>Anyone who has spoken to me about gaming for more than 2 minutes will know that I have a deep, and slightly weird, love for Dragon Age:Origins. I'll probably write up some epic post about that at some point, but this one is about Dragon Age 2, whose demo made it out onto PSN/XBL/PC earlier in the week.

I am not ashamed to admit I am a massive roleplay nerd. I roleplay in WoW, which is not the best RP environment by a longshot. I would really like to play more pen and paper because the taster of it I had I really enjoyed. I love that feeling of living and breathing a character, shaping their hope and desires, weaknesses and flaws. From this point of view, I have some reservations about DA2. The debate about voiced vs unvoiced main character has good points on both sides, but for me I really didn't mind that in DA:O the main character was silent. When you are your character, they have your voice, and being text-based means I knew exactly what my character was saying. There was the occasional breakdown in communication where I thought a sentence had a nice calming tone, but the response from the NPC suggested I said it like a twat. So I do like the little "tone" icon DA2 has. I know this is funny, this is nice, this is threatening to make you eat your own balls etc. But to get that, we've lost the ability to know exactly what our character is about to say. Also, having a voiced character ultimately has the problem that the VA may or may not be any good.

It feels like it's going backwards. Instead of shaping a character and helping them learn and evolve, we are given the Hawke character and we basically choose if they are nice or not. They come prebuilt, and yeah we can fiddle with them a bit, but the demo didn't really show any of that evolution. Because she's voiced, it's not longer me speaking through a character, but a character being poked by the player. Plus you can't have a dwarf or elf character, and as anyone knows the two dwarven origins in DA:O are the best ones.

The combat is pretty much the same. No auto-attack so some button-mashing is in order. Tactics are still there and the level-up trees from what little you see look good. The whole "fight like a Spartan" thing does make me want to fly to the US and punch whatever Bioware PR dickwad came up with it. My main gripe with the combat is the noise. Apparently gamers these days need constant sonic reminders that they are in combat, and my fuck-off 2-handed sword sounds awfully like a lightsaber in places. Bioware have said that they want it to be more "Press a button and stuff happens RIGHT NOW". I'm sorry, but if gamers have reached the point where waiting more than half a second to use an ability or spell will somehow cause them to fall asleep at their screens, then I don't know if gaming is worth it anymore.

They want to widen the audience for this game. It's understandable and somewhat commendable. However, DA:O felt like the kind of game RPG players had been waiting for for so long, and on console it's almost in a genre of one. We already have RPGs like DA2 is trying to be, bloody Mass Effect for a start, get your "10 MILLION SALES" bullshit that way, but don't go pissing on us players who loved, and will continue to love, your much better first DA game. Try the DA2 demo, it's not terrible but it's also not deep enough to help you get a real feel for the game, especially for roleplay fags like me.

>I'm not what you would call a "music person"; my music collection is less that 20gig and I probably have less than a thousand CDs/tapes(showing my age). However, I always have my iPod on me, or my laptop and I feel naked without some music to listen to. And there are some bands I completely love, one of those is Machinae Supremacy.

I got into them through one of my girlfriend's uni mates in 2003/4. One of the first bands to really get the internet, before bands had things like Myspace to post stuff on. As such there are 3 albums' worth of material available on their website for free, and the Jets'n'Guns soundtrack, some of my favourite game music. Their unique points are 1) Robert's distinctive and wonderful vocals 2) inspiration but nerdy lyrics and 3) SID-metal! The SID chip was the sound chip the C64 used, and it has a very distinctive sound, something a lot thicker and warmer than NES/Gameboy chip music. The lyrics are about the youth staple of "fuck the system"but phrased in a empowering way, and listening to them always makes me feel like I could reach out and mould the world in my own hands however I see fit.

A View From the End of the World is their 4th 'studio' album. A mixture of post-apocalyptic urban winters and celebration of gaming and the internet as a connective idea-sharing world. There is more than the SID chip at use here, with NES sounds sprinkled throughout and a rhodes piano at one point. So here's my track-by-track(All interpretations are my own, and may not reflect their original intent):

1) A View From the End of the World - We race towards the end of days
The title track and a great scene-setter. A warning against a religious apocalypse, not from a god but from the ignorance of those who would inflict their faith upon us at the cost of all else.

2) Force Feedback - A borderless nation of thoughts to replace / your walled-in existence in space
A reverse 'get off my lawn'; a call-to-arms to all those who use the internet against those companies and organisations that can't catch up and so try to force it from us. Some amazing female vocals; both in english and japanese. Epic guitars and sweeping SID.

3) Rocket Dragon - As I burn down and murder I know that God forgives
A song about war, and the impersonal nature of it. That we are just dots on a targeting screen, or images on a infra-red camera. The soldier feels he is delivering righteous justice. One of the NES tracks with a long guitar solo.

4) Persona - Put on your new face and run run run
It's easy to stay with a crowd, and hard to fight against it. Conformity is spiritual death, figure out what face you are. One of those songs about how the world will only change if we want it, and if we want it we can build whatever we want. If you don't try, you get the world you deserve. A stand-out track, rhodes piano!

5)Nova Prospekt - The time for running now is over
So you decided to fight? Good, this is the song of your revolution. Half-Life players will get the reference of the track title and on the face of it this is a song about that level. Underneath that it's a song about mobilizing and reclaiming. A heavy, SID-laden, relentless song littered with game references.

6)World of Light + 7) Shinigami - The devil in the doorway is defined within our blood
World of Light is a short instrumental track designed as Shinigami's introduction. These tracks are about Death Note, and I'm not a Death Note fan so I probably miss a lot of the references, but Shinigami is one of my favourite tracks. It deserves to be played loud and screamed out. A bored deity sets the world on fire just for kicks, but it also feels like another warning about extreme political parties and how voting for them out of desperation or propaganda will only trap you when their real motives become clear.

>It's a well known phrase; "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." And it's a well known joke in the gaming community that a Fable game never will be what it says it will be. And really that's alright, because the gameplay and the world underneath are always worth visiting.

So you're a lazy princess/prince who sleeps with dogs and has John Cleese as your butler; your brother is the king and he's being a royal dick so your butler and Bernard Hill take you away to claim your heritage as the child of Albion's most famous Hero. So you scour the land for allies to help you overthrow your brother and take the throne to improve the land from its dire state. Each ally you gain by making promises to help them out once you become King/Queen. You have to make these promises to make the game progress, which feels a little silly but otherwise all that work you did gaining their trust would have been slightly pointless. Then you travel to a new land, end up in a Lovecraftian desert that in now in my top ten gaming moments of all time, and come back to face your brother and become ruler. As ruler you have to make tough decisions to keep your promises and drive the land to ruin, or be an evil but rich tyrant.

All the Fable staples are here. You can buy, sell and rent houses, get married and have children. Single parents and gay characters can adopt and a nanny will raise your children if you have no spouse or if they die in some kind of freak accident that occurs between the pause screen and back again. There's no menu system here, everything from shopping to trying outfits to levelling up is done 'in-game' and actually works really well. The main character voice acting is excellent and the writing easily surpasses Fable 2. NPCs still have those stereotypical English voices that will drive you mad and make any sex scene exist somewhere between embarrassment and hilarity.

So, negatives. The main plot is much much too short, and the climax of the story will hit you without warning making the countdown of days till disaster entirely pointless. The good or evil moral choice system is frustratingly dated and its a shame no work was done to improve this and make it more immersive; seeing how it's one of Lionhead's favourite toys. And no matter your alignment it makes little difference really until the post-end game. Ruling is boring as shit. I would have much preferred something a little more complicated, like Simcity 2000 budget setting or something. The map allows fast travel much as Fable 2 did, but this Albion feels much less open and connected. And the bugs. Jesus Christ, someone buy Lionhead some more testers, this really could have done with it. Took me ages to walk my boyfriend to a date because pathfinding fuck-ups kept breaking running so we could only walk Very. Very. Slowly. Also "Do this thing and I'll be your friend"? I'm the fucking Queen, if I want to drag you to my big castle so you can impregnate me then that's what I'll do!

Final opinion: Worth playing, but possibly rent or borrow from a friend. Central gameplay pretty much unchanged but tweaked and the lack of menus really helps game flow. Voice acting spectacular. Too short, and too simplistic. After Dragon Age Fable 3 feels like a relic from the past.