Peter Hodges

I want my Dragon Age: Origins game back. That’s right, folks. The game that won my vote for video game of the year in 2009, a deep, tactical RPG, has been retardified for the legions of console whiners. The haunting story, the awesome role-playing elements, the complicated symphony of character activities, the sheer, bloody difficulty, have been converted into an on-the-rails experience that feels more like Call of Duty than an RPG.

WTF?

Instead of letting you assume the role, your in-game surrogate is voiced by a charming lady with British diction (like Mass Effect, only stupid). Instead of seeing your responses laid out before you (sometimes as many as five in the first game), you’re left with a radial menu that has three responses with five to seven word summaries. A cute little icon gives you a halo with wings, a theater mask, and crossed weapons, letting you know that you can be nice, snarky, or evil. What you pick isn’t always what the character says, or at best, is only an approximation.

(Yes, I typically play girl characters in video game RPGs. No, it doesn’t say anything interesting about my psychology.)

Combat uses the same basic abilities over and over again. The combat animations look more like something out of Mortal Kombat or Soul Calibur and not like the deliberate, coordinated actions of a party of medieval-technology fighters. I had to put the game on hard mode to even make it challenging, and even then, it was root, nuke, stun stragglers, tank’n'spank. I’ve gotten more challenge playing Hungry Hungry Hippos with my son.

To save money on art assets, the game keeps returning to the same places over and over again in the city of Kirkwall. I got so tired of the same locales over and over again at the halfway point in the game that I was wishing that I could get my fifty gold pieces to go on the dwarven expedition just for a change of scenery. Sure, the fiction was interesting, but if the game doesn’t support interesting world-building with great play mechanics, it’s wasted.

Speaking of saving money, the game MSRP is $59.99. Most reviews say the game clocks in between 25-30 hours, depending on how many sidequests you do and how deeply you explore the codex. I have 10 hours into it and I’m about 65% done. Really? An RPG that can be finished in a marathon weekend? And the publisher jacked the price up ten dollars? Nice.

This is Bioware’s first misstep in my opinion, and the root of that misstep lies in trying too hard to appeal to the watered-down RPG mechanics that are favored by console gamers. Bioware would have done well to polish the formula that worked well in the first game, allow users to use their saved characters, and focus on deepening the connection that players had with the world and the time invested in building their parties.

I’m already about two-thirds of the way through the game, so I’ll probably finish it, but don’t expect it to show up on my best of the year lists. Right now, it’s shaping up for a solid C+.

On a side note, PC developers who have defected (or at best, diversified) into the console segment misunderstand a couple of key points. The first is that abandoning development on the PC, or porting the console bullshit to PC, doesn’t drive PC gamers to buy consoles. It drives us to give up gaming and do something more productive with our lives. Of my friends in the big LAN party scene of the 90′s, I only know one who plays console games seriously, and he has a teenage son, and does it as a bonding activity. As developers have focused their efforts on the consoletards, the market (anecdotally) has contracted, not shifted.

The other point is that those of us who are still loyal to the platform are spending less money on hardware, and going for longer cycles in between upgrades. The era of being a viable PC hardware enthusiast is over, and with it, hardware manufacturers are feeling the bite.

Grr. Rant over.

Bulletstorm is an irreverent, quirky shooter that makes fun of more serious games like Mass Effect 1/2 and Call of Duty, while still retaining the virtues of honor and loyalty.It’s hard to describe Bulletstorm in any meaningful capacity without experiencing. It is over-the-top in every sense of the phrase. Foul-mouthed characters who suffer from over-cussing, extreme examples of gore, an entire skill system based on being creative in the way you kill enemies, set the stage for a story of…redemption? Honor? Friendship? The end result of the campaign is somewhat at odds with the build-up, leaving you with a slight feeling of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

The game mechanics will be familiar to legions of Xbox 360 fans, but were somewhat new to me. This is less a free-form FPS in the tradition of Half-Life or Borderlands, and more an on-the-rails console experience. In fact, a “jump” is completely absent from the available moves, limiting your ability to move around obstacles or fall off of ledges. Waves of enemies, each with their own particular penchant for destruction, are thrown at you in increasingly difficult combinations, forcing you to use new skills on the more difficult level to survive. (Don’t play on easy or medium, the game is a complete cakewalk on it, possibly to make it playable for our less skilled console brethren.)

The number of skills shots are mind-numbing; they are also in a significant number of situations contextually dependent upon your environment. They go by such irreverent names as “Rear Entry,” “Double Penetration,” “Meat Spin,” “Ground Chuck,” and “Trap Shooting.” The names are somewhat evocative of the setup required, but each drop shop also includes a database of discovered skill shots that tells players how to accomplish them.

The campaign flows from set piece to set piece. Most of them were a combination of tedium and awesomeness that typically accompanies console “ports” to PC, but I didn’t mind these nearly as much as some of the ones I experienced in Batman: Arkham Asylum. The environments are incredibly detailed and even made my PC sidestep a bit at high resolution/high detail. (Frame rates dipped into the high 30′s.) The dialog between characters was full of vulgar witticisms that appealed to the fifteen year old in me, although the main bad guy, General Serrano (voiced by R. Lee Emery) eventually wore on my nerves.

Multiplayer is an unqualified blast. Players are required to work together in an arena to kill enemies; to advance to the next wave, the team must meet a scoring threshold. Once  you’re past the sixth wave or so, it is essential to get team-based skill shots (for two to three times their normal points) to achieve the necessary points to advance. This is cooperative mayhem in its purest form, a great way to blow off steam after a hard day of work and hang out with your friends. I fear it won’t have the longevity of something like Borderlands or Battlefield, but as a purely jump in/jump out diversion, it excels.

If you’re looking for a quick, irreverent campaign (less than ten hours), a fun, twitch based multiplayer component that doesn’t require a whole lot of thought, then this is the game for you.