Dragon Age: Origins (PC)

I decided to get the dwarves next. I got to their mountain city, progressed one of the mercenary quests on the way and managed to piss of a messenger from the “king” while entering the city. Seems the dwarves have a problem to, surprise, surprise. Their king is dead and now 2 guys are interested in the throne. I have to pick one of them to support so, after doing lots of exploration and side quests, I decided to go for the younger, “change is good” type of guy. Now I have to get to the Dead Roads and find some noble that is being cheated by the other guy. I’m not exactly sure how far I need to go, but I will see later today.

Dragon Age: Origins (PC)

I haven’t really played today, but I did play some more yesterday, so I should probably write about that. I tried getting the 3 Juggernaut armor pieces, but I could only get one. The Revenants are simply too strong for my group right now. Maybe if I had a proper healer I would be able to do it, but I really want to keep Morrigan in my group, so I will try again later.

Other than that, I went to a village to get myself a golem, so I can add a bunch of rocks to the list of my party members. It seems like an interesting character, but I’m keeping Alistair for now. Also, I went back to Redcliffe to turn in some mage quests and that’s about it. I have yet to decide where to go next.

Dragon Age: Origins (PC)

I finally got back to this game yesterday and I instantly remembered why I love it so much. Most of yesterday, I have been doing miscellaneous side quests which are not really story related in any way, but do give experience and nice rewards. I have also spent a lot of time talking to my party members, which allowed me to unlock a couple of specializations and start some quests.

Today, however, I decided to progress the story a bit. Since the Brecilian forest was on the way to the town where I am supposed to look for the cure for Arl Eamon, I decided to stop by there. Turns out there was a clan of Dalish elves living there and they are under attack by werevolves. Long story short, I went to the forest, done a few minor quests, killed a crazy hermit and freed the werewolves from the curse that was actually caused by the leader of the elven clan. The leader is dead now and the werewolves are back in their human forms, so I’m on my way back to the elven camp. I’m not really sure how this will play out, being the murderer of their leader and all, but I’m being an optimist. Anyway, I had to take a brake here, because I have a WoW raid soon. I will continue later tonight or tomorrow morning.

Exams! Games? Not much!

For the past two weeks, I’ve had constant college exams, and a week or two before that; I had to finish all of my college projects. Besides near-daily sessions of WoW, I didn’t have time to play anything else, at least nothing concrete. I do have some really big news though. I got a PSP Go from a website. Problem is, the website is in the US and the PSP Go is not supported in my country (Croatia). If I make a US, or any other account, I can’t buy games, because my credit card address info doesn’t match with my account info. This means I will probably have to buy game cards on e-bay or something similar. I might buy a game or two that way, but I will probably wait for it to get hacked, unless they get the service to Croatia and it isn’t too expensive.  In the meantime, I downloaded a bunch of demos and tried to play that for a bit. No point in writing about it though.

Anyway, my exams will be over by the end of next week, so I plan to return to gaming after that. I’m planning to complete Dragon Age, and then either replay Mass Effect or skip straight to Mass Effect 2, depending on how long Dragon Age takes and on my mood.  See you next week!

Recap of 2009

2009 is finally gone and a new year has started. It hasn’t started especially nice (bad weather and not much fireworks), but let’s hope it’s not how the rest of the year is going to be. Since the year is over, it’s time to do a recap of what I’ve done related to gaming in the last year.

PC

• Aztaka
• Braid
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
• Call of Duty: World at War
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3
• Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock
• Half-Life 2
• Half-Life 2: Episode One
• Mirror's Edge
• Overlord II
• Prototype
• The Secret of Monkey Island SE
• Trine
• Wanted: Weapons of Fate
• Warcraft 3 - Reign of Chaos
• Warcraft 3 - The Frozen Throne
• Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War II
• Wolfenstein

Nintendo DS

• Pokemon Platinum
• Moreo! Nekketsu Rhythm Damashii Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan 2

As you can see, the DS wasn’t as popular as the PC last year. This was mainly because I didn’t go to classes so there was less travel involved. I have to be honest though, and say that it was also due to reduced interest in the platform. Maybe this will improve in the future, but it’s just how it was in 2009.

Dragon Age: Origins (PC)

The game is nowhere near to being completed, but I did make lots of progress.  I went to the town of Redcliffe to try and get an ally but it was overrun by the undead. They would come out of the castle every night and no one knew if anyone in there was still alive. After repelling one of the attacks, I decided to get in and see what’s going on. It turns out, the blood mage that I helped escape from the mage tower was hired by the wife of the local lord (can’t remember his name) to try and teach his son magic so he could hide his talents and avoid being drafted by the mages.  The kid decided it would be a good idea to bargain with a demon in order to cure his father (who was secretly being poisoned by the blood mage) and, of course, all hell broke loose. 

Anyway, I had tri options. I could kill the kid, sacrifice his mother to enter the fade and kill the demon, or go to the mage tower and ask for help there. Of course, being a really nice guy, I opted for the third option.

Arriving back at the mages tower, I found out it’s being overrun by abominations created by one of the mages in there. I guess blood magic is really in this year. Anyway, I had to clear the entire tower and save the high enchanter.  I also managed to get a new party member. This one is a healer so she was extremely useful throughout the tower. After freeing them, the mages agreed to help me save the kid so that’s the next thing I did. It was a bit hard to battle the demon by myself but luckily I had a bunch of potions that I didn’t use since the beginning of the story, so I managed to brute force her down.

Mind you, all of this happened about a week ago (a day after the last time I posted here) and I haven’t been playing since. Actually, the only thing I’ve been playing was World of Warcraft.

Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story (DS)

During the last week, I’ve maybe spent a total of an hour on this game so I didn’t make allot of progress. I did some exploring with Bowser, got zapped by the Mushroom Kingdom security system (I think) and then managed to somehow get out of Bowsers body with Mario and Luigi trough one of the pipes he inhaled. It seems these pipes are really technical, because I have no idea how that worked. Anyway, after doing that I also did some exploring with the bros. and managed to get a new item – the blue shell. This allows me to access areas I couldn’t before so I expect some overusing of the new ability for the next hour or two of gameplay.

Borderlands (PC)

I’ll be honest here. The game starts out fun (-ny), everything looks like Diablo, you can’t wait for the next drop or a new quest and you really have fun playing it. After a while though, it gets repetitive. Maybe it’s my choice of character, but basically it all became a long string of headshots. The bosses aren’t interesting at all, they feel more annoying. There really isn’t much of a strategy to any of them. They just have loads of health and hit hard. That’s all there is to it. You do a couple of headshots and run behind a wall to recover shields and health. This is mostly all that happens.

Don’t get me wrong, I still plan to complete the game, but I’m not sure it will be this year. The game is still loads of fun, but nowhere nearly as much as it felt like when I started playing it. Anyway, Mordecai is now level 25 and he did a few quests in the new town that followed after The Dahl Headlands. I can’t really remember the name now, but I can tell you the town is big and there are plenty of areas around it, so there is a possibility that this will be THE quest hub for the rest of the game.

Dragon Age: Origins (PC)

I got this for my sister’s husband who is really new to gaming in general, and role playing games especially. This is why he asked me to also start playing it so I can help him if he runs into trouble. I have to say, I did not regret installing it. It’s basically the closest thing to Baldur’s Gate since Baldur’s Gate.  I started with an elven mage. He did the Harrowing, which is something like a final exam for mages, got recruited to the Grey Wardens and managed to almost die in a battle. Basically, this means I got trough the intro of the game, and now the real thing started. I have to go to a few different nations and force them to honor a contract in which they all promised to help out when the Blight comes again. My party is filling up pretty fast. You can lead 4 characters at a time, but I already have 6 in total.

The game itself is loads of fun. It’s not as hardcore as Baldur’s Gate, but there is lots of strategy involved, unless you play at the easiest difficulty level. The quests almost always have multiple ways to complete them, and the lore is rich and interesting. My guess is Bioware is trying to turn this into a franchise, so we can expect plenty of sequels. The more, the merrier, I say!

Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story (DS)

Not much train riding lately, so not much DS gameplay either. I managed to rescue the princess but then she got beamed out of Bowser's body by Fawfull. That’s basically all that happened. It did take a while for me to save the princess though. I had to answer allot of quiz questions correctly and kill a boss in the end. This means Mario and Luigi gained a few levels, and their rank has risen to, so they can both carry 3 different equipment pieces now.

Borderlands (PC)

After completing Modern Warfare, I decided to install this gem. Basically, it’s an FPS Diablo game with lots of great humor and beautiful cartoonish graphics. You run around doing missions, getting new weapons and running people over with your vehicle. During all that, you gather experience, find new weapons and train your skills.

The plot looks simple for now. There’s this planet that supposedly holds a legendary vault full of treasure and artifacts. No one is sure of it, but people flock to the planet to find it. It’s different for you though. You have this girl in your head that knows the vault is real and is guiding you to it.

Anyway, I did some tutorial missions in Firestone, killed some local bandit leaders like Nine-toes, Sledge and some other guy, blew up a pipeline, cleared some crap off a windmill, killed and ran over a bunch of skags, including Moe and Marley, cleared all the other missions and then traveled to the second area called “The Dahl Headlands” I think. My character is level 20, but since most of the game felt like a tutorial up to now, I’m guessing the ending is not near. Anyway, I’m loving the game, so I plan to play allot more. I mean like, right now!