Since we haven’t gotten together to game in two weeks, and Maschine Zeit was played last time we got together, the D&D game I’m running for the same group hasn’t been played in, oh… about a month. And I still haven’t put together the dungeon I said I was going to. Maybe I’ll call them up and say “April Fools!” and then just not show up. Or I could work on it after Josh goes to bed like I’d planned. I’m pretty sure anyone else could have designed a dungeon to take them to level 20 by now, especially with my lack of work.
The funny thing is, I know that procrastination is a defense mechanism and I still do it, even though I have nothing to get defensive over. At least if the dungeon is shit I can say I rushed it and then no one can judge me, right? This is bullshit, since I know I can be a good GM when I’m not being a lazy twat, but still, I persist. Ah well. No one’s perfect.
What have I been doing in Videogameland?
Alistair, mostly.
Ah, yes, Dragon Age: Origins. And not even Awakening. When the game first came out, I was far too busy not giving a shit to really bother playing it. Everyone was talking about how awesome it was, but I was more interested in playing Aion, since when I have an MMO I will ignore everything else — TV, blogs, movies, other video games, D&D… everything. I made up a character (a female city elf rogue) and played through her origin, and then just kinda… quit. And that’s how it went for months and months, until Josh got more into the game and Chuck posted about it. Josh was in Orzammar and Chuck had written about how awesome the dwarf storyline was compared to everything else, so I decided to make a dwarf, since I wanted to try a warrior anyway. (I found enemies tending to ignore my warrior teammates in favour of kicking my ass instead, so being able to wear heavier armour seemed like a good idea.)
Well, I must tell you, the dwarf noble origin kicks the shit out of the city elf origin. I was a little disappointed by that, since the city elf was the origin I was looking forward to the most before the game came out, but who cares? I was enjoying myself… At least, as long as I was roleplaying and not fighting. The combat system is… meh. MMO combat works in MMOs. It doesn’t work as well in single player games. Especially annoying is the fact that every time I level up I need to update all the characters’ tactics. It’s the tedium of swapping out gear taken up to eleven. So I gave up again for a while, and decided to go back after buying Assassin’s Creed 2.
Now, I’m enjoying Assassin’s Creed 2 for the most part. The thing with platformers and puzzle games is that I can’t play them ad nauseum, though. I get sick of them quickly, especially since I’m an idiot and generally suck at all the puzzles. (I’ve avoided the game for over a week now just so I won’t have to do this fucking assassin’s tomb puzzle, for example.) So, while Josh was making his way through a puzzle, I was bored, and seeing as we have DA:O on the PC, I figured I’d go back to it.
Holy shit. Despite my lack of enthusiasm for the combat, and my seeing a couple major spoilers in Josh’s play through, I can really see why it’s so ridiculously popular: Alistair. I really thought I was going to get my hot dwarf lesbian action on with Leliana, but fuck her. I love Alistair. So much. I’m now ~30 hours in, and while it doesn’t feel like I could have gone all the way through Mass Effect in that time, it’s starting to feel long, so I still won’t have a proper review of it (or Assassin’s Creed 2, no doubt) for a while. I’m taking my sweet time, dammit.
Oh, I’m also stuck at Necron in FFIX and avoiding that game so I don’t have to fight him, and I got FFXIII for my birthday, but I’m not touching that till I clear some other shit off my plate, first.
How was your March?
Why hello there, Intertubes. No, I haven’t been avoiding you, I just haven’t had much to talk about. I haven’t really been playing anything new, and since I’m still not playing any MMOs, I don’t really have much I can talk about, game-wise, for the moment. I do have some mildly related things to talk about, though, which can be conveniently placed in list format! I love lists.
1. What the fuck, WordPress? It’s seriously been weeks since my “Preview” button has worked properly, and it’s pissing me off. I’ve updated WP twice since then, why isn’t it working? RAGE.
It really has no right to look this nice.
2. The 360 and PS3 versions of Assassin’s Creed 2 are currently $36 on Amazon. I haven’t played the first game, since I don’t own it; Josh borrowed the first game from a friend but never finished it due to the tediousness of it, so my exposure to it in general is pretty limited. We’ve been told by some very awesome people that the second one is actually worth playing, even if the first wasn’t, though, so we’re going to check it out. We’ll probably be getting it sometime next week, because we’re cheap and shipping was free. In the mean time, I suppose I could finally get around to playing Dragon Age: Origins. Speaking of…
3. Orson Scott Card will be writing the Dragon Age comics. I’m not quite sure how I feel about this. On one hand, he’s an amazing writer. Ender’s Game has been and probably always will be one of my favourite books of all time. It’s heavily influenced what I look for in fiction and how I write myself, when I can be bothered to write. On the other hand, Card is a raging homophobe who thinks I suffer a reproductive disorder and thinks that courts legalising gay marriage spells the end of democracy in America, whereas DA:O is very gay-friendly (even compared to Mass Effect). I’m guessing that homosexuality will just be ignored altogether, not openly bashed, but it’s still a step backwards from open acceptance.
4. Uh, here, have some short Aion-related fiction. Lately I’ve been working sporadically on the backstory of Amarantha, my Elyos ranger, and, to a lesser extent, Kallias, my Elyos cleric, despite not playing Aion in months. I’m very easily distracted so there’s like fuck-all written, but who really wants to sit down and read a novel on the internuts, anyway? While I wanted to post it in parts that were still long enough to be interesting, instead I’m going to post them in parts that are completed. I won’t pretend that my writing is great, or that this will be interesting to anyone who didn’t roleplay with me, but here it is regardless. I’ve wanted to write and post this pretty much forever, so, hopefully posting part of it will convince me to write the rest more quickly. I’ll post more as it’s completed.
Anyway, I hate third-person walls-of-explanation for backstories, so I’ve tried a more narrative format, and I hope you enjoy what little there is so far.
Eulogy for Amarantha, Part 1
Continue reading And Now For Something Completely Different
Or, “I beat Mass Effect 2 yesterday and feel I should write about it”. Or or, “It’s 6AM and I haven’t slept, let’s see how coherent a post I can get out”.
I’m not sure I can sum up my feelings about this game quite as simply as I did the first. Yes, I consider that long-ass post simple, since I summed up my thoughts in the title and just elaborated on them in the actual post. This new game takes a lot of the suggestions fans gave about the first and runs with them, but I don’t necessarily think it was all for the better.
Since most of this is going to be a comparison to the first game, rather than a blow-by-blow of the mechanics vs story, I’ll get the spoiler warning out of the way now. Maybe I’ll even bother learning how to do a LJ cut so people don’t have to complain about my ruining a shiny new game for them.
Mild Gameplay Spoilers Ahead!
All right, we all good? Let’s talk changes.
Not a picture of actual combat but you get the idea!
Continue reading Second Verse, (Not Quite) Same as the First
Look at that title. I just summed up everything I’m about to say and I don’t even have to say it. I could stand back, look proud of myself and just let the title speak for itself.
However, I’m not. I suspect I will have hundreds of fanboys raging all over the place here if I were to, so I’ll qualify what I just said with some experiences.
For most of the fights worth a damn I used Liara and Alenko, actually.
As I said, the game itself was really good, but I feel I should qualify that too: it was really good when I was playing a Soldier. When I first started up the game, I figured I’d probably play a Soldier because I’m boring and like killing things, but after looking at the classes I figured I’d go for something I don’t usually play, and chose the mage Adept. The combat controls were confusing at first (the game arbitrarily has different movement controls for combat and non-combat), especially since you can’t zoom out, so despite it being third person I still got that “no peripheral vision” feeling that comes with first person shooters. Anyway, I quickly discovered that you can’t keybind more than one ability — despite never using the D-pad for anything the entire game — so if you want to play something that relies as much on abilities as it does on shooting things, and you’re not playing on the PC, you’d better like pausing combat. A lot.
After dealing with the flow-breaking pausing, or just ignoring it and shooting things for the entire first mission, I finally said “fuck this” and re-rolled. Maybe it’s because I could dump all my points in assault rifles since I knew I wasn’t going to use anything else, maybe it was because I’d gotten the hang of the way combat worked, but I immediately had much more fun with the Soldier and went on with the game. I did get a couple abilities throughout the game (well, “a couple” isn’t accurate, I had almost as many as Liara by the end) but most of the time I forgot they existed and just shot things till one of us died. The only ones I ever really took advantage of were my party resurrect and the one that reset all my abilities so I could use the resurrect again. These two got used a lot, too, because the entire party liked to huddle around me, and if I was behind cover, instead of going off to find their own cover nearby, they’d stand in the open near me and get killed. Despite this, the way the fights are set up I was grateful to have party members, especially later on when Kaidan and Liara both got Lift.
Lift is awesome.
As for the non-combat parts… Well. I often found it stupid that one charm speech would cause people to rethink their entire diabolical plan/career choice/life, but I guess it’s better than requiring five conversation trees of the exact same thing. There was also one thing that bothered me with the reporter coming to talk to you sidequest… I knew it was the Renegade option to tell her to fuck off, and I was going for a Paragon, but I chose it anyway because I’d previously promised Emily Wong, another reporter and recurring quest NPC, that she would be the first to get an exclusive interview. Apparently I wasn’t supposed to remember this promise because it never comes up again and everyone acts like you’re an ass for not doing the interview, and there’s no way to tell people I refused in order to keep my promise to Wong (thereby doing the right thing). Why make things like that a dialogue option at all if you’re going to assume the player will completely forget about them?
Other than hiccups like that, I really enjoyed the dialogue parts. I’m one of those OCD types who will get as much information out of an NPC as possible, which often led to spending ridiculous amounts of time chatting, though. Rarely in a game am I so eager to get back to the action after spending time in town as I was in Mass Effect.
The game also feels very short. I clocked in a little less than 27 hours, and I did most of the sidequests, talked to everyone and was generally very slow-going. While most of the sidequests were very repetitive and can be skipped without missing anything, the main story mode had some very interesting “dungeons”, bosses, and quest lines, but if you only did them you’d probably beat the game in under 15 hours. (Plus another 2-5 worth of deaths from those really stupid Mako missions.) Perhaps it’s for the best to keep you wanting more instead of wishing it’d just end already, but the story itself could have used a bit more fleshing out, to say the least.
Which brings me very neatly to my next topic: why the story in Mass Effect can suck a big hairy dick. But first…
Warning: Here There Be Spoilers
Continue reading Good Game, Shitty Story: The Mass Effect Experience
When Tuesday came around, I decided I would update this thing. Tuesdays are a good day for updates and going about a week between updates is as long as I should probably expect to go without people wondering why I opened this site in the first place.
Anyway, as you can see, Tuesday rolled around with no update. This is because I was exceptionally busy playing Mass Effect.
This isn’t from my game, but I’m playing on the 360 so you won’t get any shots of my hot, female Shepard.
Obviously I don’t have to tell you that I’m behind the times on this one. Mass Effect 2 is out now, and most everyone in the world is playing it, while I’m still stumbling through the first one, in awe of its newness. I figured that if we’re going to be getting ME2 at any point soon, I should finish this one. And besides, the plot of FFIX has decided to shit itself inside out, so I wanted to take a break and play something that tries to make sense for a change.
I’m still not done, so I shouldn’t have to tell you to take everything with a grain of salt, but am I the only one who thinks this game is incredibly short? I’m already nearing the end of the storyline and I’ve been playing for less than 20 hours. I think. I might have been playing for more than 20 hours now, as I spent all of yesterday playing. But that just brings me back to my point — I spent almost all of yesterday doing sidequests so I could clear them out of my quest log. Other than apparently hiding all the good gear in locked crates in the sidequests, they serve very little purpose, other than making the game appear longer than it is. Is it so wrong to just have a long, linear plot? I mean, the game gives you a choice as to which “main” area to do first (find Liara, go to Feros, or go to Noveria), but since you can do them in any order, half the things you learn from Feros and Noveria overlap. If, like me, you did Noveria first, you learn pretty much nothing from the Feros questline, and it seems especially stupid that all your characters are acting surprised at a plot point they’ve already resolved. Yes, you twats, of course Benezia was brainwashed, we figured that out when SHE TOLD US RIGHT BEFORE WE KILLED HER. (Oh, spoilers, by the way.)
There are a lot of things I want to talk about with this game, but I’ll save them for when I’m done, or at least till next week. For now I want to talk about the gay.
A race of blue space lesbians? Why not?
It’s not exactly a secret that I’m not straight. If you didn’t know and this post isn’t your first introduction to me, what the fuck is wrong with you? How many times do I have to say a chick is hot before you figure it out?
Anyway. As I briefly mentioned above, one of the characters you get on your party, Liara, is a member of a race of space lesbians (the Asari). Their entire species is female, which would be dangerous around that time of the month, but thankfully they don’t reproduce normally so they probably don’t get that time of the month. I don’t know, the game isn’t really clear on this part. Anyway, they aren’t really gay because they don’t have the same concepts of gender and don’t reproduce the same way, but their inclusion brings up a question that I’m sure no one else was wondering: we have lesbians, but where are the gay men?
This is something I’ve noticed in a few video games. Many sandbox games that let you romance people for no reason (or for blood, if this is Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines) lets you seduce women, if male, and seduce women and sometimes men, if female. The only real exception to this rule that I can think of is Fable. The developers figure that most of their players will be men, and since girl on girl is hot, they’ll include it, but they don’t include man on man. The fact that the Asari don’t really think in terms of “straight” and “gay” doesn’t excuse it, because humans do, and since the player is human, they are going to think of it in that way. The player character likely thinks like that, too, as evidenced by some of the dialogue options you can choose from when Liara’s flirting with you. So why are we arbitrarily allowed to be a gay woman and not a gay man? Were they worried about how people would feel about Kaidan if he hit on your male character?
Absolutely not gay.
I don’t think saying they were worried about offending people is accurate. If they were, they wouldn’t have gay in the game at all. There are plenty of bigots who don’t like lesbians, and plenty of bigoted women who might want to play the female Shepard, even if both are in the minority. Any gay woman can tell you how many times they’ve been told “I don’t mind that you’re a lesbian/bisexual, as long as you don’t hit on me”. If they were really worried about offending people, they’d also have more than a handful of human NPCs be something other than white. Think I wouldn’t notice this one, did you, BioWare? I like how most of the non-white NPCs are given prominent positions, too, so they can be proud of their lack of racism, despite the fact that this one prominent NPC will often be the only *insert race/nationality here* on the entire planet.
I’m getting off topic, though. I guess what I’m trying to say is “Don’t do something half-assed”. (Or, alternately, “Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining”.) If you want to attract female and gay gamers, and try to do so by making lots of female party members and NPCs, making the player able to choose to play a woman, and making the player able to be gay, don’t say “We’ve included gay women but not gay men” and expect us to say “I love being objectified! You’re right, lesbians are super hot while gay men threaten the masculinity of your playerbase and your developers”. Doing something half-assed ruins all the good feelings any of these groups could have for you for including them, even if you honestly meant no ill will and were trying to do the right thing by including them.
(Plus Liara is really fucking annoying, and has some of the worst-written dialogue in the game, but that’s neither here not there.)
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