I love the idea of putting an Intuition button in your game, but doubt I'd enjoy any game that included an Intuition button. What a terrible and completely irrelevant dilemma.

Mass Effect 2 Postmortem

I finished ME 2 a few days ago and have come away from it convinced that Bioware has on it's payroll a coven of dangerous psionics with direct access to my mind.

I've never found loot-lust compelling, I've always been a sucker for narrative, and though I enjoy an epic adventure there's a razor's edge between a satisfying, fully immersive experience and tedium.

Though most modern releases that exceed the 20-30 hour mark give the player some ability to truncate their experience, I have a fairly serious OCD complex that drives me to experience every last bit of available content. The problem with this compulsion is that I almost inevitably become bored with a game well before thoroughly exhausting it. and end up trudging through the last 10-50 hours out of some ill-founded sense of loyalty.

Imagine my delight, then, upon discovering that the techno-priests at Bioware had crafted a game that balances almost perfectly on that edge. Though I lost my appetite for canvassing every square inch of planetary mass that might yield resources well before I'd finished scanning them all, I felt no guilt in bypassing the last few systems. It's the possibility that somewhere in the vast abyss of untapped content might lie something awesome that triggers my OCD. EDI's soothing presence, assuring me that a given planet held nothing anomalous, quelled those demons and let me push the narrative ahead free of the shackles of consumer guilt.

Every time I sat down in front of my PC prepared to play I did so to satisfy a powerful craving, and not out of obligation. I can't say the same for Dragon Age, or Neverwinter Nights 2, or any of the Final Fantasies. I hope this perfect balance metastasises through the rest of that honorable studio and then relentlessly infects every corner of the industry, so that all games eventually become optimally designed to feed directly into the pleasure center of my brain.

War whilst the Sun is Rising

I've been dabbling in Dawn of War 2 lately and it's had the odd effect of making me crave a traditional RTS, a genre I've been burnt out on since the early aughts. In fact, the only reason I decided to give DoW 2 a look was because it was very non-traditional.

But at some point tonight when I was wading through a vast green sea of angry Tyranid I began to crave the ability to lay down a nice barracks, perhaps a wall or two. Maybe harvest some quantity of Unobtanium or some similarly ludicrous resource.

Don't get me wrong, the premise is charming: a squad-based isometric game with heavy RPG mechanics and the trappings of a strategic meta-game. I think part of the reason I'm not totally infatuated with it is because I'm getting echoes of Dragon Age, which I spent over a hundred hours playing and with which I'm thoroughly exhausted. I suppose I'm not fully ready for another game where I pause the action, issue orders to individual characters, and watch passively while they're carried out.

I'm not done with it, certainly, and I'm enjoying my time with it. But there are moments, like tonight, where my thoughts stray irresistibly towards Tiberium.

-a

By the rationale that GTA encourages gang activity and violence against prostitutes, The Tudors is inspiring our children to seduce women, marry them, cheat on them, annul their marriages, accuse them of treason/witchcraft, and behead them. Shame on you, Showtime.