I survived Christmas 2014 and I'm a bit sad it's already over. I used to hate Christmas, because I've experienced it many times in a family with four teenagers and a pair of stressed parents, whose marriage had broken beyond repair many years ago. But things are pretty chilled out in England, there's just lots of good food, everyone's happy and I'm actually getting presents, which is something that hasn't really happened to me anymore since I was about 16. Everything was just... good. You know, like this:
You can't look much happier than this whilst surrounded by family.
We took Hugo Bosc with us when we came over to see the family and he was a little boring at first. He has this annoying habit of hiding under the sofa, a table or anything else that makes him difficult to pick up. He does it at home, too - hide under the sofa and stalk the cats. Because the moment he comes out from under there, chances are somebody might grab him and put him back in his cage and he doesn't like that. He wants to roam. Which is okay, but sometimes I have to work and if I'm the only one at home, he just can't run around outside all the time.
So he sat under the sofa when we sat together for our Christmas dinner until the smell of food lured him out. Big old lizard decided to check out the kitchen, so he got his share of the tons of meat we had and he just ate until he went into a food coma.
He just kept on sleeping in the living room...
...and in the car.
Last night we even had a bit of snow. Some of the biggest snowflakes I have seen in my life, in fact!
Snow makes everyone in Nottingham lose their shit.
Unfortunately, this stuff never stays around for long over here, so I had to be quick. I'm not super satisfied with the result and I hope we'll get some more snow, soon, so I'll get another shot at it. But it's a start...
I need to drink less to make it yellower.
The first two letters turned out okay-ish, but then the wind got so strong that it became impossible to create any legible writing. I think next time I'm gonna try keeping the hat on for more precision.
I'm not one for new year's resolutions, so I won't come up with any. I couldn't be bothered to keep up with them, anyway. Unless... Claire's sister asked if it's possible to survive 40 wanks (long story). I can do around 20 on a good day, so maybe this is something to look into. For science!
Oh and I am now the proud owner of Forza Horizon 2 on the Xbox One.
I've added a custom paintjob - can you tell?
It's easily one of the greatest racing games I've ever seen. Unfortunately, it's also solid proof that I'm starting to outgrow my hobby and I'm too old for next-gen racing games. I can live on with the tacked-on "story" told by a bunch of metrosexual brodudes, one of which represents the player. You can't change his looks or gender and the game strictly addresses the player as male, because there are no female gamers in 2014. Doesn't fucking matter, it's all about the cars anyway.
What does matter to me, however, is how Forza Horizon 2 dangles all these choices and possibilities in front of me only to take it all away whenever it damn well feels like it. I chose a BMW Z4 for my very first car, because I think it's a cool car and I like having the possibility to tune up any vehicle beyond recognition. I turned that thing into a beast, powerful enough to take on any Ferrari. Problem is, no matter how much you power up the Z4's performance, you're only allowed to race other sports cars. What's worse, every sports car championship comes with a so-called cross country race, which takes you off the road and through corn fields and forests and tall grass and other such happy shit. Which sucks immeasurable amounts of ass when you're in a car with rear wheel drive and an ultra-low, stiff suspension and gear ratios set for speed over acceleration, i.e. a car tuned for street-racing.
Eventually I switched to a Lamborghini Countach to avoid all that cross country crap altogether, which worked well until I managed to finish all of the retro supercars championships. That's when I could no longer progress through the game until I switched to a different vehicle class. Which is something I reeeeeeally didn't want to do, because I've put hours into my Lamborghini painting it, tuning it and what have you. In the end I drove around this thing:
...why?
A bunch of championships later I was told that I could no longer progress unless I changed to yet another type of vehicle. BUT I JUST WANT TO DRIVE MY FUCKING LAMBORGHINI, GOD FUCKING DAMMIT!
So I started up multiplayer mode, hoping I could hop on my favourite car there. Instead, the host had decided to use weak, low-ranked cars, so I was forced to pick a shitty car I didn't want to drive, because the game doesn't let you cancel and opt out of multiplayer until you've chosen a car you didn't want to drive in the first place. Then you get teleported to a race, then you gotta wait for the race to start, THEN you can fucking quit multiplayer, drive (or teleport for ingame cash) back to the nearest garage to switch back to the car you want, join another multiplayer session and be forced to switch cars again. I tried three different sessions, I was never allowed to use the car I want, I could never just cancel and bail when the game told me I had to pick a shitty car and I had fucking voice chat forced on me in ever session. You can only mute each player individually by opening up their profile, which is super convenient IN THE MIDDLE OF A FUCKING RACE!
Hey, anyone fucking remember Need for Speed: Porsche BACK IN FUCKING 2000 where you could just pick any fucking car you wanted, join a game and fucking race? And you didn't have to listen to a bunch of teenage douchebags the entire time? Yeah, that was great. 15 years into the future and online gaming is so fucking awful, I just can't be arsed to put up with it. So yeah... thanks for an entertaining 5 or 6 hours there, Forza. If I can ever just drive my favourite car in single- and multiplayer and ON THE FUCKING ROAD at that, I'll be back. Meanwhile I'm just gonna work on that 40 wanks thing or something.
But wait... there is more!
Oh, while I'm already bitching: can we stop making fucking EVERYTHING a goddamn achievement? You manage to drive a couple inches without crashing? BAM! "Clean Driving!" Extra points. You hit something? BAM! "Wreckage!" Points for you. Just about dodge another car? "Near miss" (also available in great near miss, awesome near miss and ultimate near miss, I shit you not). More points for you. Fail to dodge that car? Doesn't matter. "Trading paint" aaaand extra points. Drifting, high speed, fast acceleration, it's impossible to play for more than two or three seconds without bonuses or achievements popping up left, right and center.
This shit right there is why I play Dark Souls. A goddamn boss comes out of nowhere and his favourite thing to eat is your face? You get killed in one hit? TOO FUCKING BAD, go and get good at the fucking game! No, "At least you tried really hard" achievement or some shit. Achievements are for winners. They're for getting shit done. Modern game designers are like whores. They tell you over and over again how damn awesome you are at everything you do. You know they're lying, they know they're lying, but everyone feels a little better about themselves and the customers will come back to spend more money.
2014 has been one of the most... erm... interesting years in my life. Christmas is approaching rapidly and I finally get to sit down and chill out for a while. Which, of course, is a complete lie, because I'm still writing reviews, posting news and doing a few new things with all that creative energy, since being a freelance games critic doesn't really pay the bills anymore. In fact, I've reached a new low where magazines offer one third of the money that I used to get when I first started writing about these games roughly half a decade ago. Of course I don't accept grossly underpaid job offers like that, but by the end of the day that means I still have my dignity and nothing to eat. So instead of just writing about games I now get to help create them by writing quest text and helping out with translations. It requires more or less the same level of wit and creativity but without the math (German review scores are fucking horrible!) and without a bunch of 14 year old shitheads jerking off all over the comments section. If you happen to be one of my German commenters on any of the websites I work for, yes, I just called you a shithead and I hope you die. If you're one of my employers, please don't fire me. :P
I don't claim to know anything about game design or the development of games, but at least in the case of the game I get to write for, the actual mechanics, the stuff you click on, the things you do in the game are already implemented and working. There is just no story for that particular content. You see, the devs just have this spot on a map, which features a certain setting, players go there to quest, loot, same old, but there is no explanation as to why anyone would have to go there or what's going on. And that's where I come in. It's pretty exciting stuff, because you come up with a background story and a fitting quest chain and then the devs put all your text in the game and eventually you get to play all the stuff you wrote about.
It's complicated, too, because everything needs to fit the overall theme and setting of the game, so stuff goes back and forth for a while, things get rewritten, some stuff makes it in there right away and sometimes a series of quest texts goes straight in the bin, because it just doesn't fit. The whole thing is far from being an impressive AAA-production, but it's fun to help create something, even if it's small and not incredibly significant. Good money, too, so I'm happy. And by now I've written paid columns, adverts, manuals, translations, reviews, game text... wow. And it all started with a crappy little blog like this one.
How to ruin your mood in one easy step: 1. Launch Dark Souls.
We're trying to fit in some exciting shit with all the work I get to do these days, so there's still a lot of Warframe going on and we're also back on Dark Souls, because we're fucking masochists. Seriously, after five minutes of Dark Souls, even the toughest challenges on Warframe feel like a vacation. Especially since their community ladies are being so nice with me.
Burrrr-surrrr-kurrrr...
Digital Extremes are hosting some of the best live streams and this moment really made my day.
And since I'm already linking my shit on Youtube - the channel is starting to see more activity and subscribers, so the new mic must be doing something. With that said, I still went down from 250k views to only a little above 150k when I removed one video, which showed the drawing of a naked lady on my psp's wallpaper for about four nanoseconds. It's a bit depressing, really. I can try voice, no voice, music, guides, reviews, gameplay or what the fuck ever, but all it takes for a video to be REALLY successful is a split-second of vagina.
As for Dark Souls, I didn't actually want to get back into it, but with the recent migration from GFWL to Steam I had to fire it up again, then I had to make sure my old savegames still work and then I played around for a bit and one thing lead to another and... yeah.
So much suffering.
And let's be honest here for a minute: Much of the praise this game is getting for being incredibly difficult but never unfair is a load of bullshit. When enemies, traps and other shit that can kill you in one hit lurk around every corner, usually hidden in a way that makes it impossible for you to react until it's too late, there is very little fair play involved. Forcing you to memorize the layout of a level isn't fair, it's actually pretty bad game design.
So coming back to the game after more than a year of inactivity on a New Game++++ is an exercise in frustration. But there is just something about Dark Souls. The gritty, depressing setting, the sad music, the futility of it all, the whole thing is a very melancholic work of art. And finally beating a ridiculously unfair boss fight after getting your ass kicked for god knows how many hours feels much more satisfying than it should. The game also allows for a lot of different play styles and I'm really enjoying the combat system.
You can dual-wield just about anything from cool stuff that makes sense (claws, knives, fencing weapons + parry daggers) to shit that makes no sense at all (dual shields, dual twohanders), use quick and agile builds, which rely on parrying, dodging and backstabbing or power-heavy builds with heavy weapons and armor, clocking in at significantly fewer swings per minute, but making every hit count that much more.
And I can't help it. Though I've already finished the whole thing and all the bosses multiple times and though I'm playing like a complete and utter noob again after my long break, I just can't stop playing it. I'm using this ridiculous combination of gear where I'm swinging a giant two-handed sword in slow motion, blocking most hits with a shield the size of an average dinner table and shooting baddies with my really awesome triple crossbow. The real fun starts when Claire and I play in co-op and people invade us, so I just stun-lock them with lightning bolts while Claire hacks them to bits. And then we usually get a whole lot of hateful messages for fighting 2vs1 and for not bowing and stupid shit like that.
Do I look like I'm gonna give you a respectful bow before I kick your ass?
This is the one thing that seriously bothers me about the Dark Souls community. People can invade other players' sessions and attempt to kill them in pvp. It's part of the game and I can live with that, even though some assholes spend all day collecting all the most powerful items on deliberately underleveled characters in order to kill total newcomers, who wouldn't stand a chance with or without gear, anyway. It's entirely possible that some dickhead will enter your game during your very first hour on Dark Souls and just thrash you with the game's most powerful items while you're still trying to figure out how to jump. Because people will do anything to win and to gain an unfair advantage.
Ironically, these guys don't just enter your game, chop you up and leave again. They use the emote system and fucking bow before they attack. In fact, it's considered common courtesy to return that emote. Because "honor". "Ohai, I suck too hard to fight consenting PvPers in the arena, so I have to invade noobs. Please accept my humble bow." So if you bow to me during an invasion, it's likely the last thing you'll do. And if you're expecting me to take turns with my team mate and attack you one at a time, well, GO FUCK YOURSELF!
I'm still on the fence about Dark Souls 2. On the one hand it's on Steam Sale right now for 11 Quid. Better dual-wielding, more gear, better magic, much larger game world, more stuff to do. On the other hand, I'm still having fun with the first one and while most people agree that Dark Souls 2 is an okay game by itself, it's a disappointing "Souls" game. There is also way too much troll crap going on in pvp and people on the forums complain about "hackers" a lot. Which is no great surprise, seeing how Dark Souls stores save files locally, meaning any idiot can alter them with a simple hex editor or even change files "live" using a memory editor. Oh hey, look at me, I'm such a total hacker!
And they're already working on a "next gen" DX11 version with the DLC already included, so I should probably just wait a little longer.
Claire is back on WoW. It was actually me who said she should just go and get WoD, even though I hate the idea of her hanging around on there all day while I'm playing other shit by myself, but we're taking a few hours each day where we still do stuff together. And the initial hype has already died down a bit. She's still on there a lot, but she's no longer over the top crazy about it. To be fair, I've heard the exact same stuff from my old man, whose sudden death was, in part, related to his WoW addiction. Make no mistake, he was just the kind of guy who was easily addicted, so if it hadn't been WoW it would have been something else and I don't blame the game. But I just can't play it anymore and wouldn't do it, even if it wasn't for all the changes and simplifications which I'm no huge fan of.
Classic AV was fucking tedious. I miss it a lot.
We had this messed up relationship and never really talked or did anything together. For my 9th birthday I didn't ask for any presents or anything and just wanted to spend a day with him, because he was always working or playing video games. Azeroth was the only place where I could really reach him.
I've done some amazing shit on there with him and Claire. The three of us would tackle instances way above our own levels, just the three of us, and we'd win. He was a lousy father, but he was one of the best hunters I've ever known. What a weird thing to say. Walking around Ironforge, flying over Dun Morogh, knowing I won't see the login-spam from his army of characters, who covered just about every profession there is, knowing he won't send me messages on there and we're not playing any dungeons - I just can't do it. Sometimes I wanna log on there and roll a dwarven hunter and name him Redbeard like the first character who became his main, the first one he leveled all the way to 60. There are plenty of memorials in Azeroth dedicated to people who died in real life, so the idea isn't even that far-fetched. WoW was his happy place. The guy had his problems and he ran away from them when he was on there all day, but it's where he chose to be and where I've buried most of my happy memories about him, for as weird and as sad as it might be. It would be nice to have him remembered on there. Oh well.
We were such noobs back then.
I'm still writing the odd game review here and there, but it's mostly news these days. And hopefully more quest text and translations, because that stuff is a lot more fun than news. I wish I had the time to put something useful on my Youtube channel in between all that stuff, but there are only so many hours in a day and the really annoying stuff usually pays the most. Haha, "pays". Working 7 days a week, every week and being able to juuuust pay the rent and buy food isn't fun. I thought that kind of shit would end when I stopped working in call centres and doing retarded data typist crap, but poverty seems to be the way to go, no matter what. On then, to a poor, filthy 2015! At least we're having fun.
If you head to Nottingham market square right now, you'll be greeted by this:
It's a fun little thing inspired by German Christmas markets, except nobody speaks any fucking German and you get a selection of bog-standard English faire food like burgers and sausages or completely made-up "German specialties".
It was one of those rare and special nights where I was actually a bit sad how neither one of us owns a smartphone, for we have encountered many a weird and wondrous thing and now you'll simply have to take my word for it. Let me start with the happy, friendly faces of the many people who work at all the many food stands. Or complete lack thereof. I ordered a delicious ham sandwich from a lovely young lady, who looked at me as though I had just taken a massive shit on her counter. And before those among you, who know me a little better, are going to ask - no, I did not.
The potato lady wasn't much friendlier, though her menu was a lot more amusing. "Kartoffel is a classic German specialty served with ham, Brockwurst and curry or cheese sauce". Yeah, we sure love Kartoffel in Germany!
Pictured: Fine German delicacy.
What they served was really just baked potato. You know, sliced up and fried, like they do just about everywhere. There's nothing particularly German to that and adding what they referred to as "Brockwurst" didn't change that very much. And it's not just a silly little typo they put in there - by adding the extra R and putting a Brocken in your sausage, you're referring to chunks, as in the kind of stuff you'll be blowing after eating too much kartoffel.
The best thing I had today, aside from a delicious ham sandwich served with a death stare was some fantastic barbecue chicken with sour cream. I also would have tried some mulled wine, but all alcoholic beverages were served in a sealed-off part of the market, with big, scary signs saying NO ALCOHOL PAST THIS POINT and even bigger, scarier guards to make sure you don't ignore these signs. I shit you not.
So, remain stationary with your wine, eat your potatoes and enjoy a cacophony of Bing Crosby, Wham and Techno as every single stand blasts their very own choice of music across market square. It was fucking awful and I loved most of it. Thanks for actually paying me on time this month, work!
My favourite thing I've seen all night has to be Funtastic's Bob the Alien Warrior. You see, we have this super popular shop around here called Poundland, where everything costs a Pound or less. They're a huge chain opening one store after another, all over the place. And they sell hilarious, super shitty toys for a pound a pack. Sometimes you get a bunch of action figures pieced together from discontinued pirates, wrestlers and ninjas, they get some new names and stickers and random oversized plastic weapons stuffed in the pack and are sold for a pound.
Funtastic usually just rip off popular characters from Star Wars, GI Joe, Marvel and the like.
What they had on offer tonight was particularly exquisite. I'm sure you're aware of those stereotypical little grey aliens, which have become hugely popular thanks to the X-Files. You know, these guys:
Now imagine this guy's head put on top of your average He-Man action figure's body. Then they threw in a bunch of generic oversized plastic guns for the little guy and voila: Bob the Alien Warrior was born!
There's not even trying and then there's Bob. Look, I'd agree that maybe they were going for something funny here like Paul (Alien Seth Rogen with Pegg & Frost, anyone remember?), if it wasn't for the whole Rambo getup and all the guns and the fact he's called an alien warrior, for fuck's sake! So of all the names they could have come up with, they chose Bob. Fucking Bob. The Alien Warrior. Now that'll strike fear into the hearts of his enemies.
Of course it's not the first ever god-awful creation they've ever come up with out of a He-Man's body and some disenfranchised head. Look at this shit:
Damn. After the huge mess that was Call of Duty: Ghosts, I decided not to buy the next game of the franchise. And I swear - I didn't! Problem is, somebody else did it for me and now we're kinda streaming our results.
Our sweet, sweet results.
I won't lie. I'm having more fun with this game than I had anticipated, but it has its fair share of problems, starting with maps, which freeze and stutter like mad to slightly less problematic maps, which let me play at around 20-30 FPS to only maybe one or two maps, which actually run at a full 60. Which, of course, are exactly the maps other players constantly vote for, so the whole experience lacks a certain sense of variety.
One nice touch is the return of user-made emblems, which you can stick on your player card, your uniform, guns and everything. I've made a fun little Berserkerkitten, wielding a giant knife and all that. Yay!
Pictured: Fine art.
Problem is, whenever there's a Call of Duty, which allows players to show off their creativity, the result is always one of two things. A dick or a swastika.
Because idiocy knows absolutely no limits. Also... black dicks? Really?
We have a history of strange neighbours. There was Sam Capone, who used to live upstairs. What a fucking cool name. I bet he had a cool mafioso nickname, too. Sammy "The Knife" Capone or something. Grew weed all day. Whole street smelled of it until even our cats were tripping balls. Most creative phase in my career as a writer. They busted him in winter, when our house was the only one without snow on the roof.
I might have told you guys about that one night where I heard the lady upstairs fight with a man and I wanted to rush out and stop the guy from doing whatever he was doing to the poor woman. Turned out he was running for his life while she tried to shank him with a broken bottle. That same lady also set fire to her kitchen and just closed the door and ignored it, hoping for it to go away by itself.
Our newest neighbour tends to leave little notes, complaining about how our noisy tv is keeping her up all night. Which is funny, because we don't have a tv. Claire uses my computer monitor to watch her soap operas three times a week (in the afternoon, which isn't exactly the middle of the night) and that's pretty much it. I bumped into her earlier tonight and she told me that Claire and I are the reason she doesn't want to live here, because there's a repulsive smell coming from our place, like some dead guy was rotting in our house. Charming. I gave her the thumbs up, said "great" and went back inside, because between that and punching her in the face, I was too confused to come up with any satisfying ways to respond.
For a minute or so I considered going upstairs for round two or to take a piss on her doorstep, but then the pizza was there, everything was good and a few minutes later two guys showed up, banged on her door and shouted for her to let them in. It didn't take long until there were three of four people trying to get inside and when I asked what was wrong, they apologized for the noise. I told them I saw her just a few moments ago and she was behaving a bit... uh... hostile, so I was informed she wasn't being herself and "we may have a problem."
The cops and a bunch of paramedics showed up a little while later. Not entirely sure whether or not they took her away or decided the situation wasn't so bad after all, but they stayed for a while and our house looked like a murder site or something. Our neighbour had breakdowns before (family members banging against the bathroom door while she was shouting at them and calling them names) and I suppose one can suddenly hear phantom television or smell dead people when you're fucked up enough.
So now we're sharing the place with a crazy person. Not entirely sure what to make of this. So the next time she's banging on my door or leaving a note, telling me she caught me setting her cat on fire or some other stupid shit like that, what am I supposed to do? She might be an alcoholic or maybe she's tripping balls or maybe a tumor is making her hallucinate or some shit, so it doesn't seem right to high-five her in the face with a chair. On the other hand this place is both my home and my office and I'm not in the mood to spend the next bunch of years taking abuse from a screaming banshee, just because she's fucking mental.
I finished Dragon Age: Inquisition and it makes me sad. Such a great game, but I reeeeeally don't feel like exploring every last inch of the game world now, finishing every single last side quest and shit, because frankly, that stuff is really just boring filler and doesn't hold a candle to the incredible story. There's a lot of bitching, whining and moaning going on when you look at websites like metacritic, where stupid people talk about how Bioware "ruined the lore" and "shit all over the story" ever since the two Bioware founders left the place. Which is interesting, considering the story was penned by David Gaider, who was already responsible for the first two games. So you mean to tell me that Gaider himself is crapping all over his own lore, simply because the story didn't go in a direction you had personally hoped for? You stupid, stupid assholes. It's the same damn crap that happened in Mass Effect 3. Boooo, we didn't like the controversial ending, let's downvote the fucking game everywhere and hate Bioware for all eternity. I have never kissed a girl.
WARNING: This post contains spoilers. If you haven't finished Dragon Age: Inquisition yet and you don't want parts of the story revealed to you before you get there in the actual game, turn back now, look at porn, get back in the game, just gtfo.
The good people at EA (never thought I'd call them that) were kind enough to let me have a copy of Dragon Age: Inquisition and 50+ hours into the game I'm still having difficulty putting down the controller to get some actual work done. The game has its flaws and I'd rather micro-manage my characters and their attributes (it's all distributed automatically now) instead of managing every tiny aspect of Skyhold. I don't really want to choose from 250 different thrones, banners, drapes and other crap to kit out a virtual base of operations. I wish I could just hire an interior decorator for this stuff.
Nitpicking aside, I'm rather impressed with the game, the dramatic storytelling and the fantastic writing. Bioware made some bold choices here and I was particularly surprised by a quest involving Dorian, a mage who can be hired as a companion for the Inquisitor. Frankly, I was fully expecting to hate Dorian when I looked at character trailers and previews. I mean, just look at that silly, drawn-on facial hair!
I don't mind the fact that he's homosexual. All of my friends are, too. He's just a bit... flamboyant? There is one particular quest where the entire world is in flames and there is this constant sense of impending doom and he complains about the interiour decoration of some old fortress. See? SEE? THIS is why I feel the urge to keep decorating Skyhold even though I don't care for this kind of feature in RPGs! Stuff has to look nice or people get bitchy.
Dorian is a smartass, his facial hair is stupid and I just didn't like him very much when the game first introduced him to me. But the guy grew on me over time, he gets some of the most brilliant lines in the game and he's a decent enough character once you see past the somewhat annoying surface. And since it's perfectly normal for companions in Bioware games to betray you and stab you in the back if they hate you enough, I made sure to be friends with everyone, including Dorian.
As part of his storyline, I ended up accompanying Dorian on a meeting with his estranged father. They're not exactly best friends, Dorian has absolutely nothing nice to say about his old man and when you encourage him to talk to his father, it turns out that the main reason for all the bad blood between them is the fact that Dorian prefers the company of men.
You can break up the whole thing, tell Dorian that his old man isn't worth it or tell the guy to go to hell, but if you encourage them to talk to each other it turns out that Dorian's father deeply regrets how he treated his son and that he seeks forgiveness.
Look, I get it. It's soap opera material. But I've never seen anything like it in a video game and their decision to put this quest in there was brave and nothing short of impressive.
Homosexuality is treated as perfectly natural and nothing weird in Bioware's Mass Effect universe. One of Shepard's crewmen openly talks about his husband, whom he has lost in the war. Nobody picks on him for that or jokes about it, nobody calls the guy names, because it's the distant future and people are past that kind of crap. Things aren't quite as happy in Dragon Age. Dorian and his dad are at each other's throats, because the young mage is openly gay.
The Inquisition is also home to the first transgender character I have ever seen in a video game. Cremisius "Krem" Acclasi looks and fights like any male soldier, he has short hair, no boobs and when you first encounter him, he sounds like a woman. Frankly, I thought it was just a bug and the game was accidentally displaying a male character model for a female character. That kind of stuff happened a lot in games like Guild Wars, where random NPCs would look male and speak with a female voice or vice versa until they got fixed in a patch. No big deal here.
That's until Krem casually mentions binding breasts at a later point in the game. Turns out Krem was indeed born female and it never felt right. He talks about how he never wanted to wear dresses as a kid and how he posed as a man to become a high-ranking soldier. When you ask the leader of his unit if there are any issues with him being a woman, he tells you off. "He's not a woman. [...] Krem's a good man. I don't give a nug's ass that it's a little harder for him to piss standing up."
I have met people on the internet who felt they were the wrong gender. I had a friend, some guy in Manchester in his late 50s, who would occasionally wear his wife's clothes. One day she caught him and he told her that he wanted to be a woman. The two of them had been married for more years than I had been alive, but she left him when he went through with it. The hormone treatment, the operation, the whole thing. He... she wanted to be whom she felt she really was enough to give up on their marriage.
I won't lie. I think it's weird. I have no right to judge. It's none of my business whether people feel happy with their gender or not. But I don't think I'll ever be able to understand it. I will never know how it feels to be in that kind of situation and I'm pretty grateful for that. But I like how Dragon Age: Inquisition brings it up, makes you think about it. And teaches tolerance. A good game shouldn't just teach you that if you hit a boar hard enough, gold will come out. That being a hero, a "good guy" doesn't just mean you punch dragons in the face or decapitate bad guys in epic cutscenes. A good game makes you think. And maybe a good game can teach you just a little bit about values. I like that idea. I think they're doing a good thing here.
And with a face like this, my Inquisitor isn't really in any position to judge.
We'll be streaming Dragon Age multiplayer tonight. It's gonna be messy. I don't honestly believe anyone would even want to watch us, but I'll give my friend the benefit of the doubt. He's very enthusiastic about these things. Nothing to lose, right?
It's my birthday this week. First time I won't be receiving any emails or phone calls from my dad. He was never very good with this stuff. I remember one year where he called a day late, because he forgot. I wish things could have been different. I wish we could talk.
I can't believe it has been a whole year since I've replayed the first two Dragon Age games. Dragon Age: Origins is still one of the greatest RPGs I've ever played and Dragon Age II... sigh. Yeah. And then there's Dragon Age II, which is an okay RPG that doesn't deserve to be called Dragon Age and isn't much more than a husk of a proper BioWare RPG. I didn't hate it or anything, but it turned the original Dragon Age experience into a console-friendly arcade experience for morons, with very little customization or role playing aspects and a bunch of companions I just can't give a shit about.
Dragon Age: Origins had some incredible, memorable party members like Morrigan, who was a bit unpredictable and antisocial and had this constant rivalry going on with her "mother" Flemeth, who just so happens to turn into a fucking dragon whenever she's in the mood. Yes, the game also had its boring, stereotypical dwarf and an elven assassin, who was basically a much gayer version of Shrek's puss in boots, but you could genuinely care about most of the companions and the banter between group members like Alistair and Morrigan was brilliant and often hilarious. Meanwhile, Dragon Age II had a shaven dwarf and a bunch of guys, who couldn't wait to betray you.
In fact, one of them nukes a whole bunch of people and starts a war, forcing you to exile or outright kill the fucker, while another one simply runs off at some point, so you can choose to go after her and sell her into slavery. This is not how you make the player care about their companions. And don't get me started on the dark, brooding, stereotypical white-haired anime elf named fucking Fenris, of all things. With tribal tattoos and a ridiculously oversized sword. What the fuck is this, Final Fantasy? Yes, I get it, the game was also released on consoles, you want to appeal to a younger audience, but that's no excuse to give your characters no fucking personality, even if they're walking cliches of themselves.
Don't get me wrong - it's interesting to put some assholes or traitors in the party and things can get boring when everything is happy-happy-joy-joy, but maybe add a few likable ones here and there, too? I couldn't care less if any of those guys died. I'd be sad to lose Wynne, Morrigan or Alistair from Origins. I'm aware that it's totally possible to get most of them permanenty killed, but I don't do shitty playthroughs like that.
Anyhow. Dragon Age II is still an okay game and you should totally play it if you've enjoyed Origins. It's just a lot more shallow than the first one, but it looks glorious and the combat is fun and fast-paced, so there is that.
And now the third game of the series, Dragon Age: Inquisition, is less than three weeks away and promises to fix so many things that it's hard to judge how much of that is just the usual PR-bullshit and how much if it is actually true.
People complained about how their decisions didn't really have any effect on the three "different" endings of Mass Effect 3, so BioWare promised over 40 unique and different endings for Dragon Age: Inquisition. They also promise over 200 hours of gameplay. And when something sounds too good to be true, well...
I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. What I've seen so far looked absolutely incredible and I'm not seriously expecting those alleged 40+ endings to be vastly different from each other. So I won't really be disappointed when it turns out that the differences between endings will be very minor. I'm more concerned about the artificial stretching of content in those "200 hours" of gameplay. I don't give a shit about collections, hidden achievements and tons upon tons of secrets, especially if you are forced to waste lots of time with them to get a "good" ending.
Nobody gives a fuck about boring errands. "Good sir, it would help me tremendously if you handed these 20 leaflets to the people in town" or some shit. Dragon Age: Origins did it, it didn't make the game any more fun and spending hours trying to find every last asshole you were supposed to hand random shit to didn't feel fun or rewarding. Look, I get it, you have to add some useless filler here and there in order to give people the advertised amount of gameplay, but I'd much prefer if games were advertised as featuring only 30 or 50 hours of gameplay and you actually get to play the damn game in these hours, not hunt after stupid flowers and rare beetles and lost family signets and other useless crap nobody really cares about.
I also have mixed feelings about the Dragon Age Keep. You know, the website, which lets you create a starting savegame for Dragon Age: Inquisition, based on your actions and decisions in the predecessors. First of all, how fucking stupid is it that PC users can't just import their fucking savegames from previous games? I've been keeping my save files on my computer for years and years, anticipating the next game, fully expecting to carry over my heroes and decisions. Instead, I have to answer over 300 stupid questions on a website, telling the game what I did or didn't do in the first two games.
What adds insult to injury is how you can "import" your characters from the first two games into the keep, but it will only use the names and (attempt to) recreate the likenesses of your custom heroes and that's it. Nothing else carries over, you'll have to set it all by hand. And if you haven't uploaded your original characters to your BioWare account, then you won't be able to import them into Inquisition at all. You can choose from a bunch of premade heroes on the website to make up for it, but why not just allow people to upload their damn savegames or skip the stupid Dragon Age Keep completely and just let them move their savegames from one title to another, like in Mass Effect?
Probably fucking DRM. If you can only use a legit BioWare account and their website to move custom heroes from one game to the next, then you'll be forced to actually own all three games on the exact same BioWare account or it won't work. I have the games right here, but I have never bothered to upload any characters or data to the Origin cloud, so I had to download and reinstall Origins and Dragon Age II just to get all of that shit into the Dragon Age Keep. Not remotely fun or user friendly.
The biggest problem is how there is never enough context when the Keep asks you about your decisions in the previous games. For instance, I was faced with the following options for a particular NPC: Nathaniel is well and alive / Nathaniel is dead / Haven't encountered Nathaniel.
Great. How the fuck am I supposed to remember if I met some asshole named Nathaniel in a game I haven't touched for a year? I had to google that shit and read up on most of the questions on Wikipedia. It took me a half hour only to recreate a world state, where both my main character and Alistair had survived the final battle. Turns out this only works if you've boned Morrigan (which I did), but her child has to be "an old god" and not human. I don't fucking know what the child turned out to be, because I didn't play any of the DLC and never met Morrigan again, so I played it by ear, picked a human baby and doomed my main character. Took a lot of trial and error to figure out why the keep always declared him dead.
Besides, knowing exactly which actions in the first two games do or do not have an impact on the world of Dragon Age: Inquisition also brings a few spoilers. The website asked me whether my character in Dragon Age II was a goodie-goodie, a sarcastic prick or a nasty old cunt, so it's relatively safe to assume that he'll make another appearance and have whatever personality I picked for him on the website. I'm genuinely excited about his comeback and I hope I'll get to fight alongside him and my main character from the first game, but the surprise would have been so much nicer, had I experienced it ingame and not through a question in the keep.
The keep asks whether certain characters lived or died in your playthrough, telling me I'll see them again in Inquisition - if they lived. Heck, if I fucked up and got them killed in my game, I can just lie to the keep and say they totally lived and get them back, anyway. It's not the end of the world, but it spoils a few surprises, it allows me to cheat and it makes my original playthroughs a little meaningless. I know, I know, I still got to experience the story and I know what it's all about, but now I can change any detail I want with a click, no matter how hard I tried during my actual playthrough or how much I sucked.
I noticed something funny when I played through Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom the other day. There is this RPG cliche where your main character is the son of some legendary swordsman, who once saved the world and then died or vanished or some shit and you have to pick up the family sword and save the world all over again and yada, yada, yada. Phantasy Star III takes it to a whole new extreme by letting you play that world-saving swordsman, then letting you play as your own son. And his son after that, once that storyline is over. It's funny. My old man played and finished all of these games when I was a kid, then I started finishing them all when I got older, just like he used to and now my son is getting into these games some more. Three generations of world-saving sofa swordsmen.
We're re-watching all the old Star Trek movies right now and it's funny how, once you reach a certain age, everything is and always has been about being "too old for this shit", long before they came up with the first Expendables movie. Many of the pre-TNG movies are about how the Enterprise and her crew are outdated, they're taking a rather humorous look at how none of them are getting any younger and sometimes things get downright depressing and characters question themselves, wondering if they have grown too old for the whole ting, altogether. They sound a bit like my late grandmother.
In the 32 years I have known my grandmother, she always seemed obsessed with death. When I was a little kid she'd tell me that most of her time was up and how she was sad that she wouldn't be around to watch me get old enough to visit her with kids of my own. She totally lived long enough to experience exactly that, but talking to her you'd get the impression that she may just crumble to dust at any second and without warning. Heck, I remember blowing soap bubbles when I was a kid and she'd tell me that the bubbles die when they pop. "But they really live on when they pop, right? They just lose their form." - "No. They're all dead." Thanks, grandma!
Ugh. I'm not sure I want everything in life to be about death or about being too old for shit now. Columbo is dead, Leslie Nielsen is dead, a whole lot of actors and famous people I grew up liking have kicked the bucket and with a bit of luck I'll live to see Jackie Chan, John Cleese, Patrick Stewart and a ton of other cool people die in no particular order. Imagine you're 70+ years old and in a world where Han Solo, Captain Kirk, John McClane and Rambo are dead and the young generation won't know who the fuck they were. Wow, that's gotta suck!
Well, there might be funny aspects to becoming a modern old geezer, as well. Large-scale war is going out of fashion and for all we know, we might grow up to be Warcraft veterans, instead. After all, I fought in all three Warcrafts, long before most of you young, ignorant fucks ever heard about WoW. And cybersex is probably gonna be pretty fucking epic. I don't think I'll ever become too old for that kinda shit. Bring it on, future!
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