The Black Dog Does Mass Effect: Podcast Madness!

Mass-effect-3-femshep-is-officially-a-redhead

 

The other night I stayed up very late drinking more than one glass of wine, talking Mass Effect with the Black Dog Crew. Oh and for once they recorded it and there was a podcast at the end ;) You can listen to it here (please note that if you haven't played the first two games it may be somewhat spoilerific).

If you're a regular reader of the blog you'll know how much I adore Mass Effect, and I am so excited about Mass Effect 3 that I may have a wobbly geek-plosion before Friday. Bring it on!

Shepard is coming to save the Universe, and she's bringing her space hamster with her..... 

Tagged Black Dog Commander Shepard Mass Effect Rocks video games

Skyrim is a Girl's Toy

Skyrim-dragonborn

The writing of The Copper Promise part 2 continues pottering along on its own meandering course, so I thought today I’d do a little post about that other obsession of mine: videogames.

A great many hours have been spent in Skyrim recently. I shall briefly share the sort of info you traditionally have to bring up in any discussion of this game: I’m a female Nord with a leaning towards one-handed and two-handed weapons, destruction magic and conjuration. I’m also a werewolf, have been playing for approximately 95 hours and no, I’ve barely made a start on the main storyline yet.

Skyrim is an extraordinary game. What makes it so staggering, I think, is the sheer level of detail involved, and the real sense of exploration you get as you go wandering off around the map. You are frequently distracted from quests by mysterious looking paths that lead to secret dungeons, or you stumble across two mages having a tiff, and if you're not paying attention a dragon might swoop down on you from nowhere and chew on you for a bit. I have spent a ridiculous amount of time just making swords and enchanting them, and have now saved up enough coin to buy a big posh mansion in Solitude, which I'm gradually decorating…

It is, I realised the other day, the ultimate fantasy play-set. It’s like having a giant dollhouse, except the house is an entire land, and the dolls wear armour and have magical swords and go on adventures with werewolves and vampires. You can spend forever just accessorising, collecting spell books to go on your shelves, mucking about down the blacksmiths, crafting potions. And then if you feel like it you can pop out to kill the occasional dragon. In short, I love it. And how I wish I had an Unrelenting Force Shout of my very own…

Tagged Big Epic Shouts Epic Fantasy Skyrim beards dragons swords video games werewolves

Dragon Age 2: The Demo

I played the Dragon Age 2 demo last night. Woah, nelly.

 

If you know me reasonably well, or had to put up with my continual tweets about it at the beginning of last year, you will know that I was pretty much obsessed with Dragon Age: Origins. We’d only just got one of these fancy console things, and it was the first game I totally loved; I loved the story, the gameplay, the voice acting, the characters… In fact I liked most of the companion characters so much I was devastated to see them go at the end of the game- I desperately wanted a scene like at the end of Labyrinth where all the jolly people you met during your adventures pop by for a bit of a dance about in your bedroom.

 

I played it through three times. I got up early to play it before work. I obsessively scanned the wiki pages to make sure I hadn’t missed any of the swords with really cool names. I bought t-shirts, I considered getting a tattoo. In short, I am a big fan.

 

Now, from what we’ve been told it seems the sequel is reasonably different from Origins. You’re not a Grey Warden anymore (sob!), you can only be a human, the storyline of the game takes place over an entire decade of history, and they’ve made a number of tweaks to the technical levelling up stuff, which I don’t really understand but I’m sure is dreadfully important. So, all these changes… am I concerned?

 

Well, no. I was happy with how the original game ended (how could I not be? I was the gorram Queen of Ferelden!) and I don’t think that story needs to be continued. What’s important to me is that we see more of that world and hear more of its stories, and DA2 certainly appears to be doing that, with a massive 10 years of history to play through. Having played the first five minutes of the game now, I can happily report that all the slicey dicey carnage and spell casting action is there- in fact, the gameplay has moved up several notches, so that instead of your Rogue sort of fading when you evade an attack, she now back flips away from the enemy. Excellent. And now backstab means that your Rogue vanishes (in an actual puff of smoke) and reappears behind the slathering Darkspawn to deliver a vicious doublebladed stab-a-thon. All the characters move fluidly and launch powerful attacks that look amazingly cool and will have you grinning like a loon (or if you’re me, shouting, “Yeah! Take it, bitch! You darkspawn bitch! In the face!!”).

 

My favourite thing about DA:Origins though was the interaction between characters. How well you did depended an awful lot on how you handled your companions; they could hate you, fall in love with you, betray you or even walk off in a huff if you weren’t careful. They bickered amongst themselves, made snide comments when you did something stupid, and had their own little stories and quests to complete. When you find yourself traipsing across the map to seek out a long lost girlfriend for the drunken lout of a dwarf who keeps shouting “assless chaps!” at you in camp, you know you’re deeply involved in a game. I hope that DA:2 keeps the characters as complex, funny and affecting as they are in Origins. If they do that, and give me plenty of Ogres to explode, then I will be a very happy gamer indeed. Bring on the 11th of March!

Tagged Darkspawn Dragon Age gaming video games xbox

Dragon Age:Origins owns my soul

I’ve actually put off writing about Dragon Age for a little while, unsure I’d be able to write about it without a) revealing lots of spoilers and b) sounding like a terrible fangirl. Now, I can’t promise I won’t go all gooey over it, but given that I’m halfway into my third play through I think I can now judge what is safe to reveal to the potential player.

We got Dragon Age:Origins at Christmas, the same time we got the xbox, and I can safely say I have barely stopped playing it since; what’s that, nearly four months? Blimey. So I’m writing this blog partly as a fangirlish squee-athon for the awesomeness that is Dragon Age, and partly to distract my friends from the intervention they are no doubt planning at this very moment.

Dragon Age is a cheerfully violent RPG from Bioware (who also brought us the extraordinary Mass Effect, as if you didn’t know) and I will admit immediately that I know very little about such things. Not that I’m a total video games noob you understand; I’ve been an enthusiastic gamer since I got my Gameboy back in, gawd, was it 1989? I had a SNES after that, and a Gamecube, inherited a Playstation and then borrowed a Playstation 2, but having now dipped my toe in the New Age of Gaming that is the Xbox 360 (and no doubt the Playstation 3) I know that my gaming education is somewhat lacking. Games these days are epic! *cough* Anyway, before I get carried away by how exciting video games are now, I’ll get back to my original point. Dragon Age: Origins is the best game I’ve ever played, and this is why…

Characters! A combination of top writing, excellent voice acting, appealing design and a system of approval/disapproval means that by the end of the game, you are likely to be as fond of your various companions as any characters you may have grown to love in any lengthy book. Relationships are complicated in DA, and this, I think, is the true genius of the game. You have to win your companions over, either by making decisions they approve of, or by giving them presents, but even that is not simple; one character will approve of your dodgy dealings with assassins, where another will get the proper hump with you. Pay too much attention to the dangerous elf with the amusing accent and the ridiculously cute ex-Templar will sulk. Appear to be taking things a little easy and the Qunari will lose his rag.

And they don’t just argue with you. Your companions bicker cheerfully in the background as you move from place to place, leading to some excellent dialogue that often had me laughing out loud. Eventually most of them will come to like and trust you as the great leader you are, and your attentions may even pay off in the form of some moodily lit sexy goings on. Score!

It is difficult to point to favourite characters here, because genuinely there isn’t an unlikeable character amongst them, but yes, alright, I do love Alistair. But, I would point out, this isn’t really my fault. They clearly have some sort of evil genius at Bioware, creating a funny, angsty knight in shining armour who I am utterly unable to resist. Honestly, third play through and I still haven’t been able to unlock any other romance achievements…

Aside from Alistair (who also has some of the best dialogue) special mention should also go to Zevram, the Antivan Elf of dubious morals who resembles an infinitely more cheerful Legolas, with the voice of Puss in Boots from Shrek 2, and Morrigan, the sexy apostate mage voiced, in a stroke of geek genius, by Claudia Black. And then there’s Oghren, a sort of 18 certificate Yosemite Sam who spends most of the game drunk and will occasionally stand around shouting “ASS CHAPS!” and Sten, a sort of klingon but without the cheerful disposition, and saucy Leliana and Shale and…

Well, you get the point. There are many other factors that make DA such a joy. You are asked to make difficult decisions at every point in the game, giving you a real sense of responsibility and often changing the outcome of the story. The story itself is compelling, and full of surprises (the first time you play the battle at Ostagar is pretty stunning). Visually it looks fabulous, with dangerous forests and claustrophobia inducing dungeons, and even out of the way, no mark villages like Lothering are fully realized spaces with their own atmosphere.

The game is also, in my opinion, very aware of where it has come from. I was reminded strongly of A Song of Ice and Fire several times whilst playing, along with Lord of the Rings of course, and Marty had echoes of Dragonlance. The people who made this game both know and love the fantasy genre, and aren’t afraid to inject a little humour into it.

The conclusion I came to, in amazement and with no small joy, was that playing DA was like playing a book, only you were allowed to be the main character and make all the important decisions. You can live in another world and go on adventures and at the end, it’s your name in the codex. It’s the purest form of escapism. This does of course apply to many, many other video games and won’t be a surprise to most, but you’ll have to forgive me; I’m a little new to this.

Anyway, since I could happily talk about this all day, and this blog is already much too long, I promise I will shut up about this for a little while. Can’t promise I’ll ever stop playing, though.

FOR FERELDEN!

Tagged Alistair has lovely hair Bioware Dragon Age Fantasy Queen of Ferelden video games

The Familiarity/Comedy Hypothesis

We have recently become converts to The Big Bang Theory (um, the tv show rather than the theory itself. Although we are fans of that, too).

I was initially wary of it as I had assumed it would mainly consist of geek-bashing. A little paranoid of me perhaps but, let’s face it, for the media in general geek-bashing is normally like shooting fish in a barrel, if rather more common. Did I really want to watch a show that was entirely about “Fnar fnar, geeks are losers, fnar fnar”?

As it turns out, TBBT is funny, well observed and well informed, and all mockery is done with affection. Perhaps non-geeks find it funny too, but I hope the majority of its audience are laughing because they recognise the references, and do indeed recognise that “Wednesday Night is Halo Night”. For me personally much of the humour comes from familiarity; we’ve had plenty of discussions concerning Superman down the pub for example, and Penny’s brief addiction to a dragons-and-sorcery type video game had me cringing with recognition ever so slightly too much (anyone who has tried to talk to me about anything other than Dragon Age: Origins for the last four months will know why).

It still has its wee problems for me- there are no female geeks present still (Leslie Winkle is a science geek, and I’m talkin’ about genre geeks, although it’s worth stating that I’m only halfway through series 2) and all the guys are depicted as being utterly useless with women*, which is a little unfair. I know geeks who are married, in long term relationships, or who date around a lot. But I’m just being whingy.

It doesn’t really matter. The relationships that are shown in TBBT are sweet and funny, and it has also given us a bit of a comedy legend in Dr Sheldon Cooper. Much of the humour is centred around his complete inability to interact with the human race, and his enormous superiority complex, but he remains likable. And worryingly, I find I understand his point of view more and more- not the super-genius side of it, obviously, but the general impatience for human beings and the unshakeable belief in how “right” he is… I sort of feel like that sometimes. Bit worrying. It’s my mum’s dvds we’ve borrowed, as she’s a huge fan; I hope that isn’t just because Sheldon reminds her of what a pain in the arse I was to live with…

*I sometimes wonder if it is in fact women who are useless with geeks. I usually think this when I hear a woman calling herself an “xbox widow” or complaining about having to go and watch the new Star Trek movie. What’s wrong with you?! But then, I have a slightly skewed perspective.

Tagged Dragon Age Geeks My Mum The Big Bang Theory video games
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