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I came to Mass Effect late, only playing it for the first time last year, but I was pretty impressed with it and really enjoyed the storyline and setting that Bioware created.  My attitude towards its sequel, prior to last month, was positive, but not overwhelmingly so.  I wasn't keeping up on the press and everything too much, though I was considering preordering for the bonus items.

Dragon Age changed everything for me, I think.  That game completely blew me away when I was just sort of lukewarm on it, mostly because Bioware had spent so much time creating the setting and the story, and made me realize how much I really craved that kind of story-driven gameplay, and just how good Bioware had gotten at it.  In retrospect, that has really been in evidence since KotOR and the first Mass Effect, but I think Dragon Age solidified it as a trend in my mind.  I started paying a lot more attention to the coverage of Mass Effect at places like Giant Bomb and threads on RPGnet, and from the teasers that were trickling out, I really started getting excited about the game; I did end up preordering Mass Effect right before the release date, just to get the bonus content.

But does it stand up to the hype?  Let's face it, Mass Effect 2 has been promoted to hell and back, probably to a nearly-unprecedented level.  It would have to be pretty friggin' awesome to live up to that.

And yet, I think Mass Effect 2 does, by and large, live up to the hype.  Nearly everything I didn't like about the first game has been fixed.  The storyline is excellent, despite a few small failings, and for the most part I think your companions are more interesting and more developed than in the first game.  A lot of the accounting-style RPG trappings that were in Mass Effect (and in Dragon Age), like the ginormous (and often painful) inventory management, the complicated power management, and the annoying collection quests, have been ripped out and replaced with much more streamlined systems, giving Mass Effect a much smoother storyline -- you don't feel like the game is dragging you down with boring stuff for the most part, you're always moving from one cinematic moment to the next.  Here's my breakdown (spoilers after the break):

The Good

• Again, the writing in Mass Effect 2 is superb, and it's accompanied by some excellent voice acting.  While there's not really any Dragon Age-style banter between your companions, sadly, characters do have different stuff to say on missions, and the dialogue system from the first game is back and works very well.  The incidental dialogue you run into throughout the game is excellent, and often completely hilarious -- especially on the Citadel.  The commercials and stuff really undersell the writing of the game, very similar to the crazy Marilyn Manson trailer for Dragon Age; characters are far deeper than they seem, and this is revealed through "loyalty missions" that each character has that focuses on their backstory.
  
• Importing your character from the original game does not give you a ton of tangible bonuses, but the game does an excellent job of calling back to your choices in the first game.  Choices you made and quests you finished into the first game, even if they may have seemed relatively minor, crop up in various ways throughout the second game, some more significant than others.  Your companions from the first game show up in various places (assuming they survived), and all seem to have been profoundly affected in one way or another by their time with you.  Surprisingly, the one major exception from this was the romance subplot from the first game -- my Shepard had romanced Liara in the first game, and by and large that was forgotten in the second game, aside from her picture on my desk in my cabin and a more-than-just-friends kiss when we met up again.
• Mass Effect 2 introduces conversation interrupts (at least, I don't remember these from the first game), which really add to the game's cinematic feel.  During conversations, you will sometimes get the option for a Paragon or Renegade interrupt, which lets you make a move rather than just sitting there passively.  The bad guys have you in a Mexican stand-off while they monologue to your face?  A Renegade interrupt might be to just shoot him in the head.  One of your companions about to kill someone because they're flying into a rage?  A Paragon interrupt might be to grab their arm and knock them aside.  Most conversations with interrupts will probably only have a Renegade or a Paragon option, but rarely both.  They really keep you involved and on your toes in a conversation, rather than making it seem like a more passive experience, which definitely helps with the immersion.
• Combat is much more kinetic and seemed a lot more exciting to me in ME2 than in the original game; there are some issues I have with it (see below), but in general I had a lot of fun with the fights and didn't seem to run into as many really annoying "die a lot" combats, at least on Normal difficulty, unlike with the original game, where the two climactic fights on the first planet your pointed to, Therum, killed my ass 5-6 times before I figured out what I needed to be doing.  The addition of clips in the game, instead of using heat like the first game, doesn't really make much sense from a story point of view, but it does force you to change your weapons up and move forward to get clips from fallen enemies, rather than sitting back and gunning them all down.
  
• The horrific inventory system from the first game is gone, gone, gone.  No longer are you juggling 900 different kinds of guns and armor to figure out what is best for everyone.  Instead, there's really only 2-3 guns of each type (aside from the 5-6 heavy weapons), and you find or buy upgrades to research as you go through the game.  Most of these upgrades cover everyone in your squad, not just you.  While some people have mourned the loss of the customizable upgrade system, I actually like the new one.  It makes the focus of the game the fun parts for me -- the story and the actual missions themselves, not arcane record keeping.  If Bioware stuck with this trend for future games, even for old-school RPGs like Dragon Age, I would not mourn the loss of fiddly bits much.
• The Mako is also gone, and Bioware has done pretty much what I asked for in my Mass Effect review -- I think there are fewer side missions, but they are definitely not all "go to this generic-looking pirate base and shoot a bunch of guys."  Missions, in general, are much more varied, many don't involve combat at all, instead focused on dialogue and story, or a minigame of some sort that relies more on a keen eye and your wits than simply the ability to kill people real dead.  Even the sidequests have their own environments that are not reused (at least, not to the ludicrous extent the ones in the first game were).  I've heard that there will be some DLC coming with missions involving some sort of hovertank, but Bioware seemed to have given up on the annoying Mako-style exploration and instead focused on putting you into the action right away, and thank god for that.
• Your new ship feels both very familiar and also bigger and better than the Normandy did, and your NPC crew is given a lot more flavor than they had in the first game, where you really only had Joker and Pressley with anything to say (other than your companions).  The same goes for most of the other locations you visit in the game.  In the first game, one of my big complaints was that aside from the Citadel, the major planets of the first game seemed a little lacking -- very bland and empty for places that were supposed to be bustling metropolises or well-developed colonies.  ME2 remedies that in a big way.  The major planets all feel very different, much "busier" and jam-packed with life.  Yes, for the most part they are all pretty small for what they are supposed to be, but I didn't expect Bioware to make the sci-fi version of Liberty City for every planet you land on -- the feel and atmosphere is excellently done (with a lot of help from the superb incidental dialogue you hear as you go through the game), and there's lots to do on every single one.
  
• Again, music and the actual cinematics in the game are superb and fit the game perfectly.  I do feel like they may have slightly overdone the cinematics -- so much of the game already feels like an awesome action movie that I wish they had replaced some of the cinematics with something more like what Valve does in Half-Life -- scripted sequences that you still take part in.  However, they are so well done that seems like a fairly minor quibble, and it really is only a problem at the very end of the game.  The one problem with the soundtrack I do have is that the version that comes with the Digital Deluxe version of the game is only half the actual soundtrack -- the version available on Amazon's MP3 store (which I ended up buying) has twice as many tracks.  This was the case with Dragon Age too, and I don't know why they can't just give you the whole thing when you're shelling out the 10-15 bucks extra.
• The romance plots are well done and less salacious than in ME1, thanks to the strength of the characters, and there are more options (three male and four female, I believe).  While it's not up to the quality of the ones in Dragon Age, nor is it as tied into the game, but they are a bit of a step up over the original.  Bioware appears to have done without the even the tame "explicitness" of the sex scene in the first game and just fades to black at an appropriate moment (which didn't bother me at all).  Unlike in Dragon Age, though, there's not really any same-sex romance options (aside from one, less-developed one for a female Shepard), which has caused some ire among people on RPGnet; it didn't bother me too much, even though I think I preferred the female love interests to the male love interests for the most part.  If it really bugs you, you can just avoid it entirely -- "no time for love, Commander Shepard!"
  

The Bad

• From what I hear, if you start a new character and don't import one from the first Mass Effect, you kind of get the shaft in regard to "your" choices in the first one.  You don't get to choose your origins, you didn't save the Council, Wrex died, and Udina is the human representative on the Citadel.  Most people I know who played the first game went for the extra opposite choices in most cases, so that really sucks.  If you haven't played the first game, and you want to play ME2, get the first game (it's not that expensive anymore, and Steam puts it on sale regularly for as little as five bucks) and play it so you can import your character.  You won't regret it.
• Character abilities have been very reduced both in size and effectiveness in the second game, which is kind of annoying.  Ammo types are now a power your character will get depending on his class; my Infiltrator got Cyro Ammo and Disruptor Ammo as powers, for instance.  Each biotic or tech character really only gets two powers (plus an additional one if you win their loyalty) and most don't work on shielded or armored enemies.  Since unshielded and unarmored enemies usually aren't that troublesome, this really diminishes their utility -- on the higher difficulty levels, nearly every enemy but the weakest of mooks has shields and/or armor, which makes these abilities almost useless.
• It is still very much a console port, and that has some annoying limitations.  Run, grab cover, vault over cover, and use all use the same button -- which sometimes caused problems for me; I still don't quite have the whole vaulting over cover thing down perfectly.  I can't really zoom out much from being right over my character's right shoulder, and it seems like I have a much more limited view than I had in the first game even, which can sometimes lead to problems with situational awareness, especially against melee enemy swarms, such as husks.  All in all, I think I preferred Demiurge's port of the first one, which seemed to fit a lot better with the PC platform, to Bioware's very direct port of ME2.  It isn't bad or especially distracting, but it does feel a little lazy to me, especially considering the rather significant differences between the PC and console versions of Dragon Age.
• The prospecting minigame got to be a little tiresome.  In ME2, to build your upgrades, you need to get quantities of four different minerals, which requires you to visit a planet and scan it by dragging a sensor circle over the surface to find the minerals, then launch probes at it.  Unfortunately, partly due to my OCD tendencies in RPGs, I became obsessed with getting the minerals off every planet (because it marks it as explored after you visit it, and it's hard to tell without going there if you mined it or not), even after it became clear I was probably not going to need the half million units of palladium I was carrying around.  I think my playthrough took about 45 hours, and probably ten of that was just flying around getting minerals.  The fact that you have to buy fuel to travel between systems and you can only carry 30 probes with the option to expand to 60 later and it takes 10-20 probes to deplete a planet makes this a bit frustrating, especially since both items are only available in one system per cluster.  My suggestion -- don't overdo it.  Visit every planet to find the anomalies that represent a mission on that planet, but once you have 50-100k of an ore, don't feel like you need to do any prospecting unless you have a bunch of upgrades waiting, and don't bother mining gas giants unless you really need the more common minerals -- they usually have less of everything than rocky worlds and rarely if ever have Element Zero.  There is way more than enough minerals in the game for every upgrade you could want -- the limiting resource in ME2 is definitely credits, which are in short supply by the end of the game, largely due to the fact that you can't fund your mission by selling secondhand weapons and armor (the extra 100k credits you get from getting the Rich achievement in ME1 really come in handy, as it provides you probably 1-2 more upgrades at the very least).
• The missions in ME2 are much more discrete and end in a way that is more obviously game-y.  There's some good things about this -- you get experience for completing missions now, not killing things, so that means missions aren't as focused on combat necessarily (though it's still very much action/combat-centric) -- but at the end of every mission, instead of just heading back to your ship afterward, you get a summary screen where it tells you all the stuff you got and what you found out.  While this isn't done in a completely broken way (the mission summary is written as personal notes of your mysterious backer), it does yank you back into "oh yeah, this is just a game, not an awesome action movie" mode briefly.
• As much as I prefer the new way weapons and armor work, there are a couple issues I have.  There's really only 2-3 versions of each weapon, and they seem to have a progression of normal-better-best (though the difference between them is not nearly as pronounced as you might think) -- but it's not really clear if that is the case.  Heavy weapons are slightly different, since there are 6-7 different options, but there is one that you get fairly early on that is very good in nearly every situation, while the others are more specialized -- a flamethrower is really good against lots of swarming enemies, but won't really help you against a heavy mech or gunship, whereas a rocket launcher is the opposite.  Because you never really know exactly what you're going to run into, the all-purpose weapon tended to be what I used most of the time.  Armor had a different issue, the biggest one being that ME2 does not have a "remove helmets" option in its settings, and the DLC armors (which are much better than your default at first) all have helmets, means that you can't see your character's face at all.  When one of Mass Effect's big attractions to me is that characters have excellent "facial acting," that really sucks.  By the middle of the game, I'd found enough armor upgrades that the default N7 armor was comparable, and I switched to a headpiece that didn't obscure my face simply to avoid this problem.  The DLC armors are also not customizable like the N7 set, and that's another reason I didn't really like them.
• Probably the biggest problem I had with the game is that there is time limit with the game that may not be particularly easy for people to pick up on if they haven't read discussions online -- one with real consequences to the game as opposed to the immersion-breaking, you-need-to-go-to-Ilos-right-away-but-really-you-can-do-side-missions-for-a-while endgame start that Virmire is in ME1.  At one point during ME2, you're given a mission to go recover a certain Reaper artifact; when you're given the mission, you can choose to do it right away or keep building your team.  At that point, I highly recommend saying you will keep building your team -- once you go on the mission to recover the artifact, you will only have a limited amount of time (usually not more than enough for one or two missions) before an event happens which pushes you towards the endgame.  Waiting to do the endgame mission at that point will slowly push the game towards a bad ending, or at least a more bloody one.  I suggest doing what I did -- get all the companions you can, do all their loyalty missions, and do as much exploring as you want to do before you go get the Reaper artifact, because after you do that, it opens up another mission you will probably want to do before you go to the endgame, and if you have lots of missions to do after that, you won't get a chance.  I wish Bioware had made this more clear, but it can just sneak up on you and I have seen many people get pretty miffed about running into this time limit.  Yes, I understand why Bioware did it -- story-wise, it makes good sense.  Unfortunately, for people who are completionists in RPGs, it can really piss them off, like the time limits in the original Fallout.
• The lead villain in ME2 is not nearly as good as Saren or Sovereign were in ME1, perhaps the one place where a character from ME2 falls short of his predecessors.  From the ending, it seems likely that he will return in the future of the franchise, but you don't really become personally engaged with him like you did with the villains of the first piece.  Unlike Saren or Sovereign, you never really confront him personally, nor does he have a personal hand in striking against you.  I understand letting him be in the background for now as setup for ME3, but I wish they would have added a Saren-analogue you could confront and deal with to get some personal satisfaction as opposed to making the threat largely impersonal.  As it is, I had a more satisfyingly antagonistic relationship with the man backing my secret mission than I did with the "real" villain.
• The Digital Deluxe version (from Steam, as well as other online places) does not really give you that much stuff over the normal version.  For ten extra bucks, you get some weapons that are good, but not really that much better than what you can get in the game, some armor that (as I said above) I wasn't really fond of anyway, an art book PDF (which fell far short of the hardcopy art book for ME1), soundtrack MP3s that make up about half the tracks on the MP3 "album" available on Amazon (which goes for 12 bucks and has everything you get here and more), the 30 minute documentary I believe was broadcast on SyFy (which doesn't really give you anything you probably didn't already know), and the first issue of the ME comic series that shows what happened between the games (which if you really want, you'll probably just wait and get the TPB of anyway).  Honestly, while I don't feel screwed for getting the Digital Deluxe version, I don't think it is really worth the money.  Unlike with Dragon Age, you don't get any DLC adventures/locations you'd have to pay for otherwise.  For the vast majority of people, even hardcore fans, I'd say you'll be perfectly happy with the normal version of ME2.
  

For all those problems, though, Mass Effect 2 is still probably one of the best games I'm likely to see this year -- it far exceeds the bar set by the original game and is filled with awesome gameplay, story, and detail that draws you in quickly and does not let go.  If you are looking for a good RPG, Mass Effect 2 is definitely worth picking up, especially if you prefer sci-fi or console RPGs, where Dragon Age isn't as good an option.  Both are excellent games with superb production values, and I still think Dragon Age is a bit more superior, but if I had to choose between one or the other I certainly wouldn't feel cheated if I had taken Mass Effect 2.

If you're looking for more spoilerific information, you can look behind the fold -- just beware, a lot of events will not have quite the impact if you know what's coming.

When Valve announced Left 4 Dead 2 last year, I was not particularly happy to hear it.  Being a fan of TF2, I had purchased the original at the full price largely on the expectation that it would receive the same sort of content updates that Team Fortress 2 was getting (and is still getting).  While I wasn't quite ready to jump on the boycott wagon, I was happy enough with the original Left 4 Dead for all my zombie-killing needs that I wasn't going to pay full price for L4D2 when I could just wait 6-12 months and get it for half price.

My brother, however, purchased it right away and was overjoyed -- and despite my lukewarm feelings about the title, he bought it for me for Christmas.  I admit that at the time I wasn't rushing to play the game -- I had just finished Dragon Age, I was picking up things right and left from the Steam holiday sale (Rome and Medieval 2: Total War have eaten up far too much of my time over the last couple weeks) and I figured L4D2 was pretty much going to be more of the same with regard to zombie-killing.

Reaching the point of burnout with Total Warring for the moment, late last week I picked up the game and tried it out for the first time, and I have to admit that my preconceptions were pretty wrong.  Far from simply feeling like an attempt to cash in by selling a half-baked sequel to a successful game, Left 4 Dead 2 actually goes back and makes the original Left 4 Dead feel like a half-baked pilot project rushed out before its time.  I'm not sure if that is better or worse, but I think the ire would have been a lot less pronounced if Valve had treated it that way, selling the original game at a much lower price point (25 bucks or so) to start, and marketing Left 4 Dead 2 as "the real game," though the 50 dollar pricetag still seems out of whack -- the $33 price during the holiday sale would have been about perfect though.

What makes me say this?  In the original L4D, the various campaigns were well-made but seemed very workmanlike.  Everything was very straightforward; each stage generally progressed in the same way, the finale events were all very similar, and even the environments were not particularly all that different.  L4D2 shows evidence that the team behind the game had become comfortable with the tools -- instead of just making levels in the way of the previous game, they are using the various building blocks of the game to change the way the game is played in a very significant way.  Each of the four campaigns in L4D2 feels very distinct from the others, and generally plays at least somewhat differently as well.

The Hard Rain campaign probably exemplifies this best; it has several new gameplay elements that make it stand out as a significant departure from the original L4D formula:

• Instead of progressing through the stages in a linear fashion, you go from start to finish and back again, with the items and such remaining persistent -- if you take all the health kits on the way to the gas station you're going to, they won't be there when you have to go back from the gas station to the boat.  This adds a lot of economizing to the gameplay and forces people to make some difficult choices, especially on the harder game settings.
• While the above might seem like a cop out, as a way to only design half the levels in order to get a full campaign, on the way back to the boat from the gas station you're in the middle of a hellish storm, and much of the terrain you went through before is flooded.  Walking through the water slows you down, so you need to stick to the higher ground -- walking on catwalks, roofs, and other stuff.  The storm picks up into a furious, pelting rain at random points as well, usually accompanied by a slavering horde of zombies; having been in some really bad storms myself, Valve did a good job making the atmosphere during this part really evoke that feeling.
• The second part of the campaign takes place in an abandoned sugar mill heavily populated with Witches, including the new type that wanders around.  This definitely forces you to play in a very different fashion in order to avoid setting off one or more of them.  There definitely seem to be fewer of them on the return trip, but the added problems with visibility (and hearing) in the storm make those that remain all the more dangerous.  This new arrangement of familiar gameplay elements happens in the other campaigns as well, and really raises the bar for the level design from where it was in the original game.

Hard Rain has a similar ending to the finales of the original L4D campaigns, where you have to hold out for your ride after signaling for the boat to come pick you up, but it is different (as the designers pointed out in an interview I saw) because there's really no place for you to bunker down and hold off the horde, whereas that was generally the plan in the original, to the point where one of the main tactics for the endgame finales there was to hunker down in a closet, at least prior to some patches that made that more difficult.  Other campaigns have different crescendo events that depart from the "hold off the horde" formula as well, though it does still fall back on that to some extent.  Still, if you think you've been there, done that after the original game, L4D2 will creep up on you with some new twists and turns.

On top of those deeper differences, Valve has added a layer of creamy frosting.  L4D2 adds new weapons, including melee weapons and variations of the guns that were in the original, as well as new types of special Infected.  While I don't think these add as much to the game as the new campaigns, you definitely need to do some readjustment when you start playing.  Melee weapons are necessary in some places like the mill in Hard Rain or one part of the Parish campaign where you emerge in a giant lot of alarmed cars, where one misplaced shot can bury you in neverending hordes of zombies.

The new special Infected add some gameplay wrinkles too.  In the first one you could get situations where a Smoker might drag you into a Witch or Boomer, making your life a bit difficult.  L4D2 adds the Spitter, which belches persistent acid at the players, which can be a real pain in constrained spaces or when you get attacked by the Jockey, another new Infected which jumps on your head and forces you to move in whatever direction it feels like -- often into a pool of the aforementioned acid.  There are also Chargers, which barrel into you, knocking you across the map like a Tank, and then pick you up and pummel you similar to a Hunter.  While I haven't played any Versus games (I tend to prefer the campaign missions, I admit), I suspect a good Infected team can play merry havoc with the Survivors with the right combination.

As far as the rest of the game goes, everything I liked from the original is back in the new one; the cinematic tones, the fun character interaction, and the excellent set dressing are all still very much present, and the fact that the scenarios are a little more varied allows them to show more of the game's setting and flesh it out a little more.  The campaigns now have a clear progression, whereas the campaigns in the original were largely separate; in L4D2, the survivors are making their way from Savannah, GA to New Orleans, each campaign being another step along that path.  If you play them in order, this adds a bit to the verisimilitude, if that's your thing (not everyone plays their FPSes for story though, let's face it).  The characters are all at least as fleshed out as the protagonists of the original game, and they are all very different from their L4D counterparts.

So yes, I am overwhelmingly positive on L4D2; if L4D wasn't just a year old and L4D2's price point was lower, I would tell you to run out and buy this title right away if the premise sounded at all appealing.  As it is, I can't really say that -- if you're happy with L4D, you can wait for L4D2 to go on sale in order to pick it up.  I have no doubt that there will be another sale at least as good as the holiday sale on the game in the next six months.  On the other hand, if you don't own L4D, L4D2 is worth getting if you enjoy cooperative shooters and probably worth paying full price, especially if it does get more DLC in the future; the first add-on for L4D2 has already been announced (a campaign involving the survivors from both games), and Valve has released the SDK for player-made content (which is also good for making L4D add-ons, if I understand correctly).  You're pretty much guaranteed to have a good time if you can find a good group of players, and it shouldn't be that difficult if you use the Steam community features.

Well, I haven't blogged in a while, and the biggest culprit for that has been Bioware's new fantasy RPG, Dragon Age: Origins.  Deirdre gave it to me a few weeks ago as an early Christmas present (and vice versa), and I have been playing the hell out of it.  I beat it for the first of what will probably be several times with 65 hours of play time, according to the in-game counter (not including saves and restores).

Initially, I had been very cool on the game; fantasy RPGs are not really my favorite genre, though I have fond memories of the Baldur's Gate series.  The marketing campaign, which seemed focused on the sex and violence rather than on a strong story, did not really do a good job of convincing me that the game was going to be my cup of tea either.  However, reviews were extremely positive for the most part, Bioware is one of the few developers still in my "I will buy anything from them" list, and Deirdre (who had followed the game much longer than I had) was pretty excited about it, so I was cautiously optimistic.

Does the game hold up to the hype?  Well, to say the game is flawless would be a mistake; there were parts of the game that were pretty frustrating for me, and the game's plot is not particularly original, but it is superbly written, drawing you into Ferelden and holding you there.  Dragon Age may be my favorite Bioware RPG now, and possibly close to my favorite RPG period, though I think it falls short of the Black Isle heyday.  If you are at all interested in fantasy RPGs, Dragon Age should be a must-buy, especially if you are willing to put up with some gameplay annoyances for the sake of a good (if not entirely innovative) story with strong characters and a beautifully crafted setting.

As usual, this will be a two-part review, with spoilers behind the cut.

The Good:

• As usual with Bioware RPGs, the writing in this game is excellent, even if the story and characters are not entirely original.  Shamus Young has posted a good article on this subject on the Escapist (here's his note on his blog about it), and I agree with most of his points, but Dragon Age feels like it steps beyond the writing in Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic to me.  There's a few specific cases I'll note later, but in general, characters have much deeper and complex motivations and your actions have more consequences.  NPC banter is great to listen to and even more than Mass Effect, I'm disappointed I can only bring a few characters with me in any one place.
• As in Mass Effect, the background material for the game is extensive and the world building in the game is well-done.  One minor issue is that the Codex now gets some quest-specific entries instead of just optional background material; if you don't read some of the Codex entries, you can miss out on fairly important or at least helpful game information.  The various cultures seem fairly well thought out and most seem like more than just usual fantasy tropes or historical analogues, though there's a fair share of those too.  Ferelden is clearly a sort of "not-Britain" and Orlais "not-France," but elves are not exactly nature-loving, immortally wise tree-huggers and dwarven culture, while bearing some surface similarities to Tolkien-esque tropes, is quite different under the surface.
• If you like romance subplots, but inwardly groan when you think back to some of Bioware's previous attempts, especially for female PCs, Dragon Age will probably be a pleasant surprise.  There's a wide range of possibilities, and the "good guy" romance option is not nearly as angst-ridden as say, Carth in KotOR or Kaidan in Mass Effect.  Unlike in Mass Effect, where I wasn't really that interested in any of the love interests, the romance subplot in Dragon Age actually made a difference to how I played the game, including a few key choices I had to make.
• Dragon Age's tutorial-style origin stories are a great evolution of Mass Effect's "your origin affects the game" idea.  While in Mass Effect that simply changed a few NPC lines of dialogue and gave you a new mission or two, in Dragon Age it changes the entire way you play the first hour or so of the game, and touches almost every part of how some NPCs interact with you.  Many of the subplots in the various parts of the game are much more meaningful if you have played through the origin story related to them.  This adds a lot to replay value, even if it largely only affects the dialogue and not necessarily the main thrust of the story.
• Dragon Age uses the "few major locations on a world map" style of Fallout and KotOR rather than the "few major locations with a bunch of shallow optional stuff in between" of Mass Effect, which seems to make for a much stronger game.  I don't think I ever found myself searching for subplots as in Mass Effect; even though there's plenty of quests to do not specifically related to the main plot, most of them take place in areas you will have to visit anyway.
  
• Dragon Age does a good job of making you and your companions feel like some serious badasses.  From time to time -- especially on the boss battles -- your characters will pull of some really awesome finishing moves, and the cinematics that punctuate the major victories in the game are pretty jawdropping.
• Dragon Age uses a Fallout-style ending sequence where the long-term repercussions of your actions are described after the game is over.  These are widely varied -- considerably more than the original Fallout, I think -- and change based both on your actions during the various quests and on your decisions around the endgame (mostly in dialogues).
• The tactics system is pretty neat, and I was able to come up with some decent settings for my characters that let me get a bit more hands off than I was in say, Baldur's Gate.  Some characters I could reliably not worry about, but mages especially still needed a fair bit of tweaking in order to ensure that they were being used properly.  Still, it was annoying to have to sacrifice other skills for tactics slots (though generally only on non-warrior characters) when you could simply micromanage everything if you wanted to.  Making people sacrifice abilities in game to compensate for the interface is rarely a design feature people appreciate.
• The game seems very modable, with Bioware having released the toolkit, and there's already wide variety of mods available to change everything from allowing you to respecialize characters to one that lets you make custom equipment to one that removes helmets from view (as in Mass Effect) with varying success.  Hopefully this means the game will have a good deal of longevity and we might even see some fan-made campaigns.
• As is usual for Bioware, the soundtrack for Dragon Age is quite good; thankfully, it is in the line of their previous work for Baldur's Gate and not the Marilyn Manson in the trailers.  I don't think it's quite as good as the Mass Effect soundtrack, but there's some tracks from it that are sticking with me, and it's entered my rotation of good fantasy soundtracks. 
  

The Bad

• The difficulty curve for Dragon Age has been described as a "sawtooth"; you will cut a swath through a horde of ravening darkspawn for a while, and then you will get into a boss battle or a "puzzle battle" (where the battle becomes a thousand times easier if you can figure out the one tactic that works best) that ends in a gory end for your entire party, resulting in some reloading to figure out how to win.  This was definitely my experience; I'm not particularly fond of boss battles in general, but there's a few that were incredibly frustrating to the point where I needed to take a break.
• Compounding the last issue is that the computer does not do a very good job of leveling up your companions when they join your party.  As is usual in many games, being specialized is far more powerful than being a generalist in Dragon Age, but pre-leveled characters generalize, making them much weaker than they could be.  If you get your "main companions" early on, this isn't as big an issue, but it can be annoying.  Morrigan, for instance, has the Shapeshifter specialization to start with, which is considerably less useful than the other three specializations, an issue when you can only pick up two mages to choose from in the game at all.  I am using a mod that allows you to respecialize characters and I highly recommend that for people playing on the PC.
• Magic, and particularly some of the spell combinations, seems really overpowered.  Fights that are nearly impossible without spells like Cone of Cold or Crushing Prison suddenly become far easier with them.  Prior to the last rebalancing patch, it was possible to completely lock down some of the bosses with repeated uses of stunning/paralyzing spells for the entire duration of the fights. I have heard of some people playing without mages at all, but I'm a bit surprised that's viable.
• Equipment overload is not as bad as in Mass Effect, but it is still a bit annoying that I am funding my world-saving quest by selling scavenged armor, and juggling my inventory was a serious pain during a few of the longer quest periods, such as in the forest ruin or the Deep Roads.  It isn't as bad as Mass Effect because it's much clearer what is generally better to use, but it's still a bit of a pain.  I really hope RPGs move away from this kind of loot mechanic in the future.  As an important tip, whenever backpacks are available at a shop, buy them as soon as possible.  The ten extra inventory slots will pay you back in pretty short order.
  
• Only being able to take three companions was a bit frustrating.  You generally need to take a tank (usually a sword and shield fighter), having a rogue to disable traps and open chests is a good idea (if not absolutely necessary), and you're probably going to want at least one mage for healing and/or crowd control with area-of-effect spells (and two is even better).  There's only two mages and two rogues in the game, and the rest are all basically fighters.  That really limits the options for a well-rounded party, especially when you want to bring certain party members with you on quests of special relevance to them.  Even just being able to have one more person would have made the game far easier to manage, and a wider variety of companions would have been welcome too.  As it is, I settled on the team of Alistair (a sword and shield fighter), Leiliana (a bowfighting rogue), Morrigan (a combat-oriented mage), and myself (a support/combat mage) very early on and rarely deviated; when I had to get rid of my rogue or one of my mages, it was pretty painful.  That really limits not only your strategies but also the banter and character subplots you can be involved with, which was really disappointing.  If you aren't a mage, you have even fewer choices, it seems.
• If you don't have much in the way of healing magic (and sometimes even if you do), many of the tough battles can boil down to bringing as many healing/mana potions as you can and chugging them like crazy.  Personally, I'd prefer fewer battles where this was the rule.
• There's a fair bit of annoying mook fights, necessitating that you fight through waves of darkspawn, or cultists, or some other generally-annoying-but-not-that-tough guys to get to the main set-piece battles.  Some of these are genuinely tough, simply because of the number of enemies you have to fight (many of which are archers or mages, which can be really a pain).  This can cause some serious slowdowns in the game's pacing, and doesn't do great things for the verisimilitude since for the most part they are just guys standing around waiting to fight you, with no other real reason to be there.  This is, unfortunately, a staple of a lot of RPGs (Mass Effect's final stages are another example), but there needs to be some more thought applied to the level design to avoid this kind of annoyance.
• The blood effects are a bit extreme.  It's not a giant complaint, but it's a little weird to see a cut scene where you're talking with someone calmly while you're covered head-to-toe in blood spatter.  The game wouldn't really lose much if this was toned down (or even turned off, as you can do).
  

Appendix: Downloadable Content

I got the "Digital Deluxe" edition of Dragon Age, which comes with some extra downloadable content.  Every purchased copy of Dragon Age comes with The Stone Prisoner, but the Digital Deluxe version from Steam comes with a few extra bits (some armor and some other items) as well as Warden's Keep.  The Digital Deluxe edition also comes with a set of wallpapers and the entire Dragon Age soundtrack.

The Stone Prisoner was originally intended to be included with the base game but was pushed out when they thought they didn't have enough time to finish it before release.  It is an excellent bonus to the game, as Shale, the golem companion you can get in the town it adds, is very tightly integrated into the rest of the game, especially the dwarven kingdom area.  Shale has nearly as much dialogue and character interaction scripted as the other companions, and is definitely a useful addition to your team.  The new areas this DLC adds will probably add another couple hours of gameplay as well.  I'd say it was well worth getting, but if you have a legitimate copy it should be free for you anyway, so there's no reason not to pick it up.  If you buy Dragon Age used, however, you will have to purchase it separately; I don't know if it is worth $15 if you do (you're probably better off just buying a new copy from Steam or something instead, since I doubt you'll get Dragon Age for less than 25 dollars used for a while).

Warden's Keep is much more self-contained than The Stone Prisoner; it adds a single new area for the game, which is basically a dungeon that will take you an hour or two to complete.  It also adds a number of very good items (the best sword in the game and some very good armor for the level you happen to get it at), as well as a "party chest," something that really should have been included in the game to start at your camp, and not at a static location (there is in fact a mod to do just that already, so the DLC is not necessary for that).  Seven dollars is a pretty reasonable price for what you get.  I'm not sure I like the way that Bioware is trying to get you to buy the content for this one (see the Penny Arcade on the topic) but because it was already included in my version it didn't really affect me.  I do hope that future DLC is much more like The Stone Prisoner, however, and integrates into the rest of the game rather than just being a bit awkwardly bolted on.  I'm not holding my breath though, since that's a lot more work (which is reflected in The Stone Prisoner's significantly higher price tag).

The extra items in the Digital Deluxe edition are handy, but not necessarily all that.  There are items in the game that you can find or purchase from merchants that are easily almost as good (though I admit the Blood Dragon Armor does look pretty badass).  Don't feel like they are must-haves.

Back in August or September, the demo for Tropico 3 was released on Steam.  I'd heard of the original Tropico, but I'd never played it when it originally came out.  Being moderately interested in the premise, the fact that the demo was free and I didn't have anything else to mess with at the time, I checked it out.

The last few weeks have been exciting ones for fans of old-school adventure games.  Last week, LucasArts brought several of their classic adventure games to Steam (as well as some of their other games, which I am less excited about) in a move I am going to tentatively call "genius."  I've been wondering when they were going to do something with their old catalog, which had been languishing for years despite some legacy CDs published a while ago.  The LucasArts adventures were the pinnacle of the adventure gaming genre, and it's disappointing that the genre has sort of faded into obscurity since the late 90s (much like space sims, sadly).

The four they've released so far -- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Loom, and The Dig, were all SCUMM games, which was one of the best adventure game systems of its time, and those games continued to stay alive thanks to ScummVM.  However, they are hard to find these days, at least legally -- and now I can buy it through Steam and have access to them from anywhere, which is nice.

Of those four, Fate of Atlantis is probably my favorite -- it feels far more like an Indy game than the last movie felt like an Indy movie.  But my favorites of the SCUMM games were the Monkey Island games; and tomorrow, LucasArts will be releasing The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition, which updates the classic first game in that series with new graphics, sound, and a UI overhaul.


The best part is the price -- $10!  It's a steal, especially if you never played the game when it came out.  I admit I don't know how I feel about the new graphics; I think my favorite look for the game, artistically, is the cartoon-style art from the Curse of Monkey Island (Monkey Island 3).  Still, this is something that people have been asking for from a lot of classic games for a long time -- X-Com, for instance, which has seen a lot of "remakes" but none that quite capture the feel of the original.

Last week also brought the first of a new series of Monkey Island games from Telltale Games, a team that includes many of the original Monkey Island developers.  I have played through the first episode, and I'm not sure how I feel about it.

As I said, I preferred the art style of CMI, and the new games have one much more like Escape from Monkey Island (albeit much better looking), which I just feels....wrong to me somehow.  I know it's much easier to publish for, but it just feels like something is "off" about the look.  There is also a new voice actor for LeChuck, I believe, and at least in this first episode, he doesn't seem as good as the original -- to be honest, a lot of the voice acting in the new one seems a little lackluster, though I know some of that is because it has a much lower budget than the original games.

Overall, though, the first episode, while short, has some good moments and the puzzles are not bad.  The one complaint I have is about a series of auditory puzzles that mean it's pretty much impossible for one of my friends, who is hearing-impaired, to play the game.  This was disappointing, since she was a big fan of the first four, and I hope Telltale thinks about this sort of thing in the future.  It wouldn't be so bad if there was a way to turn on some sort of subtitles -- maybe that's something that can be retrofitted later.

The writing is not bad, but, sadly, I don't think it's quite up to the level of the originals (though I think my problems with the voice acting and perhaps a little of the character design are influencing my thoughts in this regard).  There were a few laugh-out-loud moments, but not nearly as many as in the first 2-3 hours of the other Monkey Island games.  It's probably hard to catch the lightning in a bottle of Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer, but I really hope they get better in the next four episodes.  It has been done before, after all:

Overall, I'd say it's worth the roughly seven bucks (5 episodes for 35 dollars), but honestly, for your gaming dollar, if you haven't played them, get the classics first!