Leaves on the wind
Ah, the November gaming rush. Brilliant time of year. I'm going to give Modern Warfare 2 and the finally-released-for-PC Force Unlimited a pass for a while, opting instead for Dragon Age: Origins -- which I'm enjoying the hell out of so far. If you've read anything about it, odds are they've been raves, so let me just nod in assent: it's from BioWare, the people who brought us some of the best CRPGs out there, and the closest analogue one can find to describe this would be that it's a Baldur's Gate -- with all the story and gameplay and richness that implies -- for the modern gaming market. And if the idea with that fills you with joy (or just intrigue), get it now. Its mechanics and systems and conventions will all seem familiar, but pleasantly so, and that's what you need to know most.
On the other side of the killer-rig stick, I found myself playing Gratuitous Space Battles and...you know, this game snuck up on me and infiltrated my mind in a hurry. Simple premise: you build a fleet of ships to defend after waves of incoming attacks, you configure and allocate and deploy the ships, give them orders, then allow them to engage -- at which point you're powerless, forced to just sit back and watch the AI crews do the best they can with what you've given them. And as you watch you start bouncing between Serenity's Operative yelling "Somebody fire!" and Star Trek's Nero: "Fire everything!" It's a bit of the digital addictiveness of a tower-defense game and a ton of customizability and eye-candy, and with enough real strategy that I'm still...not as far along in the campaign as I'd like to be, let's just say that. (And the automatic ship names are customizable -- I've replaced them with a thousand names from the NaNoWriMo generator, so a good number of ships are named after Space Mutiny protagonists and theoretical members of the Wu-Tang Clan.) Like Dragon Age: Origins, if this is the sorta thing you think you might like, you'll probably love it (I'm looking at you, kansel01). But don't take my word for it. Try the demo.
In other news, today cannot end soon enough. And tomorrow can wait a while.
On the other side of the killer-rig stick, I found myself playing Gratuitous Space Battles and...you know, this game snuck up on me and infiltrated my mind in a hurry. Simple premise: you build a fleet of ships to defend after waves of incoming attacks, you configure and allocate and deploy the ships, give them orders, then allow them to engage -- at which point you're powerless, forced to just sit back and watch the AI crews do the best they can with what you've given them. And as you watch you start bouncing between Serenity's Operative yelling "Somebody fire!" and Star Trek's Nero: "Fire everything!" It's a bit of the digital addictiveness of a tower-defense game and a ton of customizability and eye-candy, and with enough real strategy that I'm still...not as far along in the campaign as I'd like to be, let's just say that. (And the automatic ship names are customizable -- I've replaced them with a thousand names from the NaNoWriMo generator, so a good number of ships are named after Space Mutiny protagonists and theoretical members of the Wu-Tang Clan.) Like Dragon Age: Origins, if this is the sorta thing you think you might like, you'll probably love it (I'm looking at you, kansel01). But don't take my word for it. Try the demo.
In other news, today cannot end soon enough. And tomorrow can wait a while.