Leveling Down

My fond memories of Dragon Age: Origins have been dulled by the number of extra DLC that “expand” the game.

Last Friday I posted about how I felt that EA’s Project $10 initiative is working, and I’m a supporter of it. Hey, I’m all for supporting developers and publishers to make money off their own products and if it came down to it, I wouldn’t mind if the used market disappeared altogether. EA has been coming back into the spotlight in a positive way with gamers these days, while Activision has gone the other way. But there’s one thing that EA is now more guilty of than others at this point that I am annoyed with: DLC for single player games. Read on for my thoughts why.

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EA is now including one-time use codes in their more popular recent releases

I don’t buy every game at launch. In fact, I rarely do these days except for games I’m willing to pay the $60 price tag for on day 1. But with interesting games that aren’t worth the $60 on day 1, I’ll wait until I either have more time afterward or the game is cheaper. Gamestop fills this niche for me, as they often run promotions such that I can buy a game still retailing for $60 at about half that for the used price. I don’t love buying used games, but at half the price it’s certainly something I partake in from time to time. Publishers and developers hate this, as Gamestop makes all the money from used game sales. EA has implemented “Project $10″, and for me it’s actually worked. Read on for what it’s about and why I think it works.

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Trying to get through Final Fantasy XIII, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Dante’s Inferno, and Mass Effect 2 before the end of the month is shaping up to be a bit ambitious…

I’m bad. My backlog continues to balloon even though I thought I solved this problem before. Now with the entire PS3 exclusive library (pretty large, actually) going to be a part of my backlog later this month, I have to seriously figure out what I’m going to do. Apparently I can’t stop myself from buying games that go on sale, so the next best thing I can do is to try to make an estimate of what I will be playing over the course of the next month and come up with some realistic goals to give myself some sort of control. Read on for what I am forecasting my gaming time to be within the month of April…

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Mass Effect & Dragon Age – Bioware’s own Star Wars & Lord of the Rings?

So coming off of Mass Effect 2, I decided I needed some more Bioware in my life, so I picked up Dragon Age: Origins to give it a whirl. I’m really digging the game and am getting pretty into it, although I still think Mass Effect 2 is the better game in my mind. Maybe that’s because every step of the way in Dragon Age I’m just comparing it to Mass Effect. I decided to jot down a few of my thoughts into writing.

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Lightning bolts coming out of my hands? This is insane!

I wrote the title of this post about three hours ago. I was planning to say how Insanity Mode in Mass Effect 2 started out rough, but then got progressively easier and that I was blowing through the game, but then I just spent the last three hours on ONE mission, so I think I will back off of those plans for now.

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1011101100101010011 (Translation: Buy Mass Effect 2)

If you’ve been paying attention to this site at all over the past week and a half, you probably know where this review is going. The original Mass Effect remains one of my favorite games of this console generation, but the experience was marred by some bad gameplay design and glitches. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the game for the great dialogue system and its powerful storyline. I found myself sucked in by the tough choices and situations the game forced upon me. Mass Effect 2 keeps in the great story and dialogue elements, throws in stronger character development, and streamlines the gameplay – effectively dumping most of the bad design choices from the first game. The result: Game of the Year 2010 in January? Maybe…

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Mass Effect 2 – an RPG with a shooter soul, or the other way around?

We live in an interesting time for games. In the not too distant past, gaming genres were clearly delineated: you’d play Doom to get your first-person shooting on, Starcraft to focus on real-time strategy, platformers like Super Mario Brothers 3 for throw your controller out the window experiences, and the turn based Final Fantasy role playing series for some heavy stories and to prove that “video games can make grown men cry”. But then, a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century…

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Settling for playing GTA IV: The Lost and the Damned instead of Mass Effect 2 is just not good enough.

For the earlier part of this month I had been spending my time with Bayonetta, a newly released title that I truly enjoyed. But after I completed that and DJ Hero this past Tuesday, I discovered that night that it was apparently the Mass Effect 2 launch date. I had already made a conscious decision to skip buying Mass Effect 2 at launch, just because I had already gone through Bioware’s more RPG-oriented epic, Dragon Age: Origins, last month and my pre-ordered copy of BioShock 2 is releasing just around the corner. Plus, with the number of games I have sitting in my backlog, I realized that my gaming time might be better spent clearing through a backlogged title or two before BioShock 2′s release rolls around.

But why is this so difficult?
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Mass Effect is going to be a trilogy. Bioware told us that up front when the original released in 2007. Normally, that isn’t a big deal – trilogies happen all the time. But after playing the first few hours of the game, I started really thinking about it, and one question popped into my head… Is Bioware insane?

After much rumination, I have decided that Bioware is indeed crazy…LIKE A FOX! The Mass Effect trilogy is an incredibly ambitious undertaking, and playing the sequel has made me realize why I love what Bioware’s doing, and also why it seems like a suicide mission (see what I did there?). But before I go into it, minor spoilers of the original Mass Effect below, although I will do my best without revealing any big ones.

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Crazily enough, this site has been around for over a year already. Looking back, I noticed that my first ever post was on my top 5 most anticipated games of 2009, and here I am, anticipating 2010 with two repeats from that list. That’s kind of sad, but at the same time my excitement keeps building and I am hoping all these games live up to the hype…in my mind.

The games I listed last year were Mass Effect 2, Starcraft 2, The Conduit, The Beatles: Rock Band, and Halo Wars. Halo Wars and The Beatles: Rock Band turned out to be pretty awesome, The Conduit, not so much, and Mass Effect 2 and Starcraft 2 are still MIA. So what am I looking forward to this year?

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