Mass Effect 2 - what a game!

I've spent most of my freetime the past week playing Mass Effect 2 on my Xbox. And after finishing it, I'm simply staggered... It's one of the best games I've ever played!

The game looks amazing, the controls feel right, the music, sound and voiceacting are excellent... but most of all: it has atmosphere! The story is solid but what really takes you in are the characters, the people, the places, the worlds, races and crew-members feel believable, real, with substance. They all are unique, have personality and strengths and weaknesses.

You play the game and you're sucked into the world of Mass Effect and you begin to genuinely care for your crew-/party-members. The dynamic plot- and chat-options often give you really tough choices, and many times I've found myself really cringing and wondering what I should chose... and the gameplay was so much fun I ended up playing all bonus- and side-missions and quests before starting the final battle, because I wanted the gaming-experience to last as long as possible and I wanted to see everything the game has to offer.

**** SPOILER ALERT ****




It went even that far that I ended up re-playing most of the final mission a couple of times, only to ensure I made the right choices to not have any of the party-members die (and I mean die story-wise!) because I didn't want to lose precious, loved characters and I wanted to make sure I can see them again in the 3rd and final game of the trilogy.

If a game takes me in that much, it's something special, and I enjoyed the ride alot. I was sad when the game was over, but at least it lets you continue to "free-roam" the galaxy afterwards, which makes you feel alot better since the ending is not so "final".

So how can I end this? By thanking Bioware for creating such an amazing gaming-experience! And with one of my favorite quotes that made me laugh after finishing the game and talking with my crew again... (though I fear only people will understand that did actually play the game aswell and in a certain way)



"I just wanted you to know, I'm running a minor fever, my joints ache, and my sinuses are packed with I-don't-know-what. But it was TOTALLY worth it."

Dragon Age: Origins and DLC issues on Windows 7

I recently got "Dragon Age: Origins", including promotion codes for 2 additional DLCs: "Blood Dragon Armor" and "The Stone Prisoner". I knew I especially wanted the latter, since having a Golem as Tank in your group is simply cool! And after trying it out, I can only say: It rocks! (pun intended). And so does the game, btw! It's another amazing game from Bioware! Thank you!

But as so often with PCs, I had to tinker with things first to get the DLCs to work at all:

1. DLCs not available

The problem was that even though I successfully registered my unlock-codes on the website for my online-profile, the DLCs didn't show up ingame, not as available, nor pending or installed. In fact, no add-ons did show up at all, no matter if I was signed in to my account in the game or not.

After some searching, I found the answer in the official Bioware-forums: Dragon Age installs a Windows-Service that takes care of the handling of DLCs and that service needs to be running. Well, it didn't on my system. It was installed with the start-method "manual". After actually starting it, I could see the DLCs ingame and download and use them.

A few things came to my mind right away (usually in form of rants, as usual when I'm fixing computer-issues):

• For one, why does it have to be a Windows-Service? I am no fan of such background-processes constantly running, using up resources, especially when I have no idea that those are installed/running. And for a game? come on! I might have the game installed for a long time, but it doesn't mean I'll be playing it constantly. But the service will... Wouldn't a user-process have been enough for this? Ok, I can see things like background-downloading as an advantage, but not as a big enough one to justify using a windows-service.

• Second: if using a service, then at least have your game check that it's up and running, and not silently fail/ignore if it's not. If I wouldn't have known that I have DLCs, I wouldn't have ever found out about them when playing the game, since it simply does not show any. This is actually quite counter-productive regarding the fact that Bioware tries to establish an additional income-source via the DLCs they provide for their games.

Anyway, once I installed the DLCs and played the game some more, I ran into another problem...

2. DLCs not "authorized"

When I tried running the game again later and wanted to resume my last savegame: I got an error saying that the savegame requires additional DLCs that are not enabled. So I checked the DLC status ingame and it did show them as installed, but also had (unauthorized) next to the status. I was guessing that it's an online-verification thing, so I tried logging out of my game-account and back in. Then I realized that when I was logged out, the "(unauthorized)" status disappeared and I was able to play the game again. As soon as I logged back in, I had the same problem again.

Well, solution for that one was to run the game "as Administrator". Well, Windows 7 is still Windows, so I'm not too surprised about that "fix", but it still annoyed me. Maybe it has to do with the fact that there is a service involved. But I don't really want to have to think about such issues! These things should work out-of-the-box, and I do neither have a very special system nor a very special configuration. I simply installed the game from DVD, created an online-profile and registered my 2 promo-codes.

But despite all my ranting, I still think that "Dragon Age: Origins" is an amazing game! It has depth, nice graphics, great voice-acting and an epic, exciting story that really takes you in. When a game has that much spoken dialogue and I don't mind at all sitting through it and really listening to it without skipping and when I start to genuinely care about my party-members and their personalities, the game achieved what is hardest: an atmosphere!

So if you have a faible for RPGs and Tolkien-style fantasy-worlds, then go and get this game! And hopefully, you won't be running into problems like I did. And if you do, I hope my post helped you resolve them.