Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It’s been a while since we took a look at the videos for Dragon Age: Awakening, and all of a sudden it comes out tomorrow. Tomorrow already! In the US. Sorry about the confusion. Friday in the UK. (Secretly I’ve finished it, but I can’t tell you that, nor anything else. So shhhhhh.) So after we met Anders, Velanna, and some creatures that certainly weren’t their children, it’s time to meet a lot more of the gang.

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John’s already thoroughly Wot-I-Thunked Bioware’s rather splendid star-biffing RPG, which remains very much the RPS DEFIN-O-TAKE on the game, but I have these words about it lying around from something that’s not ever going to be published. So I might as well quietly leave them on this table here and walk away whistling, really. It’s also an indulgent excuse to do something with a meagre few of the 412 screenshots I’ve accrued whilst playing ME2. Pretty graphics are pretty! If you read this piece thinking “this doesn’t sound very much like RPS”, that’s because it isn’t. Basically. WE HAVE MANY VOICES. Some of which don’t involve repeatedly referring to ourselves in the first or third person and making jokes about bears. It does at least contain the word ‘nookie’ and a William Shatner reference, however.
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Here’s a few recent Dragon Age: Origins: Awakening: The Subtitlier trailers to introduce new ingredients for the upcoming expansion. First up is Anders, Pyramid star and husband of Starbu… oh no wait. Anders the apostate mage, who can join your crew, with quite a few nice lines in his video. Then there’s Velanna, who apparently makes the trees come alive. Which is cool. It’s not explicitly stated that she’s a potential party member, but I’m guessing that’s the case. And finally there’s the Children, which is a strange word since giving it capital C suddenly makes it seem creepy and threatening.

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First of all, to explain why this review is so late. We’d hoped for code well in advance, but sadly it wasn’t sent to us until the release day. I have since played the game to absolute completion. Thus it is only proper to tell you Wot I Think. (You can safely assume this review contains enormous Mass Effect 1 spoilers, but I will not spoil ME2.)

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I tried to post this yesterday, but the blog’s back end mysteriously ate all my words so I gave up in a huff. I believe it to be the machinations of Loki, the Norse trickster god, and villain of children’s picturebook Thor #606, written by Karen Gillan and on sale now in all good Early Learning Centres. Anyway – like half the world I’ve been making first inroads into Mass Effect 2 this week. As I played the first game on -hisssss! – 360 rather than PC, I was resigned to not being able to import my old character. But Bioware mentioned there’d be a KOTOR 2-esque mechanic in which a few conversational choices established what I’d done in ME1 and made ME2’s status quo broadly reflect it.

They changed their minds. At the point where I’m pretty sure this conversation would have happened (an interview to check the [this word is spoiler-censored] Shepherd’s got all their marbles), I was instead simply told what had happened. It wasn’t what had happened. ME1 spoilers below, so skip right to the end if you’ve not finished that yet.
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Today’s been a good day, I know, but it doesn’t mean you haven’t had that nagging question in your head. Like the small stone in the bottom of your shoe, it’s been frustrating you throughout. You’ve been wanting to know the difference between the Sith Warriors and Sith Inquisitors in Star Wars MMO The Old Republic. We’re here for you, the answer’s below.

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A Mass Effect 2 trailer you say? But those are more rare than the freckled unicorn! I’d heard rumour they were even extinct. But no, it is real, it is yours to watch below.

Has any game received more trailers? Better question: has any game had so many good trailers? This latest, and perhaps even last, is absolutely stunning. 150 awesomes. The game comes out on the 26th in the States, and then because of the NO REASON WHATSOEVER reaches Europe by the 29th. Well, I suppose you can understand their decision to make sure their game is on all the torrent sites for three full days before making it legally available to buy for an entire continent. Oh no wait. [Please smash your head into bricks here.] But despite this continued idiocy, the video below is a corker.

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UPDATE: SEE BELOW

I keep having these grand plans for writing about the Dragon Age DLC. Since the game came out I’ve intended a Wot I Think summing up the content subsequently released for my favourite game of last year. But at every turn I have been thwarted by a confusion of DLC management. An enormous array of bugs and errors are making it near-impossible for some to access their paid for content. And the tale of Return To Ostagar, originally due out on 5th January but still a no-show, is rapidly descending into farce.

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OK, we’ve posted rather a lot of Mass Effect 2’s approximately 3178 different trailers to date and thus should restrain ourselves from hereon in, but I can’t help but mention this one. Last year was fascinating/horrifying in terms of Bioware marketing – with Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2 both they alternated wildly between trying to appeal to the more traditional RPG fan and then to some sort of marketing-envisaged additional crowd, some mass of potential players who just needed a bit more unconvincingly-animated sexual intercourse and past-its-outrage-by-date goth metal and then they’d surely pour untold millions of Eurodollars into these games. Supremely easy to scoff at, but also supremely rational. Money makes the world go round, and we’d be fools to believe Bioware thought any differently. And yet the most recent clutch of Mass Effect trailers suggest a return to traditionalism- and the most recent even seems to be making amends.
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I’ve banged on quite enough about Dragon Age’s first expansion, Awakening, due this March, so I’ll not witter on more here. Just to say there’s a trailer for the new content below, explaining the outline of the plot, and not featuring any silly rawk music. Post-game spoilers below, naturally.

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