The Second Mass Effect of Dragon Age

It's been too long since I do a game review post. As usual, this will be a double-billed game review post :)

Dragon Age: The Origins

My first thought when I start playing it was "This is Mass Effect, the fantasy version!". The character movement, the scenaries, the speech animations, etc., all reminded me of Mass Effect. Not that it was a bad point, it just that the similarities were rather jarring.

Overall, the game was entertaining, though it was not innovative in anyway regarding redefining the genre. Every things in this game were rather standard fantasy RPG motif. From the races, the classes, the weapons & armours, the settings, etc. The story was even rather standard as well. Some big demon army is marching to destroy all of mankind and the hero and his peer must defeat the demons and save all of mankind. It even use the accidental hero thing where the main character was thrusted into the chaos without really knowing the magnitude of it all.

I do like the fact that you have to recruit various people, can court the same sex character, and companions' quip in the map walk. The dialogues, however, can be straining sometimes.

Right now I am at about 2/3 or 3/4 into the game and did not feels like continuing on. But I will do it soon... I do wnana see what the end battle scene was like.

Mass Effect 2

It start with a bang, literally. Soon after the first scene start, the Normandy got hit by mysterious cruiser class ship. Shepard then have to go drag Joker (the pilot) from the bridge to escape pod and got thrown into the space with ruptured suit. After being dead for two years, he got resurrected by old enemy, Cerberus. The head of Cerberus wants to recruit Shepard to spearheaded the fight against the common enemy, The Reapers, following the events of missing colonies citizens.

So commander Shepard takes on the impossible mission again with the new ship, mixture of old and new crews and squard, and some interesting missions.

This times everything seems to be sleeker and easier to get into. The weapon systems got simplified tremendously. Now when you found an upgrade, your whole squard got it. The number of skills has been greatly reduced. Your squard initially got only three skills and the last one can be unlocked after successfully finished the loyalty missions of that sqaurd member.

I finished the game once already. Only to find out later how to finish one of the loyalty mission correctly. So now I have been replaying it from an old save. It is quite enjoyable to play than Dragon Age somehow. I guess it is because the fighting in Mass Effect 2 feels a lot more fast paced and reltively quick to finish. After all, you were attacking with guns and biotic power instead of sword and magic which is a lot more melee.

As of last night, I seems to skill have not got enough Praragon point to choose the correct dialogue choice for *the* loyalty mission. I still have a few other missions I can gain more Paragon points on, so I will tried that and see how it goes. If it's really bad then I would have to do the Renegade option instead...

Also, I still have problem with the graphic card driver. I just read a tip about how to fix this. I will tried it later tonight, eventhough I wants to just go home and try it right now.

Back to more *regular* post

Like I wrote in the previous post, I will probably have to start a seperate travel blog. Otherwise I seems to lost the motivation to post anything else.

I had a 4 days weekend last week, the weekend transition period. So I decided to use this opportunity to do the overhaul on my computer. This will be a total upgrade. Since I planned and ended up replacing every parts in in the case, including the power supply. Also, I decided I wants to use Windows 7 64 bits, I also have to replace my simple ADSL modem with ADSL modem router. This is something I have been resisting to do for a long time. I simply do not wants to muck around with the setup and what not.

Now I have Intel i5, with 4GB RAM, nVidia GTS250 and Western Digital 64mb 1.5TB harddisk + 1Tb + 750Gb. Now Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age: Origins run smoothly :)

So on Saturday I went to Zears Rangsit with my mom who also wants to go there to fix one of the computer from her shop. Over all, it was 3-4 hours before the overhaul is complete and Windows 7 installed.

It took me two days to completely transfer the files from my replaced harddisk to the new one, setup all the programs, getting used to Windows 7, and working the router. It took me a long while to make the utorrent WebGUI works but it finally works today. I will definitely export the settings for safe keeping tonight.

I only start searching for solution for my webcam driver. I found a few possible leads which I will try later tonight.

I will also do a game reviews post soon.