I watched Sucker Punch yesterday.

Here are my thoughts http://gamersledge.com/wordpress/?p=1097

Let me know what you thought here or there.

Can be found here: http://gamersledge.com/wordpress/?p=1038

that is all.

Imagine my surprise as I'm stumbling around the tubes this morning and I happen upon DToid's very own King3vb0 in the newest Mega64!

I dunno why exactly he said his name was something else, maybe he was incognito.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyJ48-BYb7s&feature=player_embedded

King you're internets famous now!!!


GRATS!

I had originally retooled it for display here, but apparently the site thinks somehow I am spam, with no indication of what it objects to.

So I guess you'll have to read it here.

that is all.

First of all, the goods:



The platform: PC.

I want to preface this by saying I love Jim Sterling. But in this one particular instance, when he reviewed DA:O, he complained about things that were actual SETTINGS (in case and point, just to name one, he could never find quest waypoints. There's an app for that. I mean, setting.)

I bought this for PC because I wanted the isometric view, and did not want the toned-down difficulty. Plus I wanted to be able to access the mod community.



Ok, so I'm officially 62 hours in. If I had to guess, I'd say I'm 80% through the main quest. I'm running out of places to go besides Denerim, but without spoilers, I will say that the Ogrimmar (dwarven city) portion is quite extensive. Also, I found a bug. There is a apparently a memory leak in the program, so if you run it for a very long time, the load times begin to approach 4 minutes. The solution? Save your game, exit out of the program and relaunch. Pretty simple.

I am still enthralled with the story, which is pretty amazing because it IS pretty standard tolkien-esque fare. I think my only real complaint is that I have my core party down (I use Allistaire, Morrigan, myself and another mage.) and with that said... I don't like it when I need to change! I have close to...8 party members and I only use 3 of them nonstop. But I also think that could be a personal thing.

The combat system is flexible enough to allow you to play how you like. Me? I'm a micromanaging bitch. You! Go there and stay the FUCK there! You! move over here and cast cone of cold. You! Sneak around behind those bitches and backstab them until their backs look like an old Tom and Jerry Cartoon, and that darkspawn just drank a pail of water. Only blood.

Blood spatter is... well, it's unintentionally funny; especially when you're trying to have a conversation with a noble and someone's spleen is stuck in your hair.





They keep finding the right mix of tactical combat vs. story for me; it doesn't hurt that there are over a million lines of text to read; and trust me when I say I have read every single codex entry that I have found. Plus it doesn't hurt that you get xp for finding them; but the reading is completely optional. I wouldn't trade it for anything; I really think I have a pretty good feel for 'the world' as it is, because of it.

Re: The DLC:.



Stone Prisoner: It took me an hour-ish to get through, it was an amusing little side-quest. As for the character you receive, he's middle of the road ok to good at best. Once you've played through the fade sequence (in the main game), you'll get all the things you liked about it in an NPC, but toned down. They also have an amusing story about his size, so that's kind of funny. The voice-over work is again, really good, and not at all what I was expecting. (A pissy golem, who wouldathunk it?)



Blood Dragon Armor - I'm level 15 with most of my characters; and I think my tank (Allistaire) has been using this for maybe... 7 levels now? Delicious. It also doesn't hurt that if you has the gold, you can buy multiple copies of it. Also, it will apparently transfer over to Mass Effect 2. Interesting. Plus, it doesn't hurt that it LOOKS BADASS.



Warden's Keep - buy this, and do it immediately. It'll take you probably a good couple of hours if you're dedicating time to it, but the reward is a never-ending chest that you can store infinite things in. Should it have been in the normal game? Meh. It is what it is. And it's crunchy and delicious; really well done. It also has non-spoilery a couple things you can't get anywhere else in the game. Just be sure to be thorough, however, because once you've completed the quest, you cannot return to the inside of the area. Also, when you get to 'the choice' in this (again, non-spoilery), I'd actually tell you to take the righteous choice. I took the mercy choice, and I have nothing to show for it. It would seem better to travel the road I did not (I'm a softy!.. except when it comes to demons. Then I lie to their face, and then kill them. I'm a double-dealing-dousche-to-demons.


Is this Duncan in a rare bit of downtime, or Yoj1mb0 sprinting to buy another fighting game?

Return to Ostragar - This one comes out at the end of the month of December; and I have to truly wonder how many people will really be done with the game by then (besides me). But at $5 and you get to fight in that massive battle... it's an interesting spin on DLC; as usually DLC takes you places *outside* the preexisting game, and here you get to revisit a key moment.



Final Verdict: Don't listen to Jim (this once). If you are a fan of RPGs, even if you're a diehard JRPG fan, this WACWGTFOOCWAASDRPG* will knock your socks off. Well worth the money spent.

I give it five out of five creepy King3bvo heads.







*(Western Action Combat We're Getting The Fuck Out of Control With Acronyms and Specialization Designation Role Playing Game)

that is all.

I checked the back of my box to be sure, Y0j1mb0 and I both definitely have


on the back of our boxes; and as such, I'd like to discuss a problem I've found I've had for the last several years: Game Completion.

First of all, this isn't an emopost™. I'm not complain-posting about how I have a life and I don't have time to play games yadda yadda. I'm stating that I am an adult with very large time constraints put upon me by my own doing. I am VP of a credit union, I have a side business doing website design. I DM and play in 2 D&D games per week. And I have to sleep in there, too. So there IS a limited amount of time that I can dedicate towards a game. And that may or may not be a contributing factor to what I'd like to discuss today.

You see, I have had an odd tendency over the years: I don't replay videogames I've beaten.

I find, once I've beaten a game, that it is very difficult for me to muster the gumption (that's a euphamism for sex in Louisiana, in case you didn't know. Tell your friends. Muster the gumption.) to pick it up again.


I used gumbo here because gumbo shares the first three letters with gumption, and isn't gumbo really just sex in your mouth with seafood? I think we all know the answer to that.

Let me use a recent example:

Demon's Souls.

I cannot extol the virtues and rewarding gameplay of this title enough. I contend that it's perhaps one of the greatest games ever published in North America within the last 10 years. AND THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO WAY TO GET EVERYTHING THE FIRST TIME THROUGH.

And herein lies the rub for me. It took me 37 hours to beat it. My skill is WAY up, and I rarely die 'stupid' (on my part) deaths anymore. I'm a heavy-duty character, and my confidence in my demon-slaying skills is way up there. But I find myself burdened by the fact that I know what I have to do now to get the things I missed; which is start at square one once more and retrace my steps for the entire game. And that really doesn't appeal to me. It seems like a heavy burden as opposed to something I look forward to.

Another example:


I imported this game from Japan and played with the Japanese client in Japanese for 3 years. Then, my compy crashed and I had to get a new system. I switched to the PS2. I couldn't migrate my account to the NA servers. I played for two more years, never coming close to reaching where I was initially; again the burden of having to do the same thing over surmounted my enthusiasm to play the title.

A final offering:


I started playing CO on day one. In exactly 30 days, I max leveled a character (lvl 40). It's still a launch MMO, so other than grinding monsters for character costume parts that would only unlock on the character I have already perfected (hence, no desire there); there's no endgame content yet to speak of. I LOVE the game, and I have 7 other characters around level 20. But do I really want to take them to level forty; just doing the same thing again? No; again, the burden of knowing exactly what I have to do surpasses my enthusiasm to play the game.

Generally I try to invest in games that have infinite replayability, like Call of Duty 4 (I never did get the gold cross, it was too much!). Or I'll just take forever and NOT beat the game (FFVII, FFXII, Burnout Paradise) until I really have exhausted EVERYTHING there is to do.

I don't watch movies a second time (unless I REALLY love it), and I don't play videogames again after I've beaten them, unless there is some online component that makes it different. But even then, sometimes I don't, unless I feel like I'm making progress and the gameplay is just blow me out of the park. (Call of Duty 4 is a gem to me specifically because I beat single player, I achieved double rank prestige in multiplayer, but the game is just.that.fun. that I keep on playing, even today, even tho I'm not gaining anything.)

So like I said, this is not

emo-post™ central.

What I am interested is hearing your opinions on whether you replay games and/or why you do/don't.

It's cawfee..let's tawk. Discuss.

that is all.