This week has definitely been more uniform than last week. At least, I mostly played a genre which I have known and loved since I was just a young one.

I am referring of course to the RPG.

Anyone that follows me will soon come to learn, that I am a huge RPG fan and have been for a very long time. It’s the one genre that I simply never get bored of. No matter what kind of gaming mood I am in, an RPG can satisfy me. Perhaps this is where my love of a decent single player in a game comes from.

Most of Saturday/Sunday was devoted to Halo: Reach. As mentioned in last weeks blog, I am currently running through the campaign on Legendary by myself, and although I only got a little further than where I was, I spent most of the time playing matchmaking, ranking up and perfecting my game just that little bit more than before.

Any that follow my twitter feed, will see that soon after this, I decided that it was time for a good ol’ game of Left 4 Dead. Now, for some unknown reason, whenever I try and boot up L4D2, my entire Xbox crashes. I have tried with several copies, my console just doesn’t seem to like that game. So I fire up the first game (which although I have many problems with, it’s more with the side of the community that still play it rather than the game itself.) So after a few rounds online with some complete and utter idiots, and then a couple of rounds with a group who actually knew what they were doing, I called it a night. And turned in.

On Tuesday, anybody and everybody on my friends list was raging on about the new Dragon Age demo (there shall be a midweek post this week (most likely Wednesday) with my personal review of said demo). Which led me to realise, that although I got Dragon Age: Origins, I never bothered to play through it. I had 2 achievements on it, and both of those were origin story ones. And so my friend Tom offered me a challenge. The challenge was that he and I could both start a new save file at pretty much the same time, both start a character that was nearly identical (he did Dwarven noble rogue, I did Dwarven commoner warrior), and he would finish before me. At first, I thought this was ludicrous. As he has completed the game several times, this was before he informed me that he would be going away for 4 days over the duration of the competition. Now, some of you may just be thinking “great, Ben’s got this one in the bag!! No way can he lose”, don’t get too far ahead of yourselves. I have explained what a fan of RPGs I am. This is for one reason: Immersivness. And on my initial run through on pretty much ANY RPG game, rather than just “do what needs to be done”, I will explore every nook and cranny of the map, trying to find as many secrets as I can, exploring as much as possible, and trying out as many of the different gameplay mechanics as possible. This can quite easily add several days to my first run through of any RPG, so whilst the contest seemed very one-sided towards me, it actually worked out quite balanced.

As for the game: Running through my third origin story was not an overly enjoyable experience. It seems to me that the origin story exists as kind of an unskippable tutorial, which, whilst not ENTIRELY unappreciated due to the refresher, is ridiculously boring and far too long for all it is. I felt very little depth was added into the origin story to veil what it truly was, and just to give a rough idea of people/place names for later in the game. Even after I left Orzammar for the first time and arrived in Ostagar to go through the initiation into the Grey Wardens, it felt very flimsy, and patched together without too much thought. However, the Ostagar part began to make sense after clearing it, and heading out to Lothering, and I’ve had very little but good things to say about the game ever since.

After leaving Lothering, the game really picked up pace, and caught up with itself, which in my opinion made up for the extremely slow beginning. Just the vast wealth of places to explore, and people to meet, and things to do spanned out before me, so I headed straight back to my hometown of Orzammar, where an in-depth and detailed quest explained things that had happened in the origin story in much further detail, and how and why other things did or didn’t happen. I still don’t feel any different about the origin story, and believe many things could have been explained at the time, but I was definitely pleased to see they went to the bother of tying up several loose ends.

After Ostagar, I travelled the world! From Redcliffe, to the Tower of the Magi, to Denerim itself. With the story flowing, and linking me between each key location, and giving me reason to WANT to go there, rather than the tradition “this is the continuation of the story line so you must”. One thing to say about DAO is that the story is definitely compelling. You want to see it through to find out what happens, not just for the sake of completing the game.

As for the gameplay mechanics: At first I wasn’t a fan. They seemed to me to be slow, and (for want of a better word) a bit faffy. I prefer games where I can use my items after just a couple of button presses rather than having to scroll through radial menu after radial menu before then opening a basic inventory window to use a tome because the inventory menu on the back button didn’t allow me to use it, just to look at it. However, after just a couple of hours of game time, I was navigating through the radial menus with relative speed and ease. And even going through the radial menu to use items out of my inventory rather than just visiting my inventory began to make sense; and helped prevent a few mis-clicks and accidental use of items when I was rather tired at one point.

My overall verdict of the game so far: AWESOME! Although it annoyed me at first, and certain parts later on were nearly enough to make me put the game back on the shelf for another year (read: the fade), the game has really had me gripped, and since it touched my console, nothing else has entered it (except for when a few friends came over but that was after the Friday and will therefore be in next weeks post.) and for at least a few more days, I can’t see anything replacing it in there. I still haven’t bought any of the DLC, and intend to get at least some of that to give it a try.

As for the weeks highlights of Magic: the Gathering:

Well, I have a fair chunk to write here yet again, in fact I am thinking of perhaps breaking it off into a separate post that goes up on a Friday night/Saturday morning so it doesn’t overrun the main post. Still, it’s a HUGE part of my gaming life at the moment, and most definitely deserves to get mentioned.

My personal favourite of the week with Magic actually happened on Monday. I went down to the shop to play a couple of games with the owner, and look at getting some new cards for one of my decks. It ended in a huge 5 man match (2 teams of 2 and then one guy on his own), this might not sound anything too special, but factor into the equation that me and the guy that was on his own were both using our EDH decks (using them as EDH decks with the General starting in the command zone), whilst the rest of the table used good quality standard decks (including a blue/white control containing 4 JtMS’s). This sure led for some interesting game politics and teaming up until the other team decided that me destroying permanents every turn and my teammate using infect was enough of a risk for them to leave the other EDH deck alone for a few turns to knock us out of the game first.

As for FNM, once more I ended up playing EDH, and after holding my own fairly well in the first game, got pummelled in the second game where we played 2HG EDH using Archenemy cards. However, the way we use archenemy cards is that every team picks one at the start of their turn rather than just one specific player. We find this leads to having a lot more fun, with a lot more annihilation. There was no main reason for us getting pummelled, and we successfully managed to take out a team before we died (I ended up dealing the final blow with a simple Galvanic Blast), but the combination of an artifact deck that destroys permanents coupled with a mono-red dragon/burn deck obviously didn’t seem too nice to the opposing players.

That’s all for now. Don’t forget to check back midweek for my post about the DA2 demo.

And check back next Sunday for another My Week In Gaming.

Cheers

Ben