My name is 24 Hour Gamer, and my wife is addicted to Dragon Age Origins.
She decided to give it a try last Friday, and subsequently spent eight hours straight playing it. Like me, she's struggled with the complexity of the game but as an Oblivion veteran the setting appeals to her.
I'm not going to go too much into Dragon Age this week, I've been on about it for the last two weeks, but without spoiling too much, I had a 'Wrex moment' last night, that I wasn't very happy about. I'm getting the feeling that by this time next week I'll have finished the game and be able to give a final verdict on it, and I'm tempted to name it my game of the year. No other game this year has kept me going for 29 hours without me getting bored, Borderlands took me 27 hours to finish but is nowhere near as deep and rewarding. And there's still probably a few hours left to do on Dragon Age.
I decided that leaving the 360 version of Alone in the Dark alone was probably the best idea, before it destroys my interest in a buggy mass of glitches, and the PS3's Inferno has now established itself on my Christmas list. Instead, I've opted to play Prototype as my secondary game this week.
Prototype does nothing new, instead it's like a 'best of' collection of aspects of other superhero games. It has the jumping of Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, the climbing of Spider-Man 2 and it's sequels, the combat of Wolverine, the gliding from Arkham Asylum (if you want to get anal about release dates, Batman Begins then), Car Throwing from Crackdown, and (I may be clutching at straws here) Venom's absorbing people for health from Ultimate Spider-Man. But it does all of that very well indeed.
The game places you under the omnipresent hood of Alex Mercer, who begins the game on a morgue slab, about to have an autopsy. He wakes up from his apparent death, and after the initial panic of narrowly avoiding dissection realises he has complete amnesia, and the ability to do, well, whatever the fuck he wants to thanks to a virus he's contracted. With the help of his sister, Dana, he finds another infected person, and sets out to free her from her prison, only to discover she's completely mental and wants to infect the entire city. So it's your job to stop her.
Alex, while being very much a hero in this story, is not a very nice man. There's none of the "don't hurt the civilians" from other superhero games, Mercer can and does indiscriminately murder anyone he feels, to the point that it's actually physically difficult not to kill any innocents (as I've already mentioned, you need to consume them for health). They always see to fly into a panic, and instead of running away from you, they just scatter in all directions and quite often end up between your claws and an enemy's throat.
And aside from that, killing them is actually really entertaining. It's great fun sprinting into a crowd and grabbing a passer by before they've even seen you coming, running up the side of a building without even breaking stride and tossing them to their doom, or picking up a car and, again, sprinting through a crowd watching the bodies fly. Strangely enough though, every time I do grab a random New Yorker, they always seem to be female, and there's no safe way to let them go. All you can do is throw them and hope they don't decapitate themselves on a lamp post during their flight.
I tried out the demo for Band Hero. Although a rocker at heart, I thought playing songs like Walking on Sunshine would be great fun to play, but said song is on the demo and it really wasn't that great. Guitar games have gotten so stale that it doesn't even matter what you're playing, it's all just pressing buttons and strumming in rhythm. So DJ Hero must breathe new life into the series, right? No, I played it in Gamestation this week, it's shit. Also had a bit of a go with Mini Ninjas, which is forgettable (and I couldn't help but notice that they stole the enemy death effect from Zelda: Wind Waker) and Galaga Legions, which very nearly sent me into an epileptic seizure. I don't recommend it.
Finally, everyone sign up to Playfire. I have a profile on there, and it's a great networking site for gamers with an addictive award scheme which is like a cross between Achievements and Trophies. Check it out.
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