Puff the magic Dragon lived by the sea, and frolicked in the Autumn mist in a land called Honalee

Overtly, for me anyway, 2011 is the year of the Fighting Game. With Mortal Kombat, Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and BlazBlue: Continuum Shift, it's definitely the best year for the genre in a long time. But if you sift through the fisticuffs, there's also an abundance of a genre fast becoming one of my favourites: The Western RPG. Coming to a crescendo with the mighty (we all know it's going to be amazing, why even speculate?) Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim later in the year, we've got lesser beasts such as Two Worlds II, Arcania: Gothic IV and Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga to tide us over. But, while they might be met by the eyes of the masses as mediocre shadows of the upcoming social-life-destroyer, one game still stands strong.

That game, for those still paying attention, is the sequel to Bioware's epic, official 24HG Game of the Year 2009, Dragon Age: Origins; Dragon Age... er... II.

Set almost immediately after the first game, DAII sees you in the shoes of a Blight refugee known as Hawke (who can be male or female and have any first name you choose, but must be human. The Dragon Age Commander Shepard if you will), trying to rebuild his/her life in a foreign city after his/her former home was destroyed by the pesky Darkspawn, bumping into lusty Pirates, surly warrior-giants and the most pleasant blood-mage (an art in the DA canon where a mage bonds with a demon to boost their own powers, basically the classic view of satanism) you'll ever meet along the way.

But the thing is, that's it. The story never really goes anywhere, you just waltz into a city, pick up the compulsory rag-tag band of misfits and generally doss around doing stuff for people, and then shit suddenly hits the fan and it's over. And while we're focusing on the negative points, DAII is one of the laziest games I've played in a while. There's only one (admittedly expansive) city and a small handful of wilderness areas, as opposed to the wide variety of settings in the original. The city is littered with warehouses to explore, and each is identical to the last, the same goes for the wilderness and caves, and it makes for some incredibly repetitive gameplay. They've also not bothered with the finishing moves in combat this time, just opting to have your enemies fall apart when you kill them, and while this looked alright in Fallout 3 where the limbs would sever in the middle of a thigh or below the shoulder, leaving a jagged rip in the flesh, DAII's enemies fall into smooth segments, like when you shoot somebody with the grenade launcher in Tomb Raider II. And that looked shit 14 years ago.

But aside from that, the game really excels. The visuals have improved no end over the washed out, low res textures of Origins, to the point that they could even be considered impressive. The combat system has been refined, sped up and simplified in the right areas, and crucially been made real-time in the console releases, and your party members, much like in Mass Effect 2, have been given much more individuality in their appearance (be it Pirate lady of ill repute Isabella's swashbuckling gear or emo elf Fenris' lyrium tattoos). They also have a lot more unique abilities, in Origins your two mages, Wynn and Morrigan, could end up playing exactly the same, or even have their roles reversed should you choose to do so. In DAII, Anders is a designated healer, Merril is a damage dealer and Bethany is an all-rounder.

Mentioning Anders and Merril brings me to my next point, there's a lot here for the nostalgic. Anders himself is now possessed by the spirit Justice, both of which were party members in Dragon Age: Awakening (they were actually my two favourite characters in the game, but now they are one person they, or rather he, seems to have become a self righteous prick), and Merril was a temporary party member in Origins if the player followed the Dalish Elf storyline. Anyone who played the demo will have come face to face with the Dragon-morphing witch of the wilds Flemeth too, sporting a sassy new look, and a bunch of other familiar faces also show up, but I won't ruin things for you there.

I don't like ending things on a low point (once again, as with last week's Dead Space 2 review, I seem to have unwillingly slated the game), DAII does have the 'can't put down' factor and is the closest thing to a Game of the Year for me so far in 2011, but it throws a big middle finger skywards when it comes to consistency in it's continuity. A lot of the races have altered, take the elves for example. In the last game they were just people with pointy ears, and spoke unanimously with an American accent. They are now much smaller and are painfully thin, and their facial structures have changed to resemble the blue guys from Avatar, and while the city elves still retain the Yankee lilt, the wild dalish elves have adopted an Irish tongue (apart from Merril, who is voiced by the unquestionably Welsh Eve Myles, star of BBC's Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood). The Qunari have also metamorphosed beyond recognition, from basically being black guys with white hair in Origins to their new look, resembling Kain from Soul Reaver. It's natural progression as a higher budget is available, I fully understand that (look at the Klingon in Star Trek after all), but for someone like me with borderline OCD over details like this, it kinda twists my melon.

Overall though, it's a great game, more suited to a console gamer than it's elder. But, under the mocking eye of the behemoth that is the upcoming Skyrim, Bioware really shouldn't have cut quite so many corners.

Am I following all of the right leads, or am I about to get lost in space?

I've decided on a self-imposed gaming hiatus, in a bid to free up some time to get this site up to date, so I'll hopefully be posting quite a bit in the coming week or so. There's so much shit I want to write about, and it seems that every time I fire up a console something is added to the list, so there comes a time when one just has to sit back, catch a breath and put pen to paper, so to speak.

I'll start with Dead Space 2 I guess, it was the first game I played during the 2011 annual laptop disaster so it's only fair. I was extremely late to the party with the first Dead Space, not only picking it up late but developing an irrational hatred of it about a third of the way in (I think I was intimidated by the apparent difficulty of the game at first, it seemed like ammo was very short in supply and the enemies just keep on coming, but things loosened off a bit later on) and shelving it. I corrected myself a few months ago and discovered what an absolute joy the game was to play.

Dead Space 2 then, is more of the same in terms of gameplay. I opted for the PS3 version for the perks of Dragon Age II DLC, Free Dead Space Extraction and not having to swap the disks, and I kinda regret this choice. Firstly, the controls are far better suited to the 360 pad, the chunkiness seems to fit with the way Isaac moves on screen. Playing the game in daylight (I only have a 360 in the boudoir) subtracted from the horror of the experience, Extraction is virtually unplayable without a Move controller, and to top it all off the DAII DLC is non-console specific, linking to your EA account and not through the PSN store or XBL Marketplace.

I suppose the biggest difference to the prequel is that Isaac, the main series' alien-zombie stomping protagonist, now has a voice, and consequentially refuses to shut the hell up. And suddenly this silent sentinel, this extension of your own psyche stuck in a deep-space hell filled with terrifying (albeit overly brittle) perversions of nature, suddenly has his own personality. And boy oh boy, is he a cock. He's informal, macho and at times bratty, totally the opposite of the Gordon Freeman archetype silent scientist, and what that conjures in the imagination.

But it's still a great game though, these aspects only lightly tarnish the refined Resident Evil 4 style engine, and the incomplex but engaging narrative. Being set in a colonial space-station set out like a city, as opposed to the Space Hulk/Nostromo/Discovery One/Red Dwarf hybrid of the first, the Bioshock similarities of the first (the uninterrupted gameplay and Isaac's aesthetic reminded me of 2K's opus the first time around) seem all the more apparent: echoes of Rapture are everywhere. There's also a bit of Silent Hill thrown in with cliched trips through a hospital and school, the latter throwing some relatively unmutated child-like monsters that could have been ripped right from the foggy ghost town itself if I didn't know better.

So original Dead Space 2 isn't. Visceral aren't really known for their originality though, Dante's Inferno anyone? There are a few new enemies and a couple of new mechanics, such as hacking minigames and being able to blow out a window to suck enemies into space, before closing it again before the vacuum consumes you (A bit like on Star Wars: The Force Unleashed actually), but it's mostly just a refined version of the original, gameplay wise anyway. I read somewhere that the game reminds the writer of Resident Evil 2, in that it's just like the original but bigger and better in every way, and I think that just about sums it up. Although as far as I'm concerned, Dead Space is still superior to it's sequel. Same goes for Resident Evil actually.

Mortal Kombat then. I've absolutely caned the demo since it became available to the masses the other week and to say I'm excited is like saying Hitler was a bit of an arsehole. The thing that is immediately apparent, once you've taken in the unrivalled violence and brutality anyway, is just how unique the game is; since the 2D fighting game revival we've seen Street Fighter IV, Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and BlazBlue as the most dominant in the genre, and as far as first impressions count, all three of those are very similar experiences. Mortal Kombat still retains the feel of the series since Deadly Alliance, matching speed and fluidity with character-specific combos and signiature moves. The new X-Ray moves are wince-inducing too (Johnny Cage's actually made me want to go and have a little cry), and although easy to pull off, they require some expert timing; performing such a move consumes (sorry, konsumes) a full special bar, and they are very easy to evade it seems.

Finally, we've got the fatalities. It's been 5 years since we've had a real, true Mortal Kombat game (Mortal Kombat: Armageddon), and even that didn't have true fatality moves. 2008's Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe was toned down to achieve a teen rating at the request of Warner Interactive, so said moves were far less grotesque, and as a result we've been starved of the privilege of a satisfying way to murder our aggressors since Mortal Kombat: Deception in 2004, seven whole years ago. The sheer brutality of the finishers on offer here makes it worth the wait. If the whole game maintains this level of intense violence and joyous gameplay, then the Mortal Kombat series is back where it belongs, as the second-best fighting game franchise on the market. Flawless Victory.

Still Alive! Laptop took a bit longer than I would have liked to get repaired, I touched on the late collection by the courier last time I posted. Well, after it was collected a week late, another 10 days later they sent the fucker back untouched, claiming that the damage wasn't covered by the warranty (I did have a look in the warranty booklet, and indeed accidental damage is not covered, which gave them a small point in their favour until I realised that they'd given my a Hewlett Packard warranty booklet when my laptop is a Packard Bell machine, derp), despite the fact that they knew what was wrong with it before it even left my house. And to top it all off, some pikeys got hold of our details from the Curry's system and called us twice trying to rob us.

So I ended up getting an independent repair company to do it for me at my own expense, although I won't divulge how much here because they guy was really helpful and did a great job, and, let's be fair, gave me my life back after about 5 weeks of being bored and having to use the Internet browser on my Nokia N97. Moral of the story: don't buy anything from Curry's, they're arseholes.

So, with the gap in posting, where do I start? I've got Dead Space 2, Dragon Age II, Diabolik: The Original Sin, Bionic Commando and Killzone 3 behind me with Red Steel 2, Wii Sports Resort and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit in progress. I also wanted to talk about the fantastic Mortal Kombat demo and the not-so-fantastic Motorstorm: Apocalypse demo, a small anecdote about BlazBlue and maybe a mini unboxing of the Killzone 3 Helghast Edition. Thanks to a bonus from work I've also got Two Worlds II, Doctor Who: Return to Earth, Dead Space: Extraction (both versions in fact), Prince of Persia Trilogy, LittleBigPlanet 2, Bulletstorm, Arcania: Gothic 4 and Motorstorm: Arctic Edge all lined up for the coming weeks.

It's also been my 26th birthday in the last week, which has allowed me to upgrade my personal gadgetry with the Samsung Galaxy Player MP3 player and the HTC HD7 mobile phone, powered respectively by Android OS and Windows Phone 7, and both respectable gaming platforms in their own right, especially the phone, which is XBox Live compatible and plays a bunch of XBLA games, achievements and all. That's still on it's way to me though, but watching gameplay videos of Need for Speed: Undercover, Assassin's Creed: Altair's Chronicles HD and Earthworm Jim HD have me very much excited. So it's all go at 24HG towers at the moment.

I suppose I'll start with the games that haven't left enough of an impression with me, less to write about, so I can get more in. Diabolik: The Original Sin wins the prize for the most aptly titled game ever, as playing the point-and-click crapfest was like spending a short time in hell. The graphics are piss-poor, like a high-end PS1 game, the voice acting is primary-school-nativity standard and the logic of some of the puzzles is frankly baffling, and this is from a man who finished Secret Files: Tunguska. Finally, the inventory system is terrible, especially with the copious arsenal of gadgets that your protagonist is equipped with before you even start. Diabolik? 'Dire bollocks'.

Bionic Commando wasn't much better, combining a bog-standard shooter with a rubbish version of the PS1 Spider-Man games. The visuals are nice, a bit Metal Gear Solid 4 reminiscent, but that's the only redeeming feature about the dull, uninvolving game. If you want to fly about on a grappling hook, Just Cause 2 does it better. Come to think of it, it does shooting and melee combat better too, and a ton of other things that Bionic Commando doesn't even attempt. What was I talking about again?

I'm going to leave it there for now, but I'll probably post again before the end of the week with a more in-depth look at some of the bigger games I've played. I think Trev's working on a new video too, so it's business as usual again here at 24HG. See you soon.

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.

Demo-lition - Plowing through the Dragon Age 2 demo!

Downloaded the Dragon Age 2 demo last night on PC and what can I say, it's Dragon Age but shiny and new!

Started off as a Mage, and this game is A LOT faster let me tell you, within the first 5 minutes I had notched up around 30 Darkspawn kills at least! You can still pause the battle though, so you don't really get overwhelmed, I found it more manageable  than DA:O, it just felt smoother giving commands to your party members saying that I didn't have a look at the tactics interface so maybe there will be no need to micromanage your team what so ever if that has been updated too.

Graphics are (Like I said at the start) shiny and new! Effects are more spectacular now, and characters now seem to have emotion on their faces too, plus the main character has............found a voice! I find you get more connected to a main character if they are more animated and involving, instead of just silence when you pick options from a list, in fact you can look at it more like Mass Effect now conversation wise, things aren't so grey anymore as in the first game, you can choose Nice - Funny/Sarcastic - Evil/Aggressive and investigate through conversation trees.........JUST LIKE MASS EFFECT. So you have a main character who has personality, and a beard.

So to sum up, I played the PC version, loved it, no slowdown or glitches that I found, played as a mage and it was very enjoyable. The ONLY problem I had is that everything I killed with my magic just exploded, which is great at first, but when EVERYTHING is exploding, you lose the novelty. Saying that it was the first 5 minutes of the game, and if you play the demo you will understand too that it won't be like that for the whole game.

I have recorded some footage from the demo for your viewing pleasure below, I was going to make it into a video commentary (I am thinking of creating a feature called DEMO-LITION where it is a commentary through a demo, just have to see how it would work) but alas my computer crashed when writing a summary of the review on notepad last night, then this morning when I actually recorded some audio the best describing words I used were "Good" and "Better than the first one" so I scrapped it, I was mucho tired!

Yo Dawg, I know you like Dragon Age II, so if you play Dragon Age II, i'll put more Dragon Age II in your Dragon Age II!

So I heard that if 1,000,000 people download the Dragon Age II demo, we all get free stuff for the game when it comes out. So it's win win WIN! Win because you will play the demo, win because you will have the game and WIN because you have free stuff.

Oh Bioware, like you had to bribe us to play the demo...You guys!