Mass Effect does have the better combats imo. Less managing, more fighting.

The second Dragon Age seems to be a bit better in that department too. I just had a fight against 4 mages and about 17million skeletons but with just a little coordination, I was able to beat them, even without a tank.

You do get a designated healer again by the way, it helps, but not as much as Wynne did, at least that´s my impression.

But the best thing about DA2: It doesn´t have these lameass boring slow battles D&D is so well known for. They´re fast, they´re brutal and they´re over rather quickly. Even the mages are fast. Though I really don´t know how to skill mine. Made him a primal mage so far, petrifying dudes and throwing lightning. It´s ok I guess.

Dragon Age must be pretty fucking bad to have worse combat than Gears of War style barrier-cowering.

That said, I downloaded Mass Effect with the intention of maxing out my sniping skill or whatever as early as possible and just breezing through every combat sequence from 4 miles away so I could enjoy the story, which I've said before is pretty aight. I'll probably have to give up on making a FemShep, since she always seems to get major turtle-lip no matter how far I make her chin jut out, and I end up playing as a space librarian.

When I played Dragon Age I just turned the difficulty down to the lowest setting. I'd feel lame doing that with most games but I only play Bioware games for their stories. From the little amount I did play on normal it seemed unreasonable difficult.

when I played DA I built a solid team and actually issued orders to them. Kicked ass most of the game and didnt seam to have these issues. :\

You had to add that, didn't you?


My difficulties with the game stem from a number of different factors, I'm finding. In particular, I have only 5 party members, not one of them a dedicated healer, so that's complicating things a little. I also don't have access to any AoE spells yet, which is what every guide I've looked at recommends you use for all the troublesome fights I've encountered.

So really, the big problem here is that I didn't do the main quest in order. Had I realized there was a specific order that these things need to be done in, believe me, I would have gone directly to the mage tower first off. I guess I just didn't expect Bioware to give me the illusion of choice like that.

Personally I don't like these types of rpgs. Their mechanics feel convoluted to me and the more novel abilities like stealth or trap making are rarely intuitive and often useless. Early in Dragon Age I got to a segment where I needed to get past a group of revenants in order to collect a quest item. Having had my ass destroyed several times getting to this point I decided to sneak past them. I was playing, in my mind, as a taciturn dwarf rouge with a secret heart of gold so this made sense to me. The game wouldn't allow it though, maybe what I was trying was possible but I never figured out how. Here's where I turned the difficulty down and breezed through the rest of the game.

Played the 3DS at PAX East. I'm legitimately impressed now. Especially by the AR game; a lot of the games I played were like PSP games, but on a DS, but the AR card game really blew my mind. There's an absurd amount of potential with that device, and I'm really excited to see what comes out for it. The target practice with the AR had some moments that were just fantastic, and the 3D effects are pretty cool.

I was sad, though; Kid Icarus is completely unplayable for us lefties, and even if it was, the controls are a tad rubbish. Pretty as hell, though. The two chicks cosplaying as Saria and Shiek playing Ocarina of Time with me made up for this though.

Also played some other games. Duke Nukem's booth was hilarious and the demo was fun, Child of Eden is pretty cool, and FEZ almost makes me want a 360. Overall, it was a fantastic show and infinitely better than last year's PAX East. Fucking huge show floor, from the big Portal 2 booth to the classy as fuck Duke Nukem setup (complete with chandelier and the trashiest booth babes I've ever seen), to a giant fucking Pikachu balloon floating over probably four other nonNintendo booths.

You all change games too often. I am still playing DCUO and loving it. I actually enjoy PvP, and at the same time, can be the most frustrated over PvP in this game. It's fantastic.

I wish I had the tolerance to play a single MMORPG for a thousand and a half years.

I wish MMORPGs were fun enough to warrant a monthly fee.

The longest I've ever played an MMO was WoW for a month. By the end of that month, the gap between levels was just too great, and I realized I was only playing Wailing Caverns over and over again because everyone I knew at the onset had quit playing after about a week.

I'm quite happy to have never touched an MMORPG in my life.

It does, however, mean that I get bumped out of conversations at the college all the time, seeing as how everyone is a game art major now :( I'M SORRY I DIDN'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT HOW THE NIGHT ELVES WERE TOTALLY STUPID TO TRUST THE ZOMBIE PEOPLE. I WAS JUST TRYING TO SHOOT THE SHIT ABOUT ART AND MOVIES, JESUS GODDAMNED CHRIST


AND I DON'T GIVE TWO TIN SHITS ABOUT YOUR BIG GAME PLAN TO OUTSMART EVERYONE AND GET INTO "TEXTURING". GO LOOK AT A PAINTING OR SOMETHING back on topic, I actually busted out Gladius again today. I wish someone else on Earth liked it!

I fucking love Gradius. Those are my roots. I always go back to it when I put down DoDonPachi or Espgaluda. That and Darius and Parodius.

EDIT: I thought you meant Gradius. :(

Gladius is good too, though, from what I hear.

I know this girl that was really into WoW, and she liked talking about it. Having never played it, I just trusted my already vast knowledge of fantasy settings and races to follow along without feeling left out of the conversation.

Following ONE person's jabbering is fine, sure. Not when three other people show up and turn a small conversation about David Alfarro Siquieros into a forty-five minute conversation about the differences between their personal goddamned video game characters, what items said characters have, what items they HAVE had at some point in time, what plot points those characters have encountered, and how specific plot points were affected by specific VOICE ACTORS, followed by an emotional and graphic portrayal (complete with elaborate hand gestures and body movement) about how this one orc chieftain totally picked this one dude up by the throat and was all like "YOU ARE DISMISSED" and dropped the dude into an interdimensional rift and it was so AWESOME, wasn't it AWESOME, it was just GREAT.




Once is enough. Three times a week is annoying as fuck. Talk about SOMETHING, ANYTHING else. JUST ONCE.
Oh. Good. Now you're talking exclusively about D&D and Warhammer. That's... better?

I AM PLAYING A LOT OF CLUE FOR SEGA GENESIS LATELY

I like that it's still considered winning even if it turns out that you're the murderer.

You should get some new objective as the murderer where you have to methodically kill the other players one by one while avoiding capture.
Also, bought and beat Black Ops. I liked the story, but it didn't feel as intense as MW2's story. It was less 'I REALLY WANT TO KICK SOME ASS', and more 'I wonder why he's crazy. Oh he was brainwashed. Cool.'
Also, gotta love the ridiculous, last-minute "FUCK YEAH AMERICA!" shot at the end of the game. How they mobilized all those infantry and battleships to Cuba that quick is a fucking miracle.

in the first dragon age i just got sleep and nightmare on one chick and then my main was an assassin type and whenever they got sleeped / nightmared my assassin would go crazy and rape murder everyone cause of attacks of oppurtinityandshitormaybeimthinkingof neverwinter nights but i think those were in dragon age :O

i always took that outcome to mean that you either successfully covered up all evidence or murdered everyone else too

I've gotta give props to Bioware for letting me play Mass Effect as basically a gunhappy Jon Pertwee. With tits.

I kinda love being a diplomatic hero instead of just shooting everyone. Maybe one day there'll be a video game where you don't even have to fight anyone, you can just talk your way out of literally every encounter by being awesome enough.

I plan to never switch Tali and Wrex out of my party if I can help it, fuck those other guys. Except maybe Garrus, he's all right. I'm also not sure if the game engine is just really good or if my computer is better than I give it credit for, but I'm running it on high settings with no slowdown and shit looks great.

The driving parts are not nearly as horrifying as I was led to believe, although the PC port could have had the Mako's handling tweaked or something. I also accidentally made FemShep's face hilariously grotesque; the back half of her skull got left really wide because I couldn't find the slider bar for it, so her giant lumpy meathead tapers creepily into the face one might expect from a lithe french gymnast. It looked fine on the character creation screen, but this is like the 5th fucking time I've accidentally made an ugly mutant Shepard and I'm starting to resent myself for being a total failure at pixel sculpting. I was avoiding having to look at pyramid-face by wearing a helmet all the time, but I've only just left the Citadel and I'm not sure I've put my skill points into the right stuff, as is usually the case with Bioware's shite, so I'd probably be better off starting over now instead of getting all the way to the final boss and having my ass utterly handed to me due to improper skill development. Cough cough KOTOR.

Not that I'm complaining, since I actually really like this game. Also, the sound seems a bit buggy; in proper cutscenes I'm able to hear everyone talking over the music and ambient noises, but idle chatter between my party members is drowned out by everything else like they're standing on the other side of a city block whispering at me.

It's called Fallout: New Vegas.

I'll put it on my list, but it'd feel completely wrong to play any Fallout game and not be a violent, omnicidal sociopath.

Especially the new ones; they put so much effort into having everyone explode into brilliant carnage snowflakes when they die, I wouldn't want to make the modelers cry.

Someone completed a no-kill playthrough of it some time ago. It's pretty close to the original Fallouts, as opposed to Fallout 3.