No dragons yet, but I'm full of hope

In the past two weeks I’ve been playing a lot of Dragon Age and a bit of Borderlands. But mostly Dragon Age. Cause it’s pretty great, and I hear there be dragons.

BORDERLANDS

Ben and I did the first co-op lap around Borderlands. For a while he had a pair of game-unbalancing revolvers, and I’d have one kill for every three or four of his. But things had mostly balanced out by the last hour or so of gameplay. The end of the game surprised both of us, but that probably has something to do with our tendency to take quests without reading them very carefully.

My only real complaint with the game is that I wish I had more target variety. I killed so many soldiers and bandits. There’s little aggressive wildlife besides the skags, and Eridians are rare until the end. There’s great variation within the groups, but once you figure out a group’s dynamic they’re pretty easy to pick apart.

This is me. And this is my gun.

I’m playing through by myself as a berserker. I’m going down the punch-things-really-hard skill tree because I prefer shotguns to rocket launchers. I can take quite a bit of punishment before going down. The play dynamic is very different. I spend very little time hiding behind things now. I just run into the middle of things and hope I can knock everybody out before my meter runs out.

DRAGON AGE

I want to put more time into Torchlight and Risen, but the only game able to pull me away from Borderlands this week has been Dragon Age, a fantasy RPG from BioWare, those guys who did Baldur’s Gate.

A lot of what made Baldur’s Gate great is in Dragon Age. You have to worry about what your party members think of you (or at least have gifts on hand to soothe the feelings of your evil companions when you do good things). Characters of different alignments argue about what the group should be doing while you wander around towns looking for quests. Combat is an exercise in micromanagement — complicated by friendly fire and area-of-effect spells, but that’s nothing new. I like the changes Dragon Age brings to the table; I’ll take mana pools over spell slots any day.

I want to be the guy on the left.

And there’s the well thought out world, only this time it’s pretty original. Sure, there are dwarfs and elves and orcs (though they’re called hurlocks for some reason), but the fantasy basics are tweaked enough that nothing feels ripped out of Tolkien or Dungeons and Dragons. The presentation has been excellent. When Alistair shield-bashes one of the darkspawn, they topple in very fulfilling way.

The story has been pretty engaging, and I haven’t had to think this hard about dialogue options since Fallout 2. Options are rarely black and white and rarely redundant. The voice acting is good, but knowing the escape key skips spoken dialogue is essential because I don’t have that kind of time. Unfortunately, one of the first important cut scenes is tied to the last line of text in the scene before it, and if you skip that line of text, you skip the movie as well.

The AI is also unfortunate. Your party members aren’t bright, but at least you can take control of them. Your enemies have no such luck.

NEWS

Microsoft has cracked down on piracy, banning about 600,000 consoles from Xbox Live. The consoles run modified firmware, which lets them play backup copies of Xbox 360 games, even on Xbox Live. Of course, not every console is modified for piracy, but the Gameodactyl will have to weigh on on whether there’s any reason to modify an Xbox 360 to play imported game.

Holy crap, Modern Warfare 2 sold a lot of plastic discs. And PC gamers aren’t happy. Kotaku rounds up how it did against other forms of entertainment.

Chris Kohler leads us through the life and times of Nintendo as a video game company. A fitting history lesson for the days before New Super Mario Brothers Wii comes out. Sadly, no mention of why Nintendo release games on Sunday.