Today's blog will be a mega blog, in which I will cover all of the stuff I have been thinking about since last time I posted something decent, I've faced a few ups and downs this week and I'll cover that too.
Firstly my Xbox 360 is on its last legs, I know this because it has recently become choosey about which games it plays. Its inability to play CDs and the weird noises it produces when you ask it to do anything other than just stay switched off.
Number 4 as I call it, being that it is my forth Xbox since launch day has fought a valiant fight, surviving its long hard battle against death for well over 13 months and faced the terrible rigors of having to do the things that it was designed to do.
May it rest in peace and I speak for us all when I say roll on Johnny 5.
Throughout my desperate struggle with the Xbox disk drive I have managed to get dragon age origins to work sporadically and have clocked up almost 10 hours of gameplay on its expansion pack Awakening.
Dragon age: Origins Awakening first impressions
When the game came out first time around I bought it because it was a Bioware RPG and I love my swords and sorcery, the original game was a Lesson to other developer in how to make an RPG, it had its flaws but the combat system and programmable AI routines went a long way towards filling the hole quitting World of Warcraft left me with.
The expansion is essentially a where are they now look at the Darkspawn following the events that unfold in the main game, the story is set in a completely new area and all of the companions are different although you still see one or two of them briefly this time around.
You can choose to continue playing as your original hero in the game but I chose to start as a brand new hero simply because I played through as a rogue and I wanted to try my hand at something new this time around, the new character was then instantly levelled to 18 and got some decent gear to start off with so I wasn't disadvantaged at all, only my lack of experience at tanking with my new born warrior held me back at the start.
One of the biggest problems in the original game was the overpowered mage ****that could kill an entire room without breaking a sweat and thankfully this time around the ****s have been rebalanced making all different ****s relevant in a party and I love how they did this rather than nerf the mage they gave the enemies much more HP and the other ****s all got significant bonuses and new abilities to use to create damage by the bucket load.
The rogue who before was useless in more than a one on one fight now gained a few abilities that allow him/her to reduce incoming damage and increase evasion when necessary, they also gain abilities that increase damage the enemies take from all sources and a brand new AOE attack which is incredibly powerful and crazy to watch as they bounce from target to target.
If I were to choose one ability in the game to keep it would have to be second wind, this ability new to the warrior tree is the single greatest ability regardless of the type of warrior you build , it refills an empty stamina bar to allow the warrior continuous use of his abilities. A two handed warrior for instance was never as viable as a duel wielder because the abilities cost so much stamina but now they can swing that big two hander all much more handing out damage by the bucket full, the tank however benefits from this move too because a lot of the sustained abilities reduce the stamina bar by a good amount, with second wind you can activate the ones you need without having to compromise one or two for the extra stamina.
The mage is still as great as ever but I do have a few gripes, they never fixed the shapeshifter tree so it remains as useless as ever and secondly the new spells and abilities do not merge with any other spells to create super spells like in the original game.
The characters in the game have been criticised by reviewers for not being as interesting as the previous companions and I found that to be misleading, coming into the game I was expecting the worst but the characters are still great and assuming the writing stays as good as it has I don't expect that opinion to change.
So far I'm thoroughly impressed though the cover price was a bit steep.
Lastly I wanted to talk about youtube, I used to be a big fan of youtube for one simple reason, lots of gameplay footage and decent commentary of multiplayer action. Recently though the site has been annoying me and that is for one simple reason...
MACHINIMA
It is now virtually impossible to find a decent gameplay/commentary on that site now that isn't some machinima whiner that complains for 10 minutes about how they are sick of fanboys, youtube, the game that they are playing and then asking me to download some toolbar so they can make money or asking for donations because their console broke.
They slate every single new release with some high and mighty attitude and I for one am sick of it.
Thats pretty much it for this one guys, my next post will be about the game room games and which ones are worth your time and a few tips I picked up during my time with it.