Gamers' Creed

Bioware has announced a new expansion release called "Awakening." Here are the details:

For centuries, the Grey Wardens—the ancient order of guardians, sworn to unite and defend the lands—have been battling the darkspawn forces. Legend spoke that slaying the Archdemon would have put an end to the darkspawn threat for centuries to come, but somehow they remain.

You are the Grey Warden Commander and have been entrusted with the duty of rebuilding the order of Grey Wardens and uncovering the secrets of the darkspawn and how they managed to remain.

How you choose to rebuild your order, how you resolve the conflict with "The Architect", and how you determine the fate of the darkspawn will be but some of the many complex choices that await and shape your journey as you venture to the new land of Amaranthine.

• Unlock the secrets of the Darkspawn and their true motivations
• Rebuild the Grey Warden order and establish their base of operations at Vigil's Keep
• Import your character from Dragon Age: Origins or start anew as a Grey Warden from the neighboring land of Orlais
• Encounter five all-new party members and an old favorite from Dragon Age: Origins
• Put your skills to the test against an evolved, intelligent breed of Darkspawn and other menacing creatures including the Inferno Golem and Spectral Dragon!
   

For the educationally minded gamer, NASA is making an MMO. And early next year, we get a demo. Well, more specifically, a "mini demo game". From their site:

"The mini demo game Moon Base Alpha utilizes actual NASA Constellation program design details developed by NASA for mankind’s return to the Moon in 2020. Timelines in the much anticipated Astronaut: Moon, Mars and Beyond MMO will be set even farther in the exciting future (2035+), but the ability to explore our own near-future moon missions is also planned for in the forthcoming game facilitated by the NASA Learning Technologies and Innovative Partnerships Programs."

I looked at the "first look" (which requires a Windows Media Player plugin), and the graphics seem serviceable. But overall, there is a dearth of polish to this game. Still, I thought America's Army was brilliant for what it was, and I think this title looks like NASA's version of America's Army. And being something of a space program fanboi, I can't help but geek out a little over this title. Let hope it's playable.

1UP.com posts that Leonard Nimoy is recording voiceover segments for Star Trek Online. Fascinating!

Eagle-eyed Trek fans are probably already asking themselves, "Self, how can Spock possibly exist during Star Trek Online? It's supposed to take place during the early 25th century, and everyone knows that Spock hopped a red matter train to the past back in 2387!"

Alright, look -- it's Leonard-freaking-Nimoy. Anything's possible. The press release states that Nimoy will narrate the intro cutscene, as well as "other key scenes and events in-game," so who knows what sort of loony plot twists Cryptic has in store for us? We'll find out for sure in February.

IGN has a hands-on preview of Bioware's upcoming game, Mass Effect 2. Based on what I've been reading, it sounds like the second game will be even better. 

There are quite a few changes to the ebb and flow of the action sequences that Mass Effect fans will quickly notice. Medi-gel is now only used to bring back fallen comrades with an auto-regenerating health system introduced. Heavy weapons add a new punch to the gunplay. New skills have been added to every class -- which you'll have to begin from scratch with once more. Weapon and armor management (There's a new set of civilian outfits for non-combat moments too!) is done through lockers instead of the pause screen, which means you can't just switch load-outs on the fly at any time. Everything is familiar, but tweaked to be a bit better.  

As part of their Best of 2009 piece, IGN's PC Game of the Year is... Dragon Age: Origins. They said:

From the moment you choose your character to the final blow against the Archdemon, Dragon Age: Origins is a genre defining game. Engrossing because of its depth, engaging because of its action and expansive thanks to its downloadable content, Dragon Age is the RPG that will keep fantasy fans satisfied for quite a long time.

CVG has news that Fallout 3: GOTY Edition is now available on Steam. Details!

Create a character of your choosing and descend into an awe-inspiring, post-apocalyptic world where every minute is a fight for survival. Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition includes all five of the Fallout 3 Game Add-on Packs:

• Operation: Anchorage - Enter a military simulation and fight in the liberation of Anchorage, Alaska from its Chinese Communist invaders.
• The Pitt - Travel to the post-apocalyptic remains of Pittsburgh and become embroiled in a conflict between slaves and their Raider masters.
• Broken Steel - Increase your level cap to 30, and finish the fight against the Enclave remnants alongside Liberty Prime.
• Point Lookout - Embark on a mysterious and open-ended adventure in a huge, murky swampland along the coast of Maryland.
• Mothership Zeta - Defy hostile alien abductors and fight your way off of the alien mothership, orbiting miles above the Capital Wasteland.

The GOTY edition will set you back around $50.

IGN has a first impressions piece posted that gives an overview of Gearbox's second DLC for Borderlands, "Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot." From the sound of it, the gameplay is rather different from the core game and the first DLC. Primarily, you get a quest to survive waves of enemies that increase in difficulty. No experience is gained by killing them, nor do they drop loot. Honestly, it doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun to me... Shoot!

There's also a quest board in here, which initially has one assignment available called Prove Yourself. It's added to your quest log, and requires that you clear 5 rounds in three coliseums to get a quest reward. What's a coliseum? Well, each coliseum, of which I saw three, functions like Gears of War 2's Horde mode or Halo 3: ODST's Firefight. Each coliseum is separated from the main room by a load screen, and the first one is called Hell-burbia.

Jumping into this area kicks off with Moxxie -- a particularly energetic woman with fishnet stockings and a circus ringleader outfit -- screaming through a megaphone as slippery electronic beats pulse in the background. There's a crowd hollering as you're set in the middle of an arena that's built from pieces of the rest of the game world, from rusted metal houses to the lighted pumpkins of Jakobs Cove. Then the action kicks off.

Koku Gamer has an editorial regarding the uproar over the potential gay relationships that can be developed in Bioware's CRPG, Dragon Age: Origins. Coming on the heels of the alien sex uproar that occurred over Mass Effect, this one just makes me yawn.

Personally, I don't care what people do in the privacy of their own homes (as long as it isn't hurting anyone), so it's kind of a non-issue for me. It seems to me that if this were a concern for Bioware, and I haven't read anything indicating that it is, then it seems to me that an easy fix would be just to toggle this option in the gameplay options. Problem solved. Anything beyond that is just bitchy people.

Speaking out against offensive content in video games is so passé and rather than feeling as if they are beating a dead horse, it feels more like a dog chewing on a bone – there really isn’t much meat there but they do it by nature. The relationship between the video game industry and mainstream news is clearly strained at best. In almost all instances where a program’s host has a discussion with a developer, it is routine for the host to belittle or even yell at the developer for destroying today’s youth. The developer usually takes it on the chin and tries to prove that he is a normal member of society with few major defects. Luckily, the damage done by the host is only temporary as their listeners are typically not gamers so winning their dollar was not possible anyways.