An Award? For Me? Aww!

I was just looking at my Twitter mentions (you can see my feed in the side bar and you're welcome to follow me) and I saw that the lovely lady who writes The OPI Junkie has given me an award.

Thank you!

The Liebster Award is designed to bring well deserved additional recognition to those bloggers with less than 300 followers.  If you receive the award you link back to the blogger had nominated you and nominate 3 more blogs.

So here are my nominations:

Gemma, who writes Flab To Fab, a blog about her quest to loose weight and be healthier. I find her inspirational. She just reached the 2 stone mark.

Laura Pernetti Kinch, my friend who writes Healthy Skincare For You. She reviews skincare products and she's lovely.

Lastly, the beautiful Sarah May aka Purplepain, author of The inept's guide to first-time gardening. She, like me, is responsible for a garden for the first time, and is documenting her attempt to turn it into something wonderful.

I moved to a new house a year and a half ago and have a garden after 24 years of a tiny balcony filled with mum's pot plants. Now I'm having to teach myself how to make my garden beautiful without my mum to guide me (though the library she left me does have books on most subject matter, including gardening) and it's great to read Sarah May's posts and know I'm not alone. Starting a garden can be a daunting task, (like re-decorating a room only you have to grow the paint!) and she has some great ideas mixed in with hints and tips.

Thank you again to The OPI Junkie for the award. I am humbled at being made to feel so welcome in the blogging community.

TTFN,

Hell Thirteen

xoxo

News for Mass Effect fans plus Games to Look Forward To

For those of you who don't know, I am really looking forward to Mass Effect 3's release. The first two were amazing and I really didn't have the same problems with the sequel as I did with Dragon Age 2. It still took time to complete and while it's true that many places were copied there was still a lot of content to get through, the story was awesome and what you did in the first game had a real effect on what happened in the second.

In case you are wondering why I compare Mass Effect, a sci-fi game, with Dragon Age which is a fantasy game, it's because both games are made by BioWare and both are RPGs.

News has just been released that Mass Effect 3 will not be released until the first quarter of 2012, between three and six months later than the original release date given of November 2011. Nobody wants to wait, especially with great games so sparse on the ground this year. The time it takes to complete a game appears to be decreasing, and we gamers are being left for longer and longer periods of time with nothing decent to play that we haven't already clocked. On the upside, hopefully this means that ME3 will be an even better game than it would have been if it were released in November.

It is easy to forget with the excitement over games like Skyrim, DAII, ME3 and Portal 2, that there are a whole bunch more games that look awesome on their way this year. Personally I'm really looking forward to Uncharted 3 and Batman Arkham City. Lego Pirates of the Caribbean is out on May 13th and I love the Lego games and the Pirates of the Caribbean films (not so much the games) so it looks to be a good one. I never played American McGee's Alice the first time round, but it seems like the kind of game that would be right up my street. Unfortunately the original game is both rare and expensive. However, with an ETA of June, Alice: Madness Returns looks to be a decent sequel and it comes with a copy of the original, and I'm assuming they've reworked it for the PS3 to go with the sequel. PC gaming isn't really my thing, aside from anything I don't have a working mouse.

One game that I'm really not sure about is Shadows Of The Damned. It could be amazing or awful, and I really don't think I'll know until I've played it. I could make a pretty safe assumption that it will be the same format as every other Japanese horror game, because playing through Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, Project Zero (Fatal Frame to any non-Brits), Dante's Inferno, and I'm sure there are others, they all have the same menu and sound effects within the menu, even the same font. Project Zero is the game that stands apart because it is the only one of these which is truly scary, and the gameplay is very different in that the speed is slower, you can enter a 1st person view, and there is far less music involved. This doesn't necessarily make the game bad, you just have to look at the more subtle differences, like plot ;-) I could always be wrong, and the game sounds cool regardless.

Anyway, that thar be my stuff to look forward to this year. It only really comes to about six. DA2 is already out and I've already finished, ME3 is moved to next year along with Bioshock Infinite. I have plans to get Portal 2 as soon as I can find it in stock, and in the meantime I am finally playing Assassin's Creed Brotherhood. Yes, I know, I'm really late. I just missed the bandwagon with that. I was all over the first 2 games, and I think I thought of it as more of an online multiplayer add-on than a continuation of the storyline.
I must say I've been watching The Borgias of late (the tv series with Jeremy Irons as the Rodrigo Borgia) and it adds a whole new depth to the story, so many of the characters are the same. It makes me want to replay Assassin's Creed 2 but I think I traded it in when my PS3 died.

So, I will be off now. Many things to do!

TTFN

Hell Thirteen
xoxo

Pre-Owned Games = Piracy?

As a games student, I get to speak to some interesting people in the industry (ooh, get me! I'm so special.)
Last year I got to speak to Rob Bartholomew, of Bethesda Publishing, and one of the topics of conversation has been on my mind ever since.

In the UK, since the days of cartridges when games were no longer self-distributed and the NES and Sega consoles had made games a commercial industry, new games have had a set price of around £40. The value of the pound has declined and the technology involved has improved, but the price of a Megadrive (Genesis for the U.S.) game was £39.99 and the price of a PS3 game today is £39.99.
Children generally can't afford this. I remember when I was a kid with my Sega Mastersystem, and after that with my Megadrive, I used to get £20 - £25 a month in pocket money. I had to wait 2 months before I could get a new game, and that was my little ritual. It was the only thing I spent my money on, even though it always meant that I had nothing left afterwards.

Now I'm an adult, my stream of incoming games is a lot less regular. There are less games I want to play, for one. I no longer have so much disposable income and I have bills to pay. I can never afford to get a game when it is released, I always have to wait for the price to come down.

The main way I get to play new games is by getting  pre-owned games, and trading in my old games for shop credit. It saves me a lot of money. However, there is a problem.

Rob was explaining to me that game developers and publishers are worried about the pre-owned games market killing the development of new games.

The problem is that when companies like GAME buy your old games, then sell them on for a profit (less than a new game but more than what they paid you for it) the only people making the profit are the ones at GAME. You're not making a profit, because you're getting substantially less than you paid for it originally, and the people that made the game - the game that GAME are now making just as much, if not more profit from reselling pre-owned as they did when they sold it new - are getting nothing.

When a brand new game is sold, the profits from the sale go to the shop you bought it from. To get the game on their shelves, the shop had to buy it from the distributor. (If you've done film studies it's a lot like the Hollywood Model - I think that's what it was called, I covered it almost 10 years ago!) The money from the sale of each game is split between the distributors, the publishers, and the producers. These are the people who developed the game, the people who burned all the discs and made all the packaging, and the people who sold it to the shops through advertising and sales pitches. This is a very simplified version of the model, there are a lot of people involved from start to finish in getting these games on the shelves, and that £40 split between them probably works out to less than a penny each per unit sold.

The really big worry is that the less brand new games are bought, the less the game designers will earn, and they will just stop making games because they can't afford to keep doing it.

I find this to be a bit arsey, as games were originally made as a hobby, and passed around for free. Any profits made were the icing on the cake. I also find these fears to be a bit unfounded because there will always be a demand for brand new games. There would be no 2nd hand games if nobody bought them first hand. There is also the fact that games don't last forever, especially now that they're all on DVD and Blu Ray discs, so people will always need to buy replacements for really good games.

Some companies have been trying to figure out ways to stop this market, saying it's as damaging to them as piracy - probably more so, seeing as it's legal. EA in particular have been giving out single-use codes in new games for exclusive and free DLC. Fair enough. I've heard some disturbing rumblings that companies are trying to "lock" discs to machines, like SIM cards in mobile phones. This is not the answer. This is why:

1. I feel that if I buy a game that looked really good but was actually awful, I should be able to get my money back (This is a massive gripe I have with PSN and XBLA) even if it is only part of the money I paid for it.
2. I live in a one bed flat. I don't have the space to keep every game I ever bought, even if I wanted to. Some games I enjoyed, but I'll never play again. I can either trade them in and make some use of them, or I can put them in the bin.
3. The Pre-owned games market is a way of recycling games and saving the world!
4. So many games would never have been played - and loved - if it weren't for trade ins. I missed Mass Effect when it first came out, I hadn't heard of it, and then I saw it, after Mass Effect 2 was released, pre-owned, for £6.99. I got it, loved it, and bought ME2 soon after.

There is a solution staring everyone in the face. The people who make the games should get a cut of the profits. How best to do this? Set up your own trade in scheme. Offer an incentive to use it.

If it is really that big a problem, there's your fix. and you can always contact me if you need more help.

Considering how much DLC is available for every game released these days, some of it costing as much as a brand new game and with none of the costs incurred making discs and packaging, I think the companies are making more than enough to compensate for the amount lost through the sale of pre-owned games.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, I hope that you've found it interesting, particularly those of you into games. I won't be doing any game reviews until I find a game worth spending my money on(!) but until then I will provide you with some writings about games in general.

TTFN

Hell Thirteen

PS: Comment question. Do you buy pre-owned games? Or do you always buy brand new?

News for Mass Effect fans

There's a new add on DLC for Mass Effect 2 coming out next Tuesday called "Arrival." The pack will set you back 560 Microsoft Points on XBox Live Arcade, £5.49 or roughly $7 on the PSN store and 560 BioWare points on the PC. - according to the Facebook page.


Mass Effect fans who have already downloaded the various expansions from BioWare will probably have mixed feelings about the upcoming add on, as Mass Effect is a great game and the more we can do within the Mass Effect universe, the better. However, this DLC is coming a long time after most will have set down their controllers and moved on to pastures new.
Previous downloadable content as been pretty short, a few extra missions that won't last a hardcore gamer more than a day. 


BioWare's other roleplaying giant, the Dragon Age series, brought out Origins: Awakening, which was a proper expansion that lasted some time at least, but cost as much as the original game. I would entertain buying a GOTY (Game Of The Year) edition, had I not already purchased and downloaded most of the available DLC for Mass Effect 2. Of course, with add ons purchased online, there's no way of knowing if they will be worth the money until they have already been purchased, and if you don't like it, there are no refunds and no way of selling them on. 


I plan to get Arrival and review it here, to help you decide if it's a purchase you want to make. In fact, I might as well review all available DLC for the game while I'm at it. There's just one problem - I lent my copy of the game to a friend.


No matter what this expansion brings, I think BioWare need to step up their game. Bethesda brought out two main expansions for their last installment in their Elder Scrolls series, Oblivion - The Shivering Isles and the Knights Of The Nine were proper expansions, The Shivering Isles in particular was my favorite thing to play in a role playing game ever. Then you get BioWare releasing things like Witch Hunt for Dragon Age Origins and it looks pathetic in comparison.


Until next time, buh-bye!

Dragon Age 2

Ok, so I've had Dragon Age 2 for just over a week now, I'm only about halfway through my 2nd playthrough but I feel I'm in a position to review it by this point, so here goes...

BioWare games generally begin and end with the story, and you can usually expect it to be well written and pretty epic, and this is no exception. The characters have depth and substance, and all of them have widely differing views from eachother, leading to conflict if you bring the wrong combination out with you on a quest, because not everyone will agree with the choices you make. Unlike Mass Effect, the sci-fi counterpart to Dragon Age, there is no Paragon-Renegade scale. BioWare's writers have chosen to roll around in the morally grey mud, possibly to make a point: there is no black and white right or wrong choice. This can lead to a lot more emotion being invested in the game, and in turn when certain characters may choose to betray you, it can be hard not to take it personally.

One of the things I wasn't so keen on story-wise was the lack of effect you have on the world. The main outcome of the story remains the same (obviously in preparation for Dragon Age 3) no matter what you do, and this bothers me. The first installment, even though you inevitably kill the dragon and stop the blight, allows you to have many possible endings, and it's not even necessary that your Warden survive the task. The choices you have made greatly effect the world around you, and continue to effect the story in Dragon Age 2. I fail to see how any choices made in the second installment will make a difference in DA3, because it seems to play out just the same.

I was disappointed at the scale of the game. Interviews with the creators stated that the timeline would cover 10 years (the first Dragon Age only covered 1 year) which left me feeling cheated when I finished the third act, after 7 years, and the credits started to roll. The whole game felt like a prologue to something bigger, and when I felt like I might be reaching the main story, it finished. It felt like a really long demo, an advert for Dragon Age 3.

The voice artists were well chosen, though I couldn't understand why some returning characters had new voices, especially when the original actors were credited with bit parts. There was only one line that I felt was read out of context; when the female Hawke (I've not played as the male Hawke) says "Such as?" it's spoken as a statement rather than a question. This is something that Dragon Age has taken from Mass Effect. In Origins the Warden is only known as the Warden or the Hero of Ferelden, although if you take the noble human origin story your surname is Cousland, and if you are the dwarf noble you hail from the Aeducan family. Your character never speaks in Origins, aside from battle cries. Drawing on Mass Effect's Commander Shepherd, in Dragon Age 2 your character has a voice and a name, though you can still change the first name, everyone will refer to you as Hawke.

One of the things that has set BioWare RPGs apart from the others is the romance and of course, the sex. Lionhead Studios' Fable series has allowed for love, sex, marriage and families, but in a cartoonish way much closer to the relationships in the Sims. BioWare instills the thrill of the chase in its romances, which take time, tact, and being a good listener. Romances will generally lead to sex, which, in the case of Mass Effect, led to some side boob and a little bit of bum. In Dragon Age, they keep their underwear on. Origins gave us some very stiff, sickly sweet love scenes, that were the same no matter who you were with. This time the writers, actors and animators have given us some passion and some humor, and some individuality. There's a lot less nudity than before, even with the perma-pants, which is a shame because the graphics for the naked body are a lot better than last time around, the girls don't look like lollipops and the guys don't look like twats in their knickers. The underwear looks a lot more flattering now, particularly the male underwear which looked like a nappy (diaper, for any american readers). In the DLC The Exiled Prince, female Hawkes can romance prince Sebastian, who is also a priest, in a chaste, non sexual way.

On to the gameplay. The main attack button is now a hit-response type button, rather than an order ("go attack that person until he's either dead or I tell you to do something else") so you can hit an enemy more often in a fight, but you ave to keep hitting that button in order to keep attacking. This means that even though the game boasts a choice between hands-on action or strategically pausing the game and handing out orders to your team, you can't just pick your tactics, hit the attack button and watch how the fight plays out, you have to actively take part.
The inventory is different, because you can no longer choose what your party wears, aside from accessories and their weapons (except Varric, who has an attachment to his crossbow, Bianca, so you can't change his weapon either) so all the armor you find can only be used on yourself, giving you a dilemma when you find a new pair of boots that are better in every way, but you really don't want to take off that enemies drop more coin rune.
The new codex is a MASSIVE improvement on the Origins codex. I don't think the entries give XP anymore, but the codex is organised in a much better way. The only real thing that has gotten my back up in terms of gameplay is the use of the start button for the inventory, level up, codex etc instead of the select button, as it was in Origins. The select button now opens up a map, and the only way to get out of it is by pressing select again.

The main drawback on the amount of time and effort BioWare put into their stories is the lack of freedom allowed to the player. Instead of being given a country to roam around in freely like Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series you are given a great big map of the country with only a few parts of it that you can actually visit, and you aren't free to move around within it. Every time you are in a cave, it is the same cave, just with certain doors made un-open-able, the same goes for every house, every dwarven ruin, every dark alley, every undercity passage. This problem was evident in Origins but I'm sure it's worse in DA2.

Even with its failings, Dragon Age 2 is definitely worth playing and I really enjoyed playing it. It lasted a lot longer than Fable 3 (I finished that in one weekend) and it has replay value. Try playing it once as a mage and once as another class, it changes things quite a lot, though I don't see it making a difference at the end of the story.

Overall: I'd give it an 8 out of 10.

If this has made you want to get the game you can go straight to the Amazon page here: Dragon Age 2 (PS3)

A return to blogging!

Well hello there.

Thought I'd given up, did you?
Think again.

I've been quiet, but I never stopped thinking about you. I've been preparing some material.

I've been filming and editing together some make up videos, tutorials and the like, and I'll be posting them on my new YouTube channel, JoysticksAndLipstick, when they're finished.

I've just ordered some things from e.l.f. cosmetics, partially because they're cheap and I'm skint and I needed to replace some brushes. So I'll be checking out their daily brush cleanser, £1.50 foundation and blending brushes, some of their blushes, a bronzer, tinted moisturizer, pressed powder, cream eyeliner and their eyelid primer; and I'll be telling you what I think of them.

I'm also preparing to make some game focussed videos, especially one on Dragon Age 2, which I'm currently in the middle of.

I'll be seeing you!

ttfn x

Fable 3 and Fallout New Vegas

Well hey there, Girls and Gamers! October was a big month for me, with the long awaited arrival of Fallout: New Vegas and Fable 3 in the shops, and naturally your humble narrator was on them both like a shot.

New Vegas is basically an expansion for Fallout 3. You play a different character, I mean, the character is still one that you create, but your history is different. You are not from a vault this time, instead you are a courier around New Vegas. The gameplay is pretty much the same, there are few new types of enemies, like these killer moth things, and giant radscorpions are now horrifically tough, fast, and deadly. I haven't finished the main storyline yet, so for now I will say that while the game is horrifically buggy and the main storyline doesn't pull you in enough to keep on at the main quest (although I am finding it hard to know which quest is the main quest at the moment, and I kind of... assassinated Caesar... so I don't know what is going on now) but it's worth playing if you love RPGs, it's better than many others in terms of gameplay at the moment, that Gothic one I downloaded the demo for and there's a crazy canadian witch and it's just so wrong!!!

Fable 3 might be a lot more polished, but Lionhead polished it right down to a pebble. After a week I'd completed it twice, including every quest. I loved it, but I was left disappointed. Once you become queen or king you have a year to sort out the country. A year plays out in five days, as it keeps skipping you forward, and unless you are playing the bastard you need to complete quests and work to get up the money you need. It just needed a lot more to do. I loved the game and they brought in some wonderful people to work on it, such as Simon Pegg and John Cleese in addition to the return of Stephen Fry. There was just so much missing from it that made it feel smaller. Even the world felt smaller. They got rid of Bloodstone and Oakwood for a start. The world changed an awful lot in 50 years.

Anyway, I am exhausted from a long week so I will TTFN.

Eurogamer Expo 2010

Ok, so I went to Eurogamer last weekend. Not for long, but long enough to check out a few new games. Here's what I thought.

Enslaved

I don't think, honestly, that this will be a game to write home about. I'm gonna get it at some point when I have nothing else to play, and I'll enjoy it, but I don't think I'll love it like I do other games.

I loved Uncharted, sorry Yahtzee darling but I thought it was fun, and better than Tombraider, whilst everyone slagged it off for trying to be a manly Lara Croft. I don't think that a game or anything else should be slammed for being similar to something that's been done before, so long as it does it better.

Admittedly, I had just gotten my PS3 a few months earlier, and when I got my 40in 1080p lcd (Samsung) I was drooling over the beauty of it. I saw the detail and the difference the motion capture and simultaneous voiceover recording had made and I loved it. I really liked the cover based combat, because it may have been done before but not in many of the kind of games I play, and that made it brilliant.

I'm talking about Uncharted here because Enslaved looks like a cross between Uncharted and Final Fantasy. Gameplay was very Uncharted, art was very Final Fantasy.

That's about all I have to say on the matter, other than that I did have a hard time stopping playing. Even when I wanted to, I couldn't let go of the controller.

Fallout: New Vegas

What can I say? If you liked Fallout 3, I see no reason why you wouldn't like New Vegas. Simple as, really. If you've never played Fallout 3, then I'll explain.

The game is set in a post-apocalyptic America following the Great War between the US, China and other countries. The Great War was a conventional and nuclear war that occurred on October 23, 2077 and lasted less than two hours despite causing immense damage and destruction.
Fallout 3 was set 200 years after the Great War, once the background radiation levels had lowered considerably. The water is still 'dirty' - a term for being irradiated, and the world is a very hostile place.

It's an RPG focused on exploration and interaction. Gameplay is very similar to another Bethesda series, The Elder Scrolls, but in a sci-fi setting rather than a fantasy setting. The two are to Bethesda's arsenal as Dragon Age and Mass Effect are to Bioware.

I love Fallout, I think New Vegas looks great, and being an RPG bunny I look forward to Dragon Age 2 (also featured at Eurogamer but I never got to try it out), Mass Effect 3, and hopefully a new installment in the Elder Scrolls series? Please?

Fable 3

Fable 3 is looking really good. The addition of John Cleese to the voices and having a base of operations where you can equip your weapons is a nice touch, and I particularly like the change in the spells to being magic gauntlets that you can mix and match for different effects. I'm really looking forward to playing it in depth.

And finally, Little Big Planet 2.

This looks amazing! I just wish my PS3 hadn't been afflicted with the blinking red light of death. I loved the quirkiness of LBP and made a thing out of playing through it with my fiance trying to get every last sticker. We played a few levels together at Eurogamer and I can't wait to get my teeth into it.
They've made a lot of improvements, there are more gadgets to play with, they've managed to make (almost) weightless levels where you soar into the air and glide back down. They've even included retro - I won't call them minigames, they're more like microgames.

Anyway that's all I can type today, I'm knackered.
Logging off...