Dragon Age: Origins (2009) by BioWare

Dragon Age: Origins drops you head-first into the deep-end of the grim, troubled world of Thedas

Most of the gamers that are going to purchase Dragon Age: Origins know exactly what they're getting into. They're likely to be either old school PC gamers with love for the Baldur's Gate series or a younger, fresher class of gamers that have enjoyed BioWare's more recent Mass Effect series. I'll preface this review by letting you know right now that if you fall into one of these two categories and for some reason haven't yet purchase this game, you need to buy it immediately, because you will be hopelessly enthralled by it. You don't even need to read the rest of this review. Just go get it. For those not familiar with any of BioWare's other games, or those who have played only more recent RPGs and enjoyed them, read on.

Dragon Age: Origins' most important strengths are the story, ambiance, and characters. Lead writer David Gaider came from a job in hospitality services to begin writing for Dragon Age years ago, but his lack of proper experience certainly hasn't hampered him in the slightest. He's brilliant. The world building is a particular strength; it's amazing, and the art team supports Gaider and his team's writing very well. Every structure has an apparent age to it, and everything feels well-worn. It doesn't just look like the structures and settings have a history behind them, it feels like it, and the game certainly helps out the feeling by providing a detailed history codex providing further detail on everything you encounter in the game. We're talking about a Tolkien-esque level of effort put into developing the lore behind this game. I was shocked to learn that I hadn't even seen combat yet in nearly two hours of playing the game simply because I was so engulfed in reading every entry provided to me in the game's encyclopedia. For gamers like me who enjoy this sort of thing, it's fantastic. If you ever feel bogged down by the constant codex entry notifications, don't worry, because you're free to go about your way without ever delving too deep into the historical aspects of the world, and the game doesn't at all punish you for neglecting it. Nearly anything you need to know by means of storyline will come up in conversation anyway. A realistic, living world is always nice, but the true value of this lies in how many different ways your choices actually affect this world. There's no good and evil meter to gamify and cheapen them, and your choices all affect the land of Ferelden in a very real way.

Another strength of the game is the richness of the characters. The nuances of your main character will be more or less shaped by you, and while that's a good thing, I would've liked to have heard spoken dialogue for my character rather than have him go the silent protagonist route. I thought BioWare did a fantastic job with how they allowed a healthy mix between player construction and static, unchangeable attributes regarding Shepard in Mass Effect. I wish they would have steered the main character of Dragon Age more toward that end of the spectrum. Aside from that gripe, the rest of the cast of characters are simply fantastic. All have deep, fully realized personalities and feel as genuine as a character from a great novel. There are no Vaans or Penelos in this game. Each character has their quirks, their strengths, and their weaknesses. The characters are so lifelike that you'll end up legitimately liking or disliking them after only a few conversations, and that's one of the real strengths of Dragon Age. It's all due to the fantastic writing done by Gaider and his team.

The gameplay is almost what you'd expect from a classic cRPG. It's very much like Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, KOTOR, etc. If you're familiar with the combat in those games then you'll be able to step in to Dragon Age and feel right at home. If not, then you'll need to make a bit of an adjustment to this style of game. You can pause and micromanage, queueing up actions for your various party members if you wish, or you can set the AI to do what you'd like it to and let your party run on autopilot without pausing the action at all. At lower difficulties the game doesn't punish you for playing either way, though once I pumped up the difficulty I found it almost a necessity to utilize the pause-and-play micromanagement style. The way you choose to play will depend strictly on what type of gamer you are.

Make no mistake, this game was meant to be played on a PC. The graphics are absolutely atrocious while playing on a console, and it's obvious that the devs designed for a PC and then ported to the consoles -- A stark and unfortunate contrast to most titles nowadays. The graphical level of the XBOX 360 version of Dragon Age is equivalent to those of the first Mass Effect's now infamous pre-texture pop-ins. There is surprisingly little detail in the texture, and framerate has a terrible tendency to grind to a choppy halt at random intervals -- even when there isn't all that much going on onscreen. This, sadly, looks very much like a game that belongs back in 2005 or so. The PC, however, is very different, with much nicer textures and environments. The use of a hotbar and the tactical overhead view on the PC also favors that platform. The radial menus on the consoles are decent enough once you get used to them, but the hotbar is infinitely more effective, flows more continuously, and is far more comfortable to use. When you consider the amount of user-generated content available for this game in the form of mods, it's really no comparison. Rejoice, PCMR: This is a game created primarily for old-school, hardcore PC gamers.

There is, however, an issue to be had with the bugs present in the retail version of this game. Several times your character will get stuck on a bump or smooth rock on the ground, causing them to run in place continuously until you move them away manually. There's also an issue with your controlled character not responding to an attack command. Little things like this take away from the experience of an otherwise quality game, which is unfortunate, but now easily correctable with bug fix mods.

If you're a fan of BioWare's previous titles or old school cRPGs in general, this game has a very good chance of becoming an instant favorite of yours. It's not for everybody, though. Those who find RPGs to be a bit too slowly paced or plot heavy for their liking will probably be instantly turned away from this game. But if you can look past the faults of the game, there's a wonderful experience to be had with this title, and I'm sure I won't be done playing this for a long, long time.

In conclusion, this is a love letter to old school CRPGs like Planescape: Torment, Baldur's Gate II, and the like. If you liked those games, you'll absolutely love this one. If you're an RPG fan in general, it's absolutely worth a purchase, as the story, world building, and characterization is second to none. You'll just have to get used to the overhead, tactical style of gameplay.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Note: This review was originally composed on November 4, 2009 for a now-defunct publication and focused on both the console and PC versions. It was then updated in November 2014 to modernize some references and make it more palatable for a gamer considering the title in the modern day.

Braid (2008) by Jonathan Blow

Sometimes, when watching a film or reading a novel, you feel a burn of emotion deep inside your chest. Something that affects you so profoundly that it moves beyond being just a form of media. It is internalized and remembered forever.

Braid is one of those things. But it isn't just an example of art in gaming, it's a game full of pure genius as well.

The game, at first, comes off as a platformer. There are relatively little instances of hardcore platforming in the game, and they usually only serve as a medium to allow you to interact with the puzzle that you're dealing with. Make no mistake, this is a puzzle game at heart.

The puzzles here are incredibly good, and very well scaled from level to level. The first two levels are relatively easy and will only take you a few minutes, the third is a bit harder, and the last puzzles will make you feel like your brain is deflated. The amount of time that you'll have to put into each puzzle may be debilitating for some, but the sheer joy and pleasure of solving one overcomes any sense of stress that staring at your screen racking your brain may cause. These aren't just run of the mill puzzles, either. There are a number that are, in my mind, some of the best puzzles that I've ever seen in a game.

The art direction is beautiful. The backgrounds are watercolor constructed, they're vibrant and bright, and dark and brooding. The soundtrack is perfectly placed and flooded with beautiful violin work. Each are augmented by an incredibly written preface that comes prior to starting each level. The story is written so broadly and so metaphorically that it can literally be translated to represent whatever the player would like it to. The ending represents one of the epic twists in video game history, and does so in game -- a puzzle in itself.

I literally cannot think of one thing that I dislike about this game. It could be longer, but length can't really be expected from a game that costs so little.

There is so much value stuffed into the 10ish hours that you'll spend playing this game, it's hard to put it into words any other way than just to spout off the cliche of "buy it and experience it yourself". It's an experience to be had, and it's one of the most artistically beautiful exhibits in gaming history that is guaranteed to affect you in a most profound way.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Prince of Persia (2008) by Ubisoft

So let's start off with the obvious good points. This game is fabulously beautiful. This is quite possibly the best collaboration between the artistic and technical side of game visual development ever displayed in a game. The colors are excellent, the level design is fabulous, and the sheer size and scope of everything constantly amazes and never gets old. Add in the fact that the visuals in this game have their own particular style and the game is just amazing to look at as a whole.

I've heard a lot of complaints about the new prince, but he isn't all that bad. He reminds me of Han Solo. Anybody that played through Warrior Within and dealt with the groan inducing teen angst of that Prince should have nothing to complain about with this one.

The characters are deep, especially Elika, and they're enjoyable and interesting to travel through the game with.

However, there are some really terrible elements in this game that make it the single worst installment of the franchise yet.

Combat is awful. I mean spectacularly awful. The camera is fixed and often sits behind columns and the pillar of light from the fertile grounds during boss fights, leaving you unable to see anything at all except the gorgeous texture of the pillar itself while you get your butt whipped. There are various quick time events a la God of War, but many of them are pop up and vanish so quickly that you literally have no chance to succeed with them unless you've fought the same boss multiple times and know when they are going to come up, making it worthless to even have the button presses in the first place.

Everyone is ragging on the fact that you can't die at all, but it's not that bad. Especially not in the platforming aspect of the game. The bad part about platforming here is that it's all very watered down. Gone are there "Hmm, where am I supposed to go now?" elements of the previous Prince of Persia games. All it takes in this one is a quick press of the Y button and Elika shows you exactly where to go. I would prefer a good map and the means to navigate it by myself.

The fact that you can't die in platforming is just a checkpoint system, and it's way overblown as a negative point. That being said, it would be nice for Elika to have had some sort of gauge on her magic so that you could only die a certain number of times. Ubisoft would have greatly benefited by having multiple difficulty levels. Easy, where Elika's magic is unlimited and you have her compass. Normal, with the map and a limited magic meter. Hard, also with the map, but an extremely limited amount of Elika's magic.

As for combat, it's the same -- Elika will save you literally hundreds of times through combat alone when the camera is constantly thwarting you and throughout the various impossible QTEs.

I had the most fun in this game traveling from point to point, healing the lands, and experiencing the character growth between the Prince and Elika. What I did not enjoy, however, was Ubisoft's cheap attempt to lengthen the game by requiring us to collect the light orbs. I feel taken as a fool when I see things like this in games. It feels very much like Ubisoft realized that the game was way too short if they just gave Elika the abilities after finishing one of the four bosses, so they tacked this on. It's incredibly boring and drove me more than one time to turn the game off after finishing a boss, and turning instead to Fable 2 or Valkyria Chronicles. I ended up dragging myself back to this game several times in order to get the bare minimum number of light orbs by backtracking through previously conquered areas.

It would have been nice to see Ubisoft instead have a very limited number of orbs reside in extremely hard to reach places instead, and leaving achievements/trophies for how many the user could collect. Gameplay lengthening through a cheap tactic like this is never appreciated, and it's one of my main pet peeves with the video game industry right now.

One minor note that is impossible not mention. Turning the cranks. I frequently found myself dropping huge strings of curses at the impossibility to consistently press the right button to turn a crank. I would rotate the joystick in the direction that I wanted the Prince and Elika to turn the crank, and it was about a 50/50 chance that the crank would actually turn that way. This left me absolutely dumbfounded, as the same exact cranks have been in the Prince of Persia series since Sands of Time, and have worked with the joystick since then, yet using the joystick in this game to operate them is basically left to chance that you will actually turn it the right way.

All in all this game is very average. The platforming is fun but lacks the depth of the previous games. The combat is absolutely awful and is far and away the worst of all of the Prince of Persia games, which is really saying something since the worst part of Sands of Time was the combat.

In conclusion, it's starting to look like die-hard fans of the Sands of Time game will never get a similar experience again... Myself included.

⭐