Jason Daniels

Finally: a game where I can pee myself while playing and claim I'm aiming for total immersion. http://www.spinner.com/2009/11/10/fergie-pees-her-pants-on-stage/

Fallout 3 CTD, which would happen out of the blue, especially when I hadn't saved for a long, long time. They weren't so much game breaking as they were soul crushing.

My laptop. It has all my writing, all my music and much of my love. Oh, wait. Can I bring my wife too? I don't want to be quoted as to which of them I'd choose from...

@Conro101 She said something along the lines of: Please leave the theater now, as measuring the effects of asbestos lined promotional wear is not part of this test. Enjoy your free t-shirt.

Seems a good choice of writer given his penchant to exaggeration and flat-out making shit up.

To be perfectly honest, the thing I'm most excited is the new graphics engine. Perhaps it is a sign that the rest of the game will improved to the current generation as well.

@Deschain

I really hate the example of the inventory as some horrible thing. Here, think about this for a minute: Commander Shepard is a Specter, an elite group picked from the best of elite groups on super-secret missions by the Council to protect the galaxy: WHY is he so poorly equipped and outfitted that he must scavenge weapons from random colonies? It was a TERRIBLE and outdated RPG mechanic that had someone that would already be equipped and provisioned looting for no reason. They got rid of this (and simply gave the player the only weapons they needed because it made sense in the narrative and got rid of the ridiculous buying and selling merchant aspect (elite solider; not a merchant). There is nothing lazy about it and it finally made narrative sense.

The character still upgrades, but no longer had to deal with the ridiculous idea that your super elite soldier can't fire a gun to save their life until they level up and etc. I mean, come on, are people so dedicated to the RPG mechanic that they forget they are supposed to be playing a role and that the role of a super-elite soldier negates the need to "level up" their shooting skills?

Here is a much more ridiculously overlong explanation about why such arguments are patently ridiculous and why the changes so decried by the player base don't remove role playing elements but boos them, even though it removes RPG elements.

http://narrativefiction.blogspot.com/2010/07/towards-gameplay-narrative-integration_03.html

As for the Dragon age bit, the voice being chosen is one of dozens and pertains to the random attack/defend/loot/heal/etc. exclamations that the character makes through the game. So many different voice overs for all of the dialogue would have been so insanely expensive it couldn't possibly be done (they were different for each race and disposition) and that they decided to add the exclamations instead of leaving blank noise (as most RPGs with non-spoken dialogue do) is actually more work than the standard. I'm personally glad they've decided in DA2 to make a single character story that's fully voiced over the non-voiced choose from so many races idea, but for those that prefer that it is ridiculous to expect full voice over (indeed, there is not a single game that does it).

It's pretty and the soundtrack is great, but there is little else to this. The gameplay is fun enough, the writing just isn't good and the premise is meh. On its own this is a fun little game that is well done, but having any sort of expectations about artistic endeavors towards it sort of ruins it. Perhaps this post was joking or perhaps the poster wouldn't know something that was actually pregnant with artistic ambiguity if it gave birth on him. Either way, it's worth playing but hardly meriting a conversation.

Blast, I really enjoyed these games.

You really only play through BioWare games once? Not even worth it! I played through ME2, put it away and played other games, when Kasumi comes out I'll pick that up with the firewalker missions and play through again as different gender, different paragon/renegade alignment and when next DLC comes out I'll do another playthrough, mixing it up, etc. I think that having the DLC helpts to break up the campaign with something new and waiting for my playthrough helps me to experience the world as fresh as possible.