Nobody touches Oghren's junk and lives!

Apologies for the quiet spell, my Laptop's gone the way of Old Yeller, and while I'm waiting for the good people of Curry's to repair it for me under warranty (postponed by a week thanks to the efforts of the workshy courier who was supposed to pick it up last week and claims I wasn't home and that he left a card, despite not seeming to have noticed that I live in a flat and not a house), I'm left without the benefit of the Internet. So I'm just checking in using the missuss' Vaio again, mainly to explain why I've already broken my weekly post promise, but also so I haven't got too much to write about when I do get my machine back in a couple of weeks.

Firstly, Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening. Thanks to the lack of the Internet's temptations to while away hours staring at Memebase or YouTube, I was able to polish this off in under two days. It's a hell of a lot more fast-paced and a damn-sight easier than the base game, and if anything the story is a lot more gripping, and the characters (of which only the Dwarf Oghren returns) are definitely more interesting and charismatic, from the dry wit of an apostate Mage on the run from Templar oppressors to a benevolent spirit trapped in the body of a fallen Grey Warden (for those out of the loop, the Grey Wardens are an elite band of warriors, like Spectres are to Mass Effect, or the Blades to Oblivion). Every party member you recruit becomes a Grey Warden this time around, but that only makes me ask myself why nobody took the oath in the base game, when Wardens were at their most needed and in very short supply?

My main problem with it is that the story is a little too similar to the Legion/Geth side-story in Mass Effect 2, just as the Origins story is very reminiscent of the main story in the first Mass Effect. I hope Dragon Age 2 shows a bit more originality and individuality. Speaking of which, I've played the demo on the PS3, and am glad to report that the combat system, as well as being a lot more fast-paced, is completely real-time in the console versions, which is excellent. The graphics have also seen a major improvement, so that's both of my least-favourite aspects of the original addressed. By the time I next post, I'll have had some time with the full game, so I'll hold my tongue until then.

Split/Second has reached the inevitable point in all racing games (apart from R4, which I was genuinely good at) where it becomes too difficult for me (other racers were using Burnout tactics and ramming me off the road, as well as blowing me up at every opportunity), so I returned to Divinity II, and came to the conclusion that the game is complete, undiluted shite. The gameplay, graphics, voice-acting and everything, top notch. But about 8 hours in, three quarters of the map become covered in toxic gas, rendering them off-limits for the duration of the rest of the game, which in an open-world RPG is absolute bollocks. Not even Two Worlds pulled that one on me, so I'm back onto trying to 1000gp Bully: Scholarship Edition on the 360.

Finally, this setback has kinda dashed my chances of doing a video review for MVC3, so I'll give a very brief account of how I feel about it. Well, it's a Capcom fighter, so it's obviously technically sound, it is what Capcom does best after all. But the simplified controls, the poor character roster and the ruinous cell-shaded graphics (of which I have never been a fan, they can be used to good effect, like in The Wind Waker, but a lot of the time, as seen here in No More Heroes, they only serve to dilute genuinely great visuals) just push it down in my esteem, and as a result I still see Super Street Fighter IV as it's superior in virtually every way. I also got a feeling that the controls were quite unresponsive, I was failing to pull off moves that I could perform every time in SSFIV or Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, but I don't know if anyone else has noticed this. I do like how some characters interact with each other though, such as Chris Redfield and Wesker, or Magneto and Wolverine.

And to sign off, I've been very quiet about The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim so far. I think this video sums up my feelings on the matter. See you in a couple of weeks.

I'm a 21st Century Digital Boy, I don't know how to read but I got a lot of toys

You know how sometimes life hands you a lemon and you make lemonade? Well, gaming-wise anyway, this last week life handed me a bottle of lemonade. Not that cheap shit either, I'm talking 7-Up. With Vodka in it.

Firstly, there's my new friend Dead Space. HMV, in it's infinite quest to make no profit whatsoever, had the Limited Edition of Dead Space 2 (The one with Dead Space: Extraction) on the PS3 marked at £24.99. I've not really had much time on it just yet, so more on that next time.

Secondly, I've upgraded from The Sims 2 to The Sims 3 on the PC. I played it on the PS3 at the tail-end of last year and was very impressed in the open-endedness of what was essentially finally a true Sims game on a console, but as far as it burns me to say it, the PC version is still far superior. Initially there's the mouse controls, instantly accessible to a long time Sims gamer where the Joypad controls seemed overcomplicated and baffling at times.

Then there's the memory limit, restricting how many items you can place in your digital self's home. It's plagued console Sims games since day one, but was always honest about what it was. It the console version of The Sims 3 it was disguised as a fire-hazard meter, a name which made me wonder if it was prevalent in the PC version too. I was very relieved to find it isn't. Then there's the seamless transition between the neighbourhood and house views, eliminating the need for a loading screen, and finally the already copious amount of free user-made costumes and hairstyles available for download, compared with the EA-sanctioned £7.99-price tagged packs on the PSN store, and I kind of wonder why I even bothered with the console version at all.

The only gripe I have with the game itself (other than that obvious things, such as pets and weather effects, have been intentionally left out to make way for expansion packs later on) is that the aesthetics of the characters themselves are a lot more serious looking, away from the over-emotive, hyper-expressive look of The Sims 2's titular heroes, and in turn make them less endearing to me. Plus, every male Sim I try to make ends up looking like Jack Black, and all the women look like Down's Syndrome sufferers, but aside from that it's great. The Sims 2 isn't quite obsolete yet, one of the big thrills of The Sims for me is having multiple households going, and in The Sims 3 you can only have one playable family in each neighbourhood.

The console version isn't different enough from it's PC sibling to warrant owning both, so my second HMV trip saw me re-homing it for £23 of store credit (they were selling the game new for £27 too, it's as if they don't actually want to make a profit), which I put towards Split/Second Velocity on the XBox 360 and BlazBlue: Continuum Shift on the PS3, both of which were on a '2 for £30' offer. Split/Second is excellent, I find myself actually really looking forward to playing it, and by trait I'm not a fan of racing games. It's not as good as Burnout really, but it's still got that same level of over-the-top mayhem, and the adrenaline rush of beating your opponent by two hundredths of a second is incomparable to any other feeling.
 

I haven't tried BlazBlue yet, but I've heard great things and I was a big fan of it's spiritual predecessor Guilty Gear. I've mainly got it to bridge the gap between the upcoming Mortal Kombat and Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds, which I bought last Friday. I'm not going to say much about MVC3, as I'm building to a video review that I'm hoping to have ready for next week's post. In true fashion though, me and Raz7el had a showdown over PSN, and just like Dead or Alive 4 before it, I tanned him pretty soundly. I'm just trolling you man, we were pretty evenly matched. At least we both looked like we knew how to play, unlike when we stunk at Street Fighter IV over XBox Live.

Deadpool, as well as being a useful character, also provides genuine comedy to the game

And to bring it all to an end this week, I finally finished God of War: Ghost of Sparta on PSP. Without giving away too much, the moral of the story is that nobody gets to kill a member of Kratos' family but Kratos. Otherwise, he just gets angry. Well, angrier.