Reviews

After playing both games countless times, I figured I might as well write up a comparison review between Dragon Age: Origins' 'Return to Ostagar" and Mass Effect 2's "Normandy Crash Site" Downloadable Content. Please turn away now if you don't like spoilers.

At the start of both games, your character is involved in dramatic events.

Dragon Age: Origins - Your character is saved from their circumstance, (Each custom character has a "Origin" story. Hence the name.) made into a Gray Warden and has the man who saved you and the man who didn't judge you, brutally killed. (One crushed to death by an Orgre, while the other is swarmed by a hoard of Dakrspawn.)

Mass Effect 2 - The Normandy is shot down by the Collectors. This forces everyone to abandon ship. (Some cannon fodder crew members die) Sadly, in saving one of your crew (Joker) Shepard dies. (But as we know revived at the start.)

=============================



I'll start with "Return to Ostagar" -

Even though you can access it when you leave Lothering, I recommend not going there until you have at least recruited Wynne, as having her in your party (Along with Alistair) makes for interesting dialogue and makes the story progression feel natural. The DLC location itself is flagged up as "Bann Loren's Lands." on the Ferelden area map. After going here and meeting someone it will then prompt you to (as the DLC is dubbed) return to Ostagar.

When you return to the site you see right away how the place is in pieces. You'd expect it to be a state after you left. But to actually see it how it is, it kinda brings a sense of down-to-earthness about it.

Upon your arrival you have to fight some Darkspawn and find a piece of King Cailan's armour on one of the bodies. Thus you get a quest to get all of Cailan's equipment back. As you make your way through the ruins of Ostagar and battle Darkspawn, you find a plot twist, that makes you dislike Loghain even more and more of the equipment. Then about half way through the DLC, you will find King Cailan's body, strung up and impaled. As your party look up at his dead body, the game plays a soft version of the games theme tune and gives you a short montage of him while he was alive, which just gives a somber feeling. After hearing what Cailan was like from others, this will be a sad moment, because you knew he died. (We are give a cut scene both when it happens and during the montage.) But to see him strung up like that, then shown a reminder of how brutally he died. That will make you feel something.
After this you are then confronted by a Darkspawn Necromancer. You have to chase after him AND gather all the pieces of armour that are missing. Once he is cornered, you then get to kick his ass and the ass of the Orgre who killed King Cailan. Once the battle is over you then have all the equipment and return to Cailan's body.

Alistair will then make a query on what to do with his body, since it just doesn't feel right leaving him. You then have three options: Give him the traditional pyre which all nobles have once they die, take him down for the wolves to feast on or just leave him there to rot. I personally gave him the traditional pyre since I felt he deserved it. (I know we don't know him for long... but he was a really nice guy.)

After all this the DLC is then over.

=============================



Now for "Normandy Crash Site" -

After going to the Citadel, (and having your Spector status reinstated) Alliance Command will send you a message asking you to retrieve the dog tags of the fallen crew members of the original Normandy. You can then go to the planet "Alchera" which is when the DLC will begin.

Once there, it plays eerie music and it gives off an uneasy feeling being in the debris of the Normandy. It almost feels like the odd feeling you get when walking through a graveyard late at night. There are no enemy's around, but you expect something to jump out at you any moment. While you’re there, you collect the dog tags of the crew members who died with the Normandy. While collecting the dog tags you go to different parts of the broken Normandy and get flash backs of crew and how the Normandy once was. Before or After all this you can place a Normandy memorial marker. Once you are ready you can then leave.

DLC is then over.


=============================

Now with all that in mind this is my personal opinion.

Both of the games are great in their own right, and even though they were made by two entirely different sections of Bioware, you can tell they put a lot of thought into doing both DLC's. However, I felt that the Dragon Age crew put more effort into giving fans some closure, while the Mass Effect crew, to me, it just felt like they threw it out there for the hell of it. It didn't really feel like closure, but more just putting it out there since they know fans would want to know what the Normandy looked like. Where as the Dragon Age lot KNEW that fans would want to see Ostagar again. That is where it all began.

So overall, I prefer the Dragon Age DLC. They were both well written, but I just got a sense that more attention to detail was put into "Return to Ostagar" than "Normandy Crash Site."

With "Return to Ostagar" I enjoyed collecting the armour and getting payback for what the Darkspawn did to both Duncan and Cailan. It gave me a sense of victory and closure. It also gave me more determination to take down Loghain and Howe.

With "Normandy Crash Site", I was left wanting more and didn't get the closure it was trying to give. I would have liked to shoot the crap out of some Collectors, even though you do get revenge in the final mission. I still would have wanted more than justwandering around a frozen wasteland gathering dog tags and getting memories.

Anyway. These are just my thoughts on the DLC's. I encourage you to get both, because they are worth the playthroughs.

Half-Life 2 is the sequel to Half-Life (duh), and chronicals the journeys of Gordon Freeman, HERO OF THE IMPERIUM- I mean, THEORETICAL PHYSICIST, as he attempts to escape, then fight back against our new alien overlords, the Combine. And that's the game in a nutshell, really. Now, if you haven't played the original Half-Life, go play it. Seriously, like, right now. I'll wait. ... Wasn't that frickin' awesome? And that's where it all started, where Gordon Freeman comes from, what those fricken zombie dudes are, and where... Well, it doesn't really explain the Combine, but hell with it.

Anyway, Half-Life 2 is at this point a somewhat dated game, hailing from 2004, but the gameplay and even the graphics still hold water after all this time. The plot is reasonably engaging, and the vehicle sections manage to be some of the best parts of the game, in spite of the frequent failure of non-vehicle based games to handle vehicle sections well. Perhaps the crowning achievement of the game however, is the realistic physics engine employed, which gives a very visceral sense of realism to a game where you go around shooting orwellian aliens in a suit of super-armor while teleporting all over the place.

And boy, does the game put that physics engine to work. There are physics puzzles aplenty, and each fairly intuitive, mainly because of realistic physics. A prime example is from near the beginning of the game, where you come across this board on top of this large section of pipe, and must pile concrete blocks on one end of the board in order to make a jump to a relatively high edge. ... Um, excuse me, this is where I need to make one observation about first person shooters in general. FPSes, why, why, WHY do we still have waist high walls that can't be scaled no matter how many times you bash your space key in frustration? It's not as if it's difficult to add a clambering function. System Shock 2 had a well implemented one, and it's bloody ancient by now. The very edge I am talking about would have been no trouble to clamber over in it, you could have skipped that puzzle entirely. Come on video game industry, it's not difficult, and it's not like you haven't been copying each other's notes ad nauseum forever anyway. So get cracking on it already!

... Anyway. Another nice feature of the game is the replayability factor. While this is generally not a feature of FPSes in general, it remains that it's very easy to miss little things as you play through the game. Alcoves with supplies and a zombie. Vortigaunts roasting a headcrab over an open fire (Achievement Get!). Combine Soldiers discussing the one free man. And etcetera. There are lots of little things to find, and in my most recent playthrough, I managed to keep turning up things I hadn't seen before; in spite of playing through the game multiple times in the past. Not every game can do that. Bloody fantastic, I say.

So yes, that is Half-Life 2 in a nutshell. I definitely recommend that you go get it, and if you still haven't played Half-Life (you bastard!) that you need to go get it _now_ and play it. Actually, you need to get it at the beginning of the review, so you'll better appreciate some of what I'm talking about. What are you waiting for?

I have been playing the Fallout series more or less since it came out, back in 1997, and have been thoroughly hooked ever since. I still play it, well, Fallout 2 (1998, more or less exactly the same), from time to time, and have enjoyed it immensely due to the intriguing setting, the dark humor, and the power armor. Now, aside from a couple of less than impressive spinoffs, by 2008 there hadn't been a new fallout game for 10 years, and expectations were set high by the fallout community. So out comes Fallout 3, and let's just say the response was... Harsh.Those whom had been waiting for the new Duke Nukem Forever game to be released, I am to understand, have understanding of the plight of Fallout fans in this regard. You wait for an unreasonably long time for a sequel that increasingly seems like it will never see the light of day, then finally it comes out and doesn't live up to expectations. One way that Fallout 3 did not live up to expectations is the removal of much of the humor that went into the first games. The first games were littered with references to pop culture and assorted in jokes that helped bring humor to the story, and references like this were purposefully removed from Fallout 3 for reasons that I am not personally familiar with. This hurt the game, in truth, but not fatally.If there was anything to do that, it was the storyline, or perhaps the execution. The overarching story is interesting enough really, "go find your dad, stop evil overlords from killing everyone," reasonably matches up with Fallout 1's "Go find water chip, stop evil overlords from killing everyone," and Fallout 2's "Find GECK, stop evil overlords from killing everyone," but the way it is carried out leaves something to be desired. Perhaps it's the dialogue, which is frequently somewhat stilted and contrived. Perhaps it's the lack of options available at certain points (you could have laid waste to the entirety of Little Lamplight and forced your way through in earlier Fallouts if you were an evil bastard, damn it all). Perhaps it's the fact that your opposition seem like parodies of their earlier selves in earlier games. Either way, there's something wrong about the whole experience that leaves a sour taste in one's mouth when playing it.One last thing, more of a nitpick than anything, is the gameplay. In the original games, one could, literally, smash a child in the nuts with a sledgehammer, if they had the proper psychotic bent. Children are now no longer killable, aimed shots to the nuts (and eyes for that matter) aren't an option, and sledgehammers suck in Fallout 3. I blame a lot of this on the ongoing disaster that is political correctness, which is slowly sapping the entertainment industry's ability to put on a good story, but that's no excuse for sledgehammers to suck. In fact, all melee weapons in Fallout 3 tend to suck, which is odd considering the origin of the game engine.Now, I've been ragging on Fallout 3 this whole time, but let me say that I did enjoy the game. It's a bit more mindless than I am used to from a Fallout game, but it was still entertaining, and if it wasn't part of the Fallout series I'd have likely hailed it as a great example of a modern FPS/RPG, of which there are very few. However, the game has attempted to ride on the coattails of some of the best western RPGs ever to be produced, and this is not particularly good for the game's image. It'd have not been as bad even still, if it had been something like "Fallout: Capitol Wasteland" or something other than purporting that it was a direct sequel to the first two games. Still, what's done is done, and we have at least one more Fallout game out, New Vegas, that was made with the assistance of some of the creators of the original games. So, maybe it isn't bad for the Fallout franchise. It's just bad for the fans.by Zephir

The premise of this story is fairly simple, heaven and hell get tired of earth, so they tell earth that no one's getting into heaven anymore, everyone's going to hell, and they're gonna expedite this process with hells assorted legions. Earth, as you might expect, does not take kindly to this, and starts resisting this sentence. They start resisting it pretty damn well in fact, with herald demons getting the shit blown out of them in the first chapter. <br><br>With the tagline, "When the Final Trumpet gets called, All Earth Breaks Loose On Hell," one can take a stab at the end results of what happens.In fact, it's something of a foregone conclusion, which can be gleamed just by looking at the titles of the books: "Armageddon," "Pantheocide," and "Lords Of War," the proposed final book in the series.<br> <br>Long story short, both heaven and hell end up succumbing to modern weaponry, what with heaven and hell being roughly equivalent to two large bronze age armies, Earth gives them a good curb stomping, and we're on the cusp to see the results in the third book, if we ever get to see it. <br><br>The actual meat of the story of course is in the telling; in this story, you get to see the results of some of the most potent of modern weapons on a demonic army, and let me just say, OUCH!I really quite like the story, but let me be frank, it's not perfect. At times it's more than a little one sided, and sometimes, like Bill Clinton's (!) slaying of a succumbis very early on in the story, how something was figured out was not really adequately explained. It's almost as if some cosmic author pulled something from their ass or something. There is of course the religious component too, those that would take offense at sacrilige would probably spontaneously combust within ten meters of it, and frankly, it seems like it's relying slightly too much on this controversy to be sellable. But hey, still a good read and all.<br><br>So I definitely recommend this story, if you can find somewhere to read it. I used to read it on spacebattles.net, but it got deleted off there. It's also been deleted off of torrents too, so I don't really know where one would find it nowadays. Try your favorite search engine and see what you can get. Well worth the attempt.

By Zephir

Want to write a review for us? It can be anime, video gaming or anything related to entertainment such as film, movie and comics. If so email us on info@animeleague.com