John Lemon

.... People like this are worse than the people who some in this thread are accusing to be sexist. How are these portrayals porn actresses? How? I mean I would understand if it was a model joke but why does everyone go immediately to porn or prostitution? Are you that dense? Actually, I'd agree with RPGmaster's statement. I'm of the opinion that there's far too many female characters in games whose appearance is designed to provide "eye candy" for the player. For some incomprehensible reason, this design decision spills over to armouring where the women in question must expose as much skin as possible, yielding the porn actress look. Case in point: what Calax, Bos Hybrid and Mera posted. Bare midriff, cleavage, plate armour bikinis and the bastard offspring of a cheongsam and miniskirt. I have a suspicion you'll have a harder time finding NFL players in overtly sexualized clothing than finding than women in bikini armour.

I... But... It... Just... Oh, wait, it's a February 8th article. In other news: VGChartz sales figures for DA2 shows a rather large decline in sales. It looks like a radiation decay graph right now.

But you have to pay extra cash for that one! And I mean real-life money! Well, when you marry someone IRL, you don't exactly get free sex either...

I am confus. Gauntlet construction points to Gothic style of armouring, but those tend to come with sallets and unless I miss my guess that's an armet, which is normally found on Milanese suits. Also, that's a guy in the armour.

Yes. Most rude. I already have to pay for bandwidth to go on the internet, I can live without an Obsidian Entertainment forum toll. You had more trouble with pairs than 10 second frogger? The minigames were so much more lenient in ME2. Just tune your mouse sensitivity a bit. I found ME2 to be rather sluggish when it came to aiming, but tweaking the sensitivity does wonders for things like that. It's no different from say, Fallout: New Vegas or Oblivion. Besides, how are you expected to see an NPC's facial expression and admire Morrigan's sneer from fifty meters away?

You do realize that vampires in the witcher are downright fugly, right? Particularly the other two involved in said foursome.

Because he felt like it?

CD Projekt's new title.

Could someone tell me what the hell makes people do this? I did the same with Doom 3, hated it from start to finish (except the hell section) but still played it through, like I had some weird duty to do that because I loved the first two I've heard analogies that compare starting a video game to starting to read a book, but I see a better comparison in watching a car crash. You know what's going to happen, you know you probably won't like it, but you still feel a desire to find out what happens in the end. I think I see your problem with Alpha Protocol. HP sink bosses aren't exactly a great idea either, nor is increasing the pace of everything happening without a corresponding reduction in cooldowns on active skills. Chalk it up to bile fascination, it accounts for most of the views crap like Quarter-Life: Halfway to Destruction and My Immortal get. It leaves a giant cliffhanger, and the disappearing hero act got old in KotOR.

Watched the and a newer gameplay video, still too much pirouetting and rolling around for my tastes, but the swords look less generic over exaggerated fantasy and closer to Albion's next generation line. Win some, lose some, I guess. Improved inventory system is good, though I wonder whether they still limit you to one steel sword, one silver sword and armour dependent slots for heavy and light weapons in the inventory. Igni and Aard look to have been changed from arcs to on-hits, Yrden is now a one use trap, Axii requires a channeled cast to convert the enemy, but I didn't see Quen in either video, I assume it's not much changed from the Witcher. Also not seeing the group style or some of the more exaggerated strong and fast style moves in either gameplay demonstration, hopefully the devs realized how ridiculous they looked. I'm a bit wary of the combat since that targeting system looks suspiciously similar to the one used in DA2 for consoles. One thing though, I don't understand why everyone and their mother decided to go for a minimalist UI. I saw it in ME2, DA2 and now the Witcher 2's been bitten by the same bug?

There's an option to toggle persistent gore, but nothing to toggle the consistency of enemies from between Jell-O and human. C'est la vie.

The characters, romances and story are uniquely Bioware, but the art style, repetition, respawning enemies and ridiculous gore are copied from anime, Warhammer Fantasy and every budget game this side of the millennium. I suggest you try a harder difficulty and either edit your team's tactics or micromanage more instead of playing DA2 like an action RPG. I don't understand what you mean by enemies appearing into combat not happening often, since I can remember every night-time Kirkwall battle, every foray into Sundermount, every quest involving caves and every engagement in the Deep Roads somehow have enemies spawn right out of nowhere. Levelling up beyond level 20 in DA2 is a bad idea, ideally you want to hit Act III End at level 20 so your equipment is either better than what you should be packing or at least not woefully obsolescent due to scaling equipment ratings, so that hampers character growth quite a bit. tl;dr: Don't play DA2 if you're looking for the fun of levelling up and exciting battles. You'd be better off playing Diablo 2, Torchlight or FATE. Playing a game != enjoying a game. I personally hated Dragon Age 2 for everything except the story, but I still finished the game out of a sense of gamer... honour? Obligation? Something, at any rate. Did I play it? Yes. Did I enjoy it? No. Would I rate it higher than a 4.0? No.

Yeah, text is always a pretty horrible medium for conveying sarcasm or sincerity. Anyway, Yahtzee reviewed Dragon Age 2. So basically a reskinned Dragon age 2 with battles involving the legions of /b/, Bioware fans and Obsidian fans. The darkspawn could be replaced by a foray into the strange lands of Metacritic where you find the plot McGuffin of the mystical "User review" button. The Qunari could be the upstanding moral guardians who insist that there should be no gore and LGB love. With one choosing between Obsidian vs. Bioware for the last act, of course.

Well, given that Fallout: New Vegas (Charting the rise to power of the Courier) beat Mass Effect 2 (Save the galaxy) to the WGA nominations for story and was nominated alongside it in the BAFTA awards, it would be somewhat awkward to explain if a reversal of focus [Dungeon siege 3 (Save the kingdom of Ehb) vs. Dragon Age 2 (Charting the rise to power of Hawke)] yielded the same results. ... am gonna be magnanimous and assume ignorance rather than codexian obfuscation. http://www.industrygamers.com/news/rocksta...rd-nominations/ HA! Good Fun! ps we will happily slam bioware, but only when they deserve the attention. Ah. I don't follow the awards news too much, I only check the results. I'll retract that statement then.

Well, given that Fallout: New Vegas (Charting the rise to power of the Courier) beat Mass Effect 2 (Save the galaxy) to the WGA nominations for story and was nominated alongside it in the BAFTA awards, it would be somewhat awkward to explain if a reversal of focus [Dungeon siege 3 (Save the kingdom of Ehb) vs. Dragon Age 2 (Charting the rise to power of Hawke)] yielded the same results.

I believe you mean the RPG codex review, where Vault Dweller complains about how persuasion was removed. He does mention that you usually rely on companions to do the persuading. I finished DA2 about 3 days ago. I'm going to have to say it's not quite worth getting. Gameplay-wise there is a lot of focus on combat, which is bad since the combat is tedious, repetitive, interminable, prosaic and every other synonym in the thesaurus I may have omitted. Random encounters are about as horrible as could be imagined. Respawning enemies out of nowhere, too many enemies per encounter, HP sink bosses, blatantly cheating enemies and the attempts to enforce MAD combine to yield a degree of tedium on par with reaching level 200 in Maplestory. Story-wise I'd say it's slightly above Bioware standard. Refer to chart for the usual beginnings. Originality arrives in the form of not actually joining some order, having an ebil antagonist or having to run to exactly four places to initiate act 3. The conflict is less "Row row fight da powah, save the world!" and more "**** happened on your doorstep, you're gonna have to deal with it", YMMV on this, but I found it great for harkening back to the BG series where all you wanted to do was find the guy who killed Gorion. Graphics-wise it's much improved thanks to the newer graphics engine. Fire looks good, animations look rather smoother but some textures could do with a bit of work. I'm not appreciative of the 'MY NAME IS HUGE" armour, fanservice heavy female companion armour or the Japanese approach to **** compensating weaponry though, I almost thought I'd bought Final Fantasy instead of Dragon Age 2. Speaking of which, the animations bear the hallmarks of too much anime and too little physics. Teleporting backstabs, swinging 7 foot long concrete slabs in a pirouette, swirly twirly cheerleader-y staff attacks kinda strains the belief that not everyone in Thedas has magical capabilities. The soundscape is... Very forgettable. I know it's Inon Zur and all, but none of the soundtracks managed to be as captivating as the music from Mass Effect 1 or 2. The sound effects are not quite what you'd expect to hear from something. E.g. the sound of staff attacks could easily be mistaken for a raygun from a 1980s Sci-fi flick, Bianca sounds like an industrial gas valve when fired.