Woah woah, wait a second. I bought a new shirt in 2000 too!
Dragon Age: I know what's the absolute worst thing about this game compared to Mass Effect!
You can't be a douchebag!
In adventure games and wRPGs, unless you're
really drawn into the game and the problems of its world, the amount of fun you're having is DIRECTLY proportional to how much of a dick you are. Being a nice guy is cool the first few times, but it becomes very repetitive fast. Finish some guy's quest perfectly, the guy's happy and gives you something, etc. There's no interesting writing in it, no particular fun, and after the 100th time no feeling of accomplishment anymore. Being a douche is often a lot more varied: Steal an unconscious man's gear before helping him, put poison in someone's drink, blackmail people, sell a kid to slavery, lie about being a doctor then do a half assed job and ask to get paid for it, punch a journalist because you've had enough of her disingenous assertions, etc.
In Dragon Age, every NPC has an approval rating. Be a dick to someone and the game will like you less. This affects combat performance and whether or not they stay in your team, so this is a big deal. The game has given hundred opportunities to mock Alistair, and I can't use them!! There seems to be a lot of quests you can miss if you're being too much of a dick, too. Which makes sense, but it's no fun.
Fortunately, you can use a team of assholes then not care about being a douche to NPCs, but you still have to be very nice to those team members of your team in private conversations. And that's not enough.
Gray Matter (360, PC)
The main character, a young magician named Sam, gets lost on the trip to London and finds herself near Oxford. She's broke and doesn't know where she'll sleep. Eventually she finds a big manor. A young woman, who claims to be the new assistant to the doctor living inside, is about to enter the manor, but she seems terrified by the manor. The heroine quickly scares the hell out of her then take her place.
Wow. Way to be a douche at the very start of a game. Great job.
Turns out the pay is good enough and living in the manor is nice. Sam stays there for a while, assisting Dr Styles, who lost his wife a few years ago but who's now trying to contact her in any way he can, thinking that her ghost might still in the manor. Sam's first job is to find 6 students to work on brain activities. Then the weird stuff starts happening.
Sam's a very nice girl overall, but she's a magician; the nature of the game implies that you'll perform a variety of tricks and deceptions on people throughout the whole game.
This is a standard serious adventure point and click game, but it's very hard to find one nowadays. The storyline is, as expected, intriguing and well written, though it never gets exceptional. Unexpected is how weird and kinda extravagant it turns out later on.
There's kind of a melancholy to the game, helped by the gorgeous still backgrounds and Oxford's architecture and style. Dr Styles (who's the main character in a few short chapters) is a broken man, his goals are desperate, and Sam's attempts to communicate with him often end badly.
Controls on the Xbox are strange. There's no pointing and clicking. Move the joystick and a wheel appears, highlighting the name of every item you can interact with. Simply select an item and your character will run to it and interact. This makes the game feel different and more accessible than every other game in the genre, as it completely eliminates pixel hunting. (and puzzles/enigmas aren't too hard) As far as I'm concerned, this is a step in the right direction (I hate being stuck in those games), but an awkward one. There's no pixel hunting in the PC version either, you can press a button to see which items you can interact with. But you're not forced to use it if you like this sort of thing.
Hard game to dislike if you're semi-interested in it. PC version is better.
