Despite some of the conclusions I had probably drawn from some of the preview material and trailers, the combat had changed very little in the end. It’s generally paced faster, while still retaining all the tactics options from Dragon Age: Origins that I need. The biggest missing thing is the tactical/bird-eye view, but who uses that, I mean really. The only time I used it in Origins was at the very beginning just to see how it looked, chuckled at the novelty of it, and zoomed right back in. The farthest zoom you have in Dragon Age 2 is quite far enough for me to see everything I need to see during combat.

The combat is still as bloody as ever.

The voice acting is mostly excellent. All the main characters are consistently handled with care, with Varric (Brian Bloom), Merrill (Eve Myles) and Isabela (Victoria Kruger) standing out as the best of them. This is also partly because of their dialogue of course, which is generally quite good. Some of the additional voices are not as good, and there are a few really bad accents thrown in there every once in a while, but they don’t drag the game down too much. And I can’t even begin to tell you how pleased I am that the protagonist isn’t silent anymore. I think that in Origins one of the biggest flaws was the silent and quite expressionless protagonist. Always staring at whoever was speaking with a blank stare on his face, just took me out of the game right away.

The tech of Dragon Age 2 works okay. I knew before I started that it’s just an updated version of the engine they used in Origins, and it clearly is. So I managed my expectations accordingly. However, the character models and environments look quite alright, as long as you don’t zoom in too close. Certainly some work has been done on the engine after Origins. I installed the official high resolution texture pack, and it made a lot of the environments look quite sharp. It’s unfortunate that the same can’t be said about armor and clothing. For a game that has so much dialogue during which the view is often very close to the characters, the texture work on all the clothing is quite abysmal. Combine that with some strange things on the character models themselves and, well, it’s not always pretty. This game could have really used a separate set of character models and textures with higher detail for all the dialogue scenes. For example, Isabela’s necklace looks like it’s just painted on her neck. Better textures would have helped, but it would have been even better if it was part of the character model instead. I’m almost positive that someone somewhere in the mod community is already working on models with higher detail, certainly a texture pack. I should also mention that it looks a bit weird when steel armor bends with character movement. It’s like they are wearing shirts that look like steel but actually are not. It’s really unfortunate that this is the case because some parts, like the character faces, are well detailed with plenty of expression to go around.

Another tech related thing is Bink. Please developers, please. Stop using Bink. Especially when there’s no real reason not to render the scene in-engine. The transition from Bink video to in-engine is always jarring, especially with the quality that these Bink videos are. If you must use video for whatever reason, surely there must be better options for you to use. This is especially apparent early on in Dragon Age 2, and I believe this was in the demo as well. The very early part where the dragon swoops in and kills a bunch of darkspawn is really badly compressed Bink video for some reason. Then later in game you actually fight dragons. Clearly it’s not a problem to render the dragons in-engine. So what the hell is the problem?

Lightning Bolt! Lightning Bolt!

Overall the game feels a lot smaller than Origins. Most of it takes place in the city of Kirkwall and some surrounding areas, but that’s it. By comparison, in Origins you traveled the land, went from city to city. There’s a lot of dungeon crawling, and that is most certainly the weakest part of this package. Cookie cutter dungeons. If you choose to do all possible side quests, be prepared to haul your ass around the same few dungeons over and over again. There’s almost always small differences, like a path that was open in another dungeon is now blocked. But it doesn’t help at all, you can clearly see that it’s still the same dungeon, even if it’s supposed to be a completely different location. If that wasn’t bad enough, they didn’t bother to change the mini-maps for these cookie cutter locations, so you’ll always see the map of the full dungeon, only to run into the stone walls where a door should be according to the map. It’s amazing that after they got so much shit about this kind of thing on Mass Effect 1, and pretty much fixed it for Mass Effect 2, they would then regress back to it.

The story of the game is okay. The story of the Champion is not as interesting as the Warden’s story from Origins, not by a long shot. It’s tied to Origins very loosely, with a few nods here and there, with couple familiar characters making an appearance. Almost like they wanted to remind you that “hey, remember this guy from the earlier, better game? yeah? okay, good, he doesn’t have any role in here but we thought to mention him anyway.” It’s weird. There is a definite resolution to the main story arc in Dragon Age 2, but the way it ends clearly paves the way to the sequel. Very typical for a second part of a trilogy, and that’s what it feels like.

So all in all, the main feeling that I’m left with is that the game feels very rushed. And looking at the time that it took for them to roll this out, I’m not surprised at all. It’s not a bad game as such, but could have definitely used another 6 months of development time, if only to create more varied dungeons, bunch of higher detail character models and just general polish.

★★★☆☆ 

KAPOW! You'll be doing this a bunch.

With the back story (or lack of it) out of the way, lets look at the gameplay. If you played Arkham Asylum, you’ll know exactly what awaits you in Arkham City. Arkham City, like Arkham Asylum, does a fucking excellent job at making you feel like a total fucking bad-ass, crushing fools left and right, while remaining very simple to grasp and still offering more depth if one chooses to dig deeper. The core remains the same, punch and counter, stun some special guys and leap over other special guys. On easier difficulties you can pretty much button mash your way through most of the encounters, but the harder the difficulty, the more important your tactics, reading enemy movements and timing your punches will be. Quickfire gadgets and additional special combo moves can help you in crowd management and knock down bunch of guys at once, making those big crowd encounters easier.

The other side of the combat coin is the predator stuff, which is also very familiar, with some welcome additions. You will still grapple between vantage points that may or may not be gargoyles, do inverse takedowns, sneak around silently, watch the heartbeat of the thugs skyrocket as you reduce their ranks one by one. And of course scare the shit out of the last thug. It’s still a lot of fun. Your predator arsenal isn’t significantly different from Asylum, the thugs however have a few new tricks up their sleeves that make these sections more challenging especially towards the end of the game. The most important is probably the signal jammer, which interferes with the detective vision.

Both the combat and predator challenge rooms also make a comeback, and are exactly what they sound like. A walled off location from the main game and you either beat up dudes for big combos and scores, or race against time in the predator leaderboards.

You'll be doing this as well.

Biggest addition to the game as a whole is the big city, but anyone expecting this to be a big open world game… it’s not. That’s not to say that the city isn’t fun to screw around in. They made the divebomb traversal fairly fun (though nothing can beat Super Mario World divebombing), but when you get the grapnel boost upgrade, the traversal becomes a breeze. A downside to this large city is that they didn’t fill it with enough interesting things to do. There are a few side missions that you can do, but in reality the city acts more like a hub. In Arkham Asylum the island was the hub, now the hub is just bigger. Most of the time you’ll still be inside a building of sorts, just like you were inside buildings in Arkham Asylum. There are a tons of Riddler trophies to collect in the city though, if you are into that sort of thing. Dropping in on unsuspecting thugs every once in a while is fun for a moment, but sooner or later you’ll reach a point where you’ll just want to haul ass from point A to point B to move the story forward.

Another somewhat meaningful addition is of course the second playable character in the story. The four Catwoman sections take place here and there during the main story thread, but aren’t so significant that you wouldn’t be able to enjoy the game without them, as they are placed behind an online pass style paywall. New games include the code for the Catwoman DLC, but you can buy it separately for $10 if you get your game used. Catwoman plays more or less like Batman during combat and predator sections, she has a few less special moves and gadgets than Batman, but is faster in her main moves. She’s also silent and can run behind thugs without making a sound, which you pretty much have to do all the time if you want to have any chance at the predator challenge room leaderboards.

You won't be doing her, if you know what I mean.

Arkham Asylum was a gorgeous looking and sounding game. Same is true for Arkham City. The music is just the right amount of brooding, visuals are top notch on all platforms. Sound design is excellent, never has punching dudes in the face sounded this good. And the voice casting and acting, fantastic. The entirety of the cast is excellent, but Kevin Conroy’s Batman and Mark Hamill’s Joker are of course the only true voices for these two characters. But I also have to mention Nolan North’s Penguin, it’s not your usual Drake-esque North. That man has more range than most people give him credit for.

As I mentioned earlier, the game doesn’t do a great job at telling you what is going on in Gotham. As you go through the game, it sheds a little light on the backstory, but some of that stuff is locked behind Riddler challenges and such. So depending on how you play your games, by the end of this one you might still have only a very vague understanding of how exactly this prison came to be. The story told during the game however doesn’t have problems like that. It does a great job at sectioning itself in a way that the main story thread is always moving in the background with some subplots occasionally taking the main stage to introduce some other villains aside from Joker and Strange.

It’s very easy to compare Arkham City to Arkham Asylum and see where they changed the game for the better. But it’s also very easy to see how similar City is to Asylum. One of the strongest aspects of Asylum was the pacing. City loses some of that with its bigger environment. It’s also very easy to nitpick on some minors things, like that you still need to mash a button to remove vent covers. It was such a useless mechanic in Asylum, and it’s still useless in City. It would be very easy to give it a relatively bad score because of how little has changed, if that’s the kind of person you are. I’m not, and the 2 years since the first game’s release is more than enough time for me to want more Batman adventures of this kind.

★★★★★ 

I also rewrote a large part of the main music page, and added a few pictures in there to spice it up a little. I think it makes more sense now. Also, remember when I used wayback machine to hunt down some release dates for some of my old songs and ended up editing the WordPress posting dates to set up blog posts in the past? Yeah, that was a dumb idea if there ever was one, so I deleted those 3 posts. And I also rewrote the About page.
And I changed the theme from the old barely working Green Goblin to WordPress’ own Twenty Eleven. Yes yes, I know, I’m a year late. It will be interesting to see what kind of theme the Twenty Twelve will be, maybe I’ll use that if it’s any good.

I was also considering getting a new domain name. I don’t really know why for sure, I’m sure I can come up with a good excuse. Beerlake is kind of tiring. Looking back, that was kind of dumb name to pick for a domain, right? Don’t really know what would be a good new domain though, and I don’t even want to think of all the dead links that would result in killing the image dump that resides in here. So I guess I’m stuck with it, for now at least.

Now, you may ask yourself, why is he doing all this, he never even updates this stupid site. That’s a good question. Maybe I will update more often. Guess you just have to tune in to find out. Mysterious!

Hooray?

Shame shame.

stew beef=okay!

I was a little skeptical at the beginning, the smell of the stew beef flavour seemed like it might be a bit too much, but it mellowed out in the end and ended up being pretty good.

vegetable=okay!

I’m sad to have to tell you this, but this post may mark the end of the instant noodle diaries, as I have now ran out of new flavours to test, of my usual noodle brand at least. I may have to start thinking outside the box on the next one, or just see if shopping elsewhere might do the trick.

Duck=good enough

Next up on my list of noodles will be vegetable valley.

Chicken=good
Pork=good
Shrimp=not so good

I’ll update you as I explore the previously unknown flavours (to me, anyway) of noodle in the magnificent world of noodles.

I guess I could write something else as well.

Like, something important…?

I don’t know man, I just need to test this shit out. Technically it should work, since I’m using the same settings as before, but better know for sure, right?