November 2009 Archives

There I was playing Might and Magic and enjoying it on multiple levels when Super Husband says, "Hey, I have a Best Buy happy, happy, joy, joy card that gives me $10 off of a game, and damn if Dragon Age: Origins isn't supposed to be awesome!"

So, we went to Best Buy. My Gamer ADD imp flipped the switch...

For you RPG geeks out there, "Dragon Age: Origins" is a must buy.  Seriously. Now, I suggest it for the PC only because those of my fellow geeks who bought it for the consoles described the controls as "wonky" at best and "fucking annoying" at the worst of times.   Not that the console versions are bad, but I have to tell you, the amount of frustration you will find in this game is more than you can stand without having stupid controls.

In the beginning, it's more along the lines of what story you want.  You have several character lines in which to choose and they will influence your path and how people treat you.  It's like "Choose Your Own Adventure" except you don't have any idea how it will turn out nor do you have the chance to flip ahead. It's hard to describe this game beyond that because your preference in character really makes a difference here.  You definitely hit a point in the plot when everything melds, but even then, how characters treat you depends on the decisions you make.  Which makes the replay value of this game amazing even on top of its huge plot.  All hail the non-linear game!  (Hey, I don't like games I can play once through, know everything, and then have to wait three years to play it again only because I've kind of sort of forgotten what happened.)

Anyway, this is a seriously pretty game, yo. Pretty enough to run my graphics card into spasms such that I had to turn everything down so that when I walked through a grassy field I didn't see actual grass unless I was standing near it.  Pout for me. Well, Super Husband took pity upon me and went and bought a brand-spanking new graphics card with which he planned to surprise me...

So, I got home and found out although he was awesome that way, sometimes awesome meets barriers of stupid - my comp case was too small for the card. After much deliberation, research, sighing at the universe, we decided he would take the new card, and I would take his old one.   Turns out that they aren't much different considering my processing power and my smaller monitor. (Hey, it's not the size of the monitor, it's the...oh, screw you guys!)

So, now, I actually get to see Dragon Age for what it is, all cranked up and bloody! It's the first game I've ever had where your characters get sprayed with the blood of their enemies.  Of course, it begs me to ask when they wipe that crap off.  Blood, like water, causes rust.  (SCA teaches a lot of things.)  Either way, it's ultimately cool to watch a rather civil conversation between characters when half of them are covered in blood.  This satisfies the Kumquat most mightily.

Outside of that, this game is seriously not on the easy side.  I've seen FAQs appear for it already, but I'm doubting they are for anything beyond the easy level or that which they hacked.  All I know is I never have enough healing potions, I regularly encounter moments I don't deem "impossible", and even when I prove they aren't, the next stage makes me weep in frustration. There is challenge here, folks.  If you find it too easy, you're either cheating or freak with strategy.  Either way, I bow to your competence.  The rest of us continue to curse in creative ways only to be distracted by the pretty ways we die.

Complaints?  So far, my biggest complaint is the inability to pause or skip through cut scenes.  First time around, I can see it, but after you've died and your only save requires you to go through 15 minutes of cut scene, again, it gets boring.  It's been a complaint of J-RPGs.  Apparently, American-RPG creators weren't listening.  I should be able to at least pause in the middle of a cut-scene so I can make dinner.  (Hey, I'm in my 30's and sometimes it's my turn to cook dinner and dammit it isn't always hot dogs and mac 'n cheese!  Some pause time would be nice!)  As it stands, if you hit escape you can fast forward, kind of, maybe, only until you have to answer an actual question.  I suppose this is the danger of having a Choose Your Own Adventure kind of game even in the minimal sense, but damn if it's not annoying for real life. Outside of that, I currently have few complaints.  It's a solid game with solid play (on PC anyway), solid graphics, awesome sound, and a really cool idea to make the storyline work with differing perspectives.  You even get decent voice acting even if you do get those odd cheesy moments that make you snerk.  ("Look!  It's a cunning trap!"  I laughed a lot at that one, but other than those moments, the random conversations between your traveling characters are hilarious.)  Besides, you can build relationships between your characters so much you can apparently have intimate relations.  I haven't seen that yet, but ya gotta love it.  (And, yes, that includes homosexual relations which I think is very cool.)

So far, I play it during a high Gamer ADD risk not only because of a serious gaming night coming up the day after Thanksgiving, but also because we are in Prime Game Release Season.  So, it's with great hopes I'll finish at least one storyline.  Next week, could distract me with some sort of Mario Pipe Laying On The Farm With Loving Sheep thing. Just sayin'.

4 out of 5 Kumquats

P.S. Am I the only one who thinks the hands on these characters are freakin' huge?

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We're supposed to play Runes of Magic for the LAN party and I can't stop playing Dragon Age!  All I can say is there will but much dying and laughing during ROM because I'm severely out of practice.  Well, the laughter will be alcohol fueled, but at least it will be fueled.

It might not be a weekly feature, but I have this itch sometimes to visit some games, movies, and random memorabilia of my younger geek girl days.

While I'm not Old Grandma Hardcore - but do strive to fill her awesome shoes one day - I have been around the gaming block a few times.

Yes, that makes me sound like a gaming trollop, and what if I am?  In the console arena, I've had Atari (several), Nintendo (most), Sega (all of them), Sony (PS3 can kiss my ass), and Microsoft (360).   I've had many illicit affairs on the PC that started with Oregon Trail and some weird little "game" that taught kids how to be lemonade stand hustlers and continued through to recent years when even I was sucked into MMOs (albeit recently).  There have been countless one-night-stands with any number of games in the local arcades and pizza joints.  Not even pin ball was safe.  And, let's not forget this little beauty:

[caption id="attachment_111" align="alignnone" width="275" caption="Ah, brings back some good memories."][/caption]

My bitches!  All of them!

And, yes, that makes me old.  Yet, some of you uppity nerds have played none of them in which case you can all kiss my Ass of Gaming Snobbery!

Beyond that, welcome to the realm of Old School, my friends.

Why an Old School review?  Why not?  Here's the thing: most games we played when we were kids were reviewed at the time they released and never touched again.  The internet offers us a chance to revisit our childhood memories asking the question: "Was it as good and as fun as I remember or was I just seriously bored?"  While I have run into sites that do that, they still stink with the professional review, a little too technical for my blood.  Where's the fun?  Where's the nostalgia?  Where the hell is that goddamned cavern I've been searching for all day?

Besides, there were games even I didn't get to play either because I didn't have the system required to play them or we were dead broke.  (There was also a short stint in my life when I was attempting "fit in" with the crowd and gave up a lot of my geek tendencies.  It happened in the 80's.  I have since atoned for my sins.)  These days we have things like Good Old Games where we can get our old memories to run on newer systems without the hell that is DOS and really get to laugh at the pixelation.  (Fuck, most of our games that would've choked a gaming cabinet back in the day run on our phones these days.  How wild is that?)

Okay, that's enough of an intro.

This week will probably begin a series of reviews on what was definitely a crowd favorite: Might and Magic.  Last I checked, we were up to number 9, but we're going to step back to 1998 and start with Might and Magic 6: Mandate of Heaven.

Super Husband went away a couple of weekends ago, and he thoughtfully left on my desktop a little icon that bore the first six Might and Magic games including Swords of Xeen.  Two things happened at that point: I squee'ed for twenty minutes, and NaNoWriMo got tossed out the window like so much used gum.  Hey, a geek girl has her priorities.

Truthfully, I started with World of Xeen because it was the last Might and Magic I had played.  Trouble was I never got to finish it.  It was glitchy and buggy as shit, and I eventually hit a graphical brick wall that wouldn't allow me to continue.  (In truth, it is entirely possible it was the computer I was using.  We are talking 1993.)  So, hell, yeah, the first one I started was World.

And, then Super Husband mentioned how cool Mandate was.

Sometimes, I think my gamer ADD comes in the form of a small imp that has access to a switch in my brain.

*click*

So, I've been playing Mandate for a little over a week now.

I have to say that I wouldn't have believed it had come out in 1998.  The graphics for the time are fabulous.   It moves smooth when walking rather than turn-based; it's got some voice acting; and dude, the weather changes!  That being said, I'm doubting seriously had I owned this game in '98 it would have looked that good or that smooth.  I had the Gateway of Doom that was also afflicted with the AOL virus.  I promise you that if it could run it, it would have been laughable at best.  It strikes me as a game that was ahead of its time and probably wasn't as appreciated by as many people could've been.  It would've taken a hell of a graphics card to deal with the load of colors, scenery, actions, and yes, that was 100 skeletons that just appeared and kicked my ass into oblivion.

I find developers still suffer with the problem of trying to develop games for the best of the best of machines without realizing that while some of us consider ourselves hardcore gamers, some things get in the way of building those kind of machines.  Let's see, in 1998, it would have been graduating college.  I wanted to be gaming, but what I was mostly doing was sitting on my bedroom floor surrounded by piles of papers, crying hysterically, and begging to die.  (Some hardcore gamers would call that "casual gaming".  Hey, some of us actually like living away from Mom's house and having sex with an actual human.  Go figure.)

That aside, I think had I been able to play this game when it released, I would have enjoyed it just as much then as I do now.  It holds up well.  Oh, sure, graphically, it's not even a strain on ye olde comp these days - hell, my netbook could play it - but the graphics aren't really all that bad for being 11 years old, which we all know is ancient in gaming years.

I have always been impressed with the sheer expanse of Might and Magic games.  These were games you had to invest some serious time to complete.  This one is no slouch.  Over a week in and I just made it into a third area of the incredibly large map.  I tried a fourth area and got my ass handed to me.   And, that's just it, you'd think that the reason it seems to expansive is because of the challenge of being powerful enough to actually finish the game.  No, really, there is a lot of ground to cover.

Now, granted, you end up repeating yourself a lot if nothing else because you start out with Nothing.  Absolutely Nothing.  It takes some time to build up a store of cash to get some decent armor and weapons, but you can only use most of those weapons and armor if you have the right skills which you have to buy but only after you get memberships to the right guilds.  Oh, and spells?  Yeah, you have to buy those, too.  And, just because you manage to buy the ability to wear leather armor doesn't mean you're all that good at it; you need to boost your skill levels and eventually learn to be an expert and then a master...  Now, I give this game props for a kind of realism you didn't see in gaming in 1998.  Yeah, if you were an average Josephine dropped in this world, you'd have to start from scratch and learn it all.  That's some awesome detail right there.  But, it's almost too detailed.  Granted, that might be me being spoiled to most modern RPG gaming rules, but I got aggravated more than once because I was seriously underpowered compared to the amount of crap that was being thrown at me.

Yes, that which is loved and hated about M&M is still present in this one.  Do you get just one goblin attack you in the woods?  Oh, hell no.  You get about 50.  Probably not so much a problem if they didn't notice you what is equivalent in-game to half a mile away and start running at you en masse.  And, the skeleton problem I mentioned earlier?  No freakin' lie.  Seriously.   Luckily, I found some ledges from which to shoot said army.  Took me two hours.  And, yes, upon counting the bodies later, there were 100 skeletons.  Thank the gods for the turn-based option.  Trust me, being able to switch from real time to turn-based will save your ass more times than you care to count.

What it really comes down to is starting from absolute scratch as a Level One Human might wear thin on most modern gamers.  Or, it might be a novelty.  Either way, no one will not experience that moment in which you see a large group of pixels on the horizon and think, "Oh fuck!" and run the opposite way.  You ain't nothing if you ain't a coward in this game.

"Save Often" should be your mantra, and you should repeat it every five to ten minutes.

Think that's excessive?  Yeah, well, you won't think that the first time you open a door and 25 monks full of magic and fury bear down on your ass.  You'll like being able to reload because if you die and let the game do a start-over you will lose all, that's right, all of your money.  Doesn't matter if it's 10 pieces of gold or 10,000.  If you want to preserve your sanity, save before you do anything life changing in the game, which means before opening any door.

This game is nothing if not challenging.  Granted, like with any game, the second time around, you'll know the tricks and can play it with a little less stress, but if you're like me on a first go round, what you're doing right now is wandering a lot and cursing as you inevitably run away from that mass of fireballs chasing your ass.  But, a happy moment is when an area resets.  This is because by the time it resets you are usually way the hell more powerful than should be allowed and you go back and sneer at creatures and watch them drop dead.  There's something inherently satisfying in that, especially since  if you head north to say Castle Ironfist, then across Bootleg Bay, and hit Free Haven, your innards are used to decorate the scenery by a bunch of bikini models with bows.

At least the dungeon creatures don't respawn.  That's something you can work with.

So, what comes down to is this game is hella challenging even for a modern gaming girl and a whole lot of addictive although frustrating at times, but I choose to call that "challenging".  From a technical standpoint, the controls aren't bad, the graphics can be seen as damn nice considering its age, and there is a soundtrack, although I haven't a clue what it sounds like because I tend to put on iTunes before starting it up.  Also, the story is apparently long and involved.  One of these days I might pay attention to it.  Right now, I'm busy still trying to figure out why that fucking dragoon cavern won't let me in.

4 out of 5 Kumquats

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They used real people for a lot of the avatars and shopkeepers in the game, and being an SCA geek, I can also recognize a shitload of Renaissance Faire peeps.  Seriously.  I just know they were brainstorming how to add a little realism in the game without spending money on actual actors and someone said, "Hey, I have all these friends that do this thing on weekends..."

You know, I'm about ready to dump WordPress.

Ye Olde Kumquat has been down for weeks.  No reason.  Just down.

Actually, there has been a reason.  WordPress had been hacked all to hell and both my blogs have suffered for it.

So, for weeks, I've been laboring under the impression Kumquat was down.  That sucks because it means what few readers I have are gone and I'm basically starting over.

Super Husband had a little time to look at the problem.

It turns out that computers and internet components so fear him that the thought of him messing with their bits worries them so much that things will instantly start to work.

He thought about fixing it.  It fixed itself.

Now, that, my friends is some serious talent.

Now, I've hit the reset button on this blog several times, but I'm not doing it again, especially not because of some stupid hackers who don't have the capacity to hack something cool like the CIA.  About the time the blog went down, I was intending it to be the gaming girl blog it was meant to be and by the gods it will be that!

So, stick with me, you one bored person with the equally bored dog still reading.  Things will happen!

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Or, things will spontaneously combust.  It's a risk we're going to have to take.