Dragon Age: Origins – Part II

**BEWARE OF DOGS** …also spoilers.

Onto my recent adventures in Dragon Age!!

So, after I defeated the big monster at the end of my last post, we ended up having a cut scene basically about everyone having their shit ruined – and they had even less chance than usual because for some reason, one of the leaders retreated his entire army at the last minute, abandoning everyone – WHAAAAT A PUSSY.

Morrigan, the daughter of the wild witch of the forest, has joined my team and although a loved member of the group – is a big rolling ball of negativity and complaining. UGH, just what I wanted.

Shut up Morrigan, not body cares about your opinions

I’ve also been discovering some of the extra options around my war dog. I just found that I can actually pat and play with him, and surprise surprise, Morrigan hates him. It’s actually fairly amusing to listen to her or Alister’s banter with the dog. Neither of them like him, but both are terrified of him.

Who’s mummy good little boooooooy?

I think someone wants a belly scratch

I’m unsure if this quest was put there to see if I was an arse-hole, or if I was just REALLY compassionate – but, I play the game the same way I would if I were adventuring in real life. Very polite, help the innocent.
Now, up until now, the good vs bad choice has been fairly obvious except for this dude.

So, the town has caged him to act as a type of ‘bait’ for blight/enemies. Morrigan comments that this is an awful way to treat such a noble and brave creature (apparently she’s a fan of this particular race) and suggests we let him go.
He’s fairly polite to speak to, but then drops a bombshell in the middle of conversation like ‘I killed a bunch of people….oh, and their kids’….remiiiiiind me why I wanted to help you again??
I actually ended up abandoning the quest half way through because I didn’t want to continue on the path of letting him go, hahaha.

I’m also enjoying the side quests.

Red = Part of active quest. Green = Side quest board

Just give me a little XP and a small break from the big cut scene filled main story line (Man, does this game have a LOT of cut scenes). The only thing is that I wish the side-quests were mostly geographically located in the area you got it in, I hate all the moving between cities and camps – is annoying.

Kill a bunch of wild rampaging GIANT SPIDERS. Shit.

Now someone commented on my blog here that they enjoy reading female gamers reviews of games as they often differ from that of males.
This is probably just me, and I don’t presume to speak on behalf of female gamers (or females for that matter) but I think this is why.

I become emotionally involved in my characters. When I had the option to switch Morrigan, Alister or my war dog for a different character – I emotionally didn’t want to. I didn’t want to leave my friends behind? This might happen for everyone, but I tend to find more of my female gamer friends feel a real connection to TV or game characters – more so than most of the males I know.

So Alister hears me having a nightmare and explains that this happens to the wardens. That they all see a dragon in their dreams who is the Archdemon, and that I shouldn’t worry – I will learn to push the dreams away in time.

Why tell me scary stories around a camp fire, right after a nightmare? That’s just mean!

Later we find out that he is actually the illegitimate heir to the throne. Cut scenes like there, where he talks about ‘being close enough to tell me this thing he’s never told anyone before’ etc, is what invests me. Morrigan’s playful hatred of Alister while we walk around, invests me. My dog wagging it’s tail, invests me.
It’s interesting how that works.
Oh, and Alisters winning dialogue.

“That’s what im here for, to deliver unpleasant news and witty one liners”

Anyhow, last save point, I was speaking to the leader of Redcliffe when a woman runs to him and says that a demon in the castle is holding her Son/Husband hostage and demands she brings back only him. I want to get into the castle too, so before following her to his likely demise, he gives me his ring that acts as a key to a secret passage.

Hopefully I’m going to find this guy inside that is a friend of Alister’s and cure the mans illness – but who knows.
Well, talk to you all again soon! I’ll leave you with a few random screen shots and captions, and see you all next time.

Sincerely,
El

Inventory! Not particularly interesting, but grabbed a shot in case anyone wanted to see what it looked like.

Stoic posing. Because I’m a boss.

Why do I flash on occasion? Also, the boobs need some severe work in this game. They seem, not attached to my characters torso somehow.

“Take this oh so sacred *scratch scratch* blessing from the *scratch scratch scratch* make of all *scratch scratch* – STOP IT DOG, SHOW SOME RESPECT”

Advertisement

LoL LoL LoL ROFL

I always though creating a game with the acronym ‘LoL’ was quite clever, because the thousands of people googling the letters to ensure that their niece didn’t just say something lewd at the end of her text message will likely become exposed to this game.

I actually stayed away from League of Legends for a while because I thought it was some kind of glorified Real Time Strategy or war-game kind of thing. Low and behold, I’m listening to two friends talking at work and one goes
One: “Oh, I started playing that tower defense game the other day”
Two: “Which one?”
One: “You know, LoL”

My ears actually pricked up (yes, this is something my ears do when I’m trying to hear) – tower defense? Yes pleeeeease!

So, here is the basic overview: Green arrow is my skills bar, Yellow is the chat window – and it let’s you know when a party member purchased an important item, Blue arrow to the left are the members in my party and the Red arrow is myself, some other players in my team and le minions.

So basically, you scuttle around in this map, trying to take out the opposite teams towers and eventually their base (is it called a base??).

Excuse me minions, coming through!

When you destroy bigger towers close to the base you get super minions.
I like these minions because I like playing the more supportive characters (Like Morgana) so they’re good to hide behind.

Spaaaaawn my lovelies. Come unto me, your leader!

And then once you finally destroy the big hub…

DOOOOOF

VICTORY MOTHER LICKER. I AM A BEAST.

Well, not so much beastly exactly as low HP and cowardly, but I like to talk big with the best of them.Talk next time folks!!
Sincerely,
El

Someone took offence to BioShock’s forced baptism

Although I have the utmost respect for personal beliefs and the right to express them – I have to admit, this made me laugh.
Firstly because in the same breath that you say ‘I can’t play this because of my religion’ you also say ‘At least I could skip stuff in the shoot em up that involves violating one of the 10 commandments and demands I slaughter people’.
Secondly I laugh because, in what other medium would you be able to return things for this? Can people take back the entire series of Grey’s Anatomy and claim that they didn’t realise that by season 6 there’d be a lesbian character? Or take back a bitten cheeseburger because they didn’t realise it was beef? No, no you cannot.

If you choose to stop watching, playing, reading, eating or partaking in WHATEVER because it makes you uncomfortable, then that is your business. But expecting compensation/refund for your own possibly poor choices or miss-understanding about the content of something is unrealistic – that’s on you, buddy.

Two Posts So Close Together?

Yes so, in the spirit of “I’m on a role”, here’s another post.

The topic for, er, this hour is Star Trek: Online.

Now, I don’t know how many of you know Star Trek, but I’ve been watching this show since I was a kid. It’s a proverbial ‘staple’ in the diet of my families TV watching. For some reason despite it’s release some time ago (Wikipedia tells me it was Feb 5th 2010 for the Australian’s in the audience) I hadn’t really gotten around to playing it until now.

So, I thought it was kind of a nice touch to allow you to ‘create’ your own uniform.

Look! I flash and what-not!

The biggest thing that I suppose that appeals to me about this game, is my own personal history with the franchise. Being about to hail my own ship and get them to beam me up, is probably more tantalizing for me – and far more tedious to others.

Beam me up, plebs. I need a coffee.

Now – I doubt anyone noticed this, but maybe as time goes one someone will see it – but all of my ‘customizable’ game characters look similar.
They follow a suit of short, slender, pale, longer black hair and blue eyes (Except my Dragon Age character is rocking green due to a miss-click).

I look so pretty in the glow of a shuttles dashboard….

I don’t know the psychology behind it but there is something cathartic and personal about being able to base my ‘in-game’ character on the basics of my own appearance (although, let’s not think for a second that I in fact LOOK like a body rocking Vulcan from the future).

AAANYWHO – this game takes place in 2 modes, character controlled and ship controlled.
The character controlled side I find far more engaging than I do the ship. Running around as part of an away team taking scans and shooting aliens is just my jam. Space shoot’em ups, not so much.

As you can see, the green arrows are directing you to how I control movement, speed and weapons, and the red in an indicative that my forward shields are losing power (or at a lower % of life than the others).

Again, fancying myself a pho-digiter, digi-tographer, snap-happy camper … whatever you call them, I took some shots.

We come in peace! Ready the torpedoes boys.

Crew members on LSD taking up my sick bay beds.

And finally…

A level of nerdy excitement ensued here. I love the IDIC symbol.

All in all, I’d give this game a 6/10. It get’s points for being ‘Trek’, and kind of engaging – but there’s something about most of the free-to-play MMORPG’s coming out at the moment that doesn’t really draw me in for the long term. Basic repetitive type quests, too many items/buy now/upgrade to premium rubbish all over the joint and an unfortunate abundance of keyboard warriors claiming you’re a noob after they’ve played the game ‘hardcore’ for at least 4 days now.

Dunno, bring back subscription for some I think? Just because then at least I was partially guaranteed that the people that were there did really like the game and weren’t just bumming around looking for a troll-op harbor.

Dragon Age: Origins – Part I

**BEWARE: POTENTIAL SPOILERS**

So, I recently started playing Dragon Age Origins.

I have to admit, the primary motivation for playing this game was the fact that I am a big fan of ‘The Guild’ (YouTube TV show) and Felicia Day talks about this game and goes onto star in the short screen adaptation they did for Dragon Age II.

Ok, so I chose a Human Noble (Swordsman) and headed off on my proud journey.

I apparently have a pretty tight nit family, with a boss Mum & Dad and a respected older brother (who has his own family). Anyway, long story short, father and brother are off to war, some Grey Warden guy wants to recruit me to their ancient order, and I have an elite war dog as a pet.

After father and brother have headed off to battle, there’s an attack.

It’s ok, doggy and I are fine, Mum. We got this, just ignore all the blood I’m wearing.

Turns out my mother is also a bad-arse and we head out into the streets to locate my father.

Now, one of the things I love in games (this may sound somewhat heartless) is when they create a character that appears humble, generous and kind – obviously getting you to like them and then something like this happens.

Low and behold, they got dad. Sorry bro, tough break.

The reason I like this is because it made me so much more invested in the story and give me the feeling that there might be more interesting twists ahead. It’s not a ‘all main characters or loveable characters automatically live through anything’ type game.

Surging ahead, I leave my parental units behind to die and set off on my journey to become a Grey Warden.
So, apparently the ritual or…test…of joining the squad of the powerful is to head off into the wild with a bunch of other hopefuls and collect things.

This is where I got to learn about the proper mechanics of operating a party during battle.

Note: Didn’t realise these images were auto-resized…that’s a bummer.

Ok, so the left red arrow is the party members, top arrow is the menu shortcuts (like to your active quests, inventory etc), right red is obviously the flippin’ map, bottom green indicating where the EXP and skills hotkey menu is and the center green is little ol’ me!

I actually find it a bit confusing, because you have the ability to pause the game at any time and set actions for each character. When you don’t do this, they have a set of pre-set options (that you can customize) to a set of when/if style rules that say something along the lines of ‘If any other character under attack, then engage’ etc.

So, I go through this whole rigmarole just to find out I have to sip from a poisoned cup and hope to buggery that I didn’t cirrhose my liver in my younger years and it’s up to the task. Spoiler, I lived.

Well, here is me looking all calm upon finding out I about to potentially bleed out internally after sipping from a cup, but luckily, I just tripped out instead.

Charlie Sheen mode engaged.

After this was a tad boring. I was asked to head into a tower, fight some dudes and light a beacon. Yea cool, I got this bro.
Alas, this was after a long cut scene involving the invading army approaching the tower I was entering.

Now, something the world should know about me, is that I fancy myself somewhat of an amateur photographer when it comes to taking screen shots in games – so I like to try to see if I can capture a really good image or moment in battle. Something akin to what you see in the pictures they choose to advertise the game play in magazines. EITHERWAY, here is an example of that.

Needless to say, these two characters lost their shit shortly after posing for their closeups.

Prior to lighting up my beacon, I of course had to prove my worth and had to plow through a building of semi-threatening minions before the big guy rolled in.
I actually found him less of a threat that I initially assumed he would be, and ended up taking him out with trusty Lassy (actually named him Choy, because I was munching on Bok Choy at the moment of his ordaining).

HUZZAH! Suck my enormous…er…curling iron, meat-bag.

And this is where I left it at my last save – sooooo I have no idea what happens next.

Either way, so far I’m actually thoroughly enjoying this game. It’s not so difficult that someone of my inept capabilities is stuck at the first fight, and the story is a little like I’m reading a really good fantasy book. +1 Dragon Age, +1.

Sincerely,
El

Good Morning Coffee Drinkers

 

Ok, so I suppose it’s kind of expected that the first post in any blog is a ‘introduce yourself and the purpose of your blog’ piece; So in keeping with that tradition, here we go.

I am a heavily caffeine addicted female gamer (25 yo).
Now, I know everyone just rolled their eyes “Ugh, self proclaimed female gamers”, and yes I get that there appears to be a ‘geek sheike’ thing banging around at the moment, and comparatively to most of my male gaming counterparts I suck at almost everything – BUT, despite all of that gaming, television shows and coffee are some of my few true joys in life.

Now, what do I play? Anything and everything (except real time strategy games, could never get into those).
I primarily game on my trusty computer (named Ash), but I also enjoy:
– PS3
– PS Vita
– 3D NDS
– Wii
– My mobile phone

Recently I have been bouncing between plating DC Universe Online, Star Trek Online, Path of Exile, League of Legends and Dragon Age Origins.

So, I guess I will leave my intro post there, and I look forward to having an outlet for my incessant screen shot taking and need to tell stories.

Catch you all shortly!
Sincerely,
L