Recommended – Page 19

Thoughts on: Dragon Age: Ultimate Edition

27/01/2011 28/06/2019

A bit over a year ago one of my most long awaited RPGs was released. BioWare promised to make this “spiritual successor” to Baldur’s Gate since 2003. And after how pretty boring Neverwinter Nights was, it was something to wait for. Yet, years later and several releases from the studio that haven’t tried to be BG, there were no news on what was to become Dragon Age. Only about a year before release we finally got some new info. It was all exciting apart from the announcement about the change from being PC-exclusive, which made me worry that the game will get postponed again. And, of course, it was.

Yet, even with an extra year of development the game was pretty buggy when I played it the first time. Though, there was plenty to criticize the game for apart from the bugs too. I didn’t write a “proper” review in hopes that later patches and updates can turn the game into something far better than the game originally was. Dragon Age: Ultimate Edition is the most complete the game will ever be, so it’s time to talk about Origins, Awakening and a bunch of DLCs included in it.

Happy about: Kane & Lynch 1 & 2. Dead Dogs an’ all sorts

03/12/2010 28/06/2019

I finally got to playing Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days – a game that I wanted to play ever since it was announced. I’m a bit slow with this, perhaps, but at least I can do something I’ve planned from the start – make a double review. I played the original game when it was released, so with this one out, I wanted to make a kind of a comparison of games. Now, with both of them completed, I can talk about them without fear that I misremember anything. Are the games as bad as some say? Are they as good as fans say? Why is the camcorder in 2 never running out of battery? Okay, I’ll skip the last question, but will try to answer the first two.

O tempora: Gobliiins 1-3 (Gobliiins pack)

10/11/2010 28/06/2019

O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.

Gobliiins hold important memories for me. Along with the Kyrandia titles from Westwood they were the very first adventure titles that I’ve played. They were the games that somewhat defined my humor, defined my understanding of the use of voices in games, defined my visual style preferences as I was a kid. While people with powerful PCs played Doom, I was playing Montezuma’s Revenge on my Поиск-1, my friend played these games on his system. And I helped. Then we switched to Space Quest, to Leisure Suit Larry and other titles, because we realized how fun the adventure games could be. A few years ago we saw a very quiet release of Gobliiins 4. I played it only for a bit and it made me question myself – what if the classic titles were as tedious, as uninspired, as illogical? Was it all nostalgia and the original games weren’t that good anymore?

O tempora: Crash Bandicoot & Spyro

04/07/2010 26/10/2019

O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.

For most people from post-soviet countries Playstation was the fifth generation of consoles. All of it. Sega Saturn was barely known, N64 not well known and it felt outdated due to the usage of cartridges instead of CDs, 3DO was known to only a few, no one ever heard about Jaguar and I still don’t know what an Amiga CD even is. That’s why, PS1 titles were so memorable. And most knew that a crazy mascot of PS1 was a bandicoot called Crash. But he wasn’t the only one competing for being the mascot. Apart from Gex, whom I still love due to Gex: Enter the Gecko (best 3D platformer, fight me), Spyro became extremely popular as well. And today, almost 15 years since the original Crash Bandicoot, I’ve finally decided to play these classics for the first time. So I didn’t even have to fight my nostalgic memories.