Kratos, Ghost of Sparta, God of War, Slayer of Ares, Sex Minigame Enthusiast, Climber of Long Ass Chains, Sole Employee of Mythological Creature Extermination Services Inc., and most importantly, Collector of Red Orbs, returns in the third and possibly final installment of the God of War series.

Odds were, I really wasn’t going to be surprised by anything that I encountered in playing God of War ]|[.  I enjoyed the first two and played them to completion.  I played through both on hard difficulty, which I felt was just the right level of difficulty.  Each time I saw the “restart from last checkpoint screen” I felt I might be able to make it if that next time, if I really just got my game on and just brought it.

Or just got luckier.

Probably the latter.

In my defense whenever I got to a point where I seemed to hit a dead end, (Usually around the nth restart.  I never really count.)  I would really rethink how I was playing and start playing differently, trying new moves or strategies.  So part of it may have been skill, but I’m not going to discount luck entirely.

But beat them I did, and seemingly before I knew it, (amazing how fast sequels get here when you’re not watching them obsessively) God of War III arrived.  I’m not going to say it was worth the wait, since I wasn’t really anticipating it.  However, when I remembered it was out, I picked it up right away.  (Maybe because my 360 was dead, but that’s another issue, altogether.  Everyone:  MAYBE BECAUSE MY 360 WAS DEAD.)

But on to God of War III

The God of War games are guilty pleasures that I just can’t say no to.  They have been consistently fun, well produced, and I can’t fault a game for being both of those things.  The third is also fun and well produced, only this time it has the added visual punch of being on the PS3.  So visually it’s way ahead of the previous two games.

Kratos is not a nice guy.  He just kills people.  That’s his thing.  He accidentally killed his wife and daughter and wears their ashes for eternity as his burden.  He’s killed more than a few gods and demigods in his lifetime.  He is a killing machine.  His motivations are simple.  Get vengeance.  On whoever.  Or is it whomever?  Either way, people are dying.

In fact, if you’re a civilian in a God of War game, you might as well arm yourself with whatever you have laying around and at least go out fighting because Kratos is going to kill you and he’s going to kill you so hard that red orbs come out of your mauled corpse.

Not surprising so far:

It’s a God of War game.  So you’ll kill lots of creatures with the Blades of Chaos Exile, collect red orbs and upgrade your various items and weapons.

Kratos’s quest for vengeance is pretty much all there is in terms of story.  I mean, a lot of it could have just been cutscenes of Kratos yelling, “ZEUUUUUUUUUUUS!” and shaking his fist at Mount Olympus.  In fact, I’d like to see someone do this.

Blood.  Everywhere.

Still working my way through, but the game is basically a very pretty God of War game.  If you liked the previous ones there’s nothing stopping you from getting this one.  However, there have been some surprises:  (Spoilers ahoy.)The difficulty.  Whoa do they mean it this time.  I don’t know if it was just a long time since God of War II, but I was having some difficulties getting back into the game.  My first stopping point was at the first mid point boss, about a half an hour into the game.  I put it away and came back the next day and everything was better, but for a while I was considering normal difficulty.  Following that pattern, it’s taken me a little while to get back into the flow of the game, but I’m still working my way through hard difficulty and enjoying it.

Special level design cameos by M.C. Escher and whoever produced The Cube movies.  Some really interesting level play mechanics for one section that really gives you a nice break in between the large cavern and large cavernous temple designs.  Also, I’d like to really commend whoever decided to reimagine the labyrinth as a series of interlocking cubes filled with with traps—each more deadly than the last!

I’m about nine hours in which means I’m close to the end, but I don’t regret any of that time so far.  It’s been fun and I’m looking forward to the inevitable completely different play mechanic for the final boss, which I presume is Zeus.

Also, if I were you, I’d upgrade the Nemean Cestus at some point.  No reason really, I’m just saying that you may run into something sometime that requires that weapon.

It’s the third piece of downloadable content for this game and I really want them to make more.  The game is just fun.  At least it is for me.  I’m trying to figure out what makes it work for me, what magic combination of RPG Leveling lite with First Person Shooter and offbeat humor that has enthralled me for this long.

Full Disclosure:  I’ve bought the game twice, on two different platforms so I could play with two different groups of people.

Mainly because I didn’t play enough of the beta to make it to the first tier ship selection.

So I did what any Star Trek fan would do if they were going to get a starship.  I started to obsess.

I was writing down ship names whenever I had the chance.  Would I go with one name, “Whisper?” Or a two name ship, “Silent Resolve?”  Would I go serious or funny?  For instance, “Furious Diplomat,” a name that initially sounds serious but only continues to get funnier the more I think about it.

I read forums and looked up ship name generators.

I decided I was going to go with a science vessel because I really wanted to be able to target subsystems and science vessels were the only ship that could do that without having dedicated bridge officers with “target subsystem” skills.  This way, I could take down shields for my team, or just take out the engines for a quick getaway, or just take out the weapons systems and leave them powerless.

You could say that I was kind of excited.

A couple of days of play had leveled me up to the point where I was a Lt. Grade 10.  This was the last rank before new ships were unlocked.

I looked at my XP bar, and it was very close to the end.  There was no doubt I was going to make Lt. Commander this session.  Curious, I hovered the cursor over the bar.

Seven skill points to make Lt. Commander.

Seven.

In terms of character progression, seven points is nothing.  You gain a skill point for every enemy you defeat and upwards of four or five skill points depending on the level of the enemies you’re fighting.

This was going to be easy.

If I was thinking straight, I would have entered a deep space combat scenario and just helped the Federation with their Gorn problem, but instead I opted to finish an exploration mission.  I entered the Arucanis arm and headed straight for the first anomaly the Lockheed’s sensors found.  It was just some radiation samples, not a system with a randomly generated mission.  No combat.

I headed for another one.  This time, an alien artifact.  Again, no combat, no skill points.

Finally I found a system with a mission.  It was an asteroid belt, that featured an abandoned base.  But it was truly abandoned, no Gorn, no Nausicaans, no Klingon occupying force to be found anywhere.  Instead, Starfleet requested that I beam down and check to see if the crew of the Lockheed could salvage any research from the computers on the station.  This mission would reward skill points after completion.

I only needed seven points, but I had waited this long—what was one more mission?  I brought the Lockheed up to full impulse and headed straight for the abandoned research base, ever hopeful that some Gorn would warp in and protest the Federation’s incursion into Gorn space.  But it was a long and uneventful trip, even at full impulse.  The base was on the exact opposite end of the map.

I beamed down with my away team, and found the first console.  There was no research Starfleet was interested in, but they wanted me to check the rest of the station.  It was at this point, that I started to wonder if I should just abort the mission and move on.  But it was late in the evening, and I was already in mission, so I stuck with it.

I wandered the empty corridors when the crew of the Lockheed contacted me via communicator.  Orion ships had been detected on long range sensors and were approaching the asteroid base.  Combat was imminent, I thought.  Surely, any second, I would beam back to the Lockheed and take on the Orions ship to ship.

I could taste the seven points.

But then my crew said they had everything handled and I was left scavenging holographic storage chips about the mineral makeup of the asteroid.  Before they signed off though, they did note that they detected Orion transporter signatures, so I should be careful.

I had hope yet.  It wasn’t long before we ran into an Orion away team.  I set up a shield generator and a phaser turret and told the away team to hold their ground.  While the shield generator was on, the away team’s shields were constantly being replenished.  The battle was never a question of who would win, merely a question of how long it would take my away team to come out victorious.

A few minutes later I was surprised to find that I had not, in fact, made Lt. Commander.  I thought that perhaps I had missed a notification message in the fracas.  The air was filled with phaser and distruptor beams, it’s not unlikely that I had missed something.

I checked my character profile.  I was still a Lieutenant.  Still Grade 10.  I hovered over the XP bar again.

One point stood between me and ranking to Lt. Commander.

One point.

One.

The Orion away team was a six member squad, and I had gained exactly one point for every Orion.

I sighed.  It was a long, resigned exhalation of breath.  It was the exhalation a person makes when they have decided to burn everything.  I ran the away team through the deserted halls, searching for another Orion away team.  Through room after room.  Nothing.

Finally, nearing the end of the map, Orions showed on the minimap.  I ran straight for them and engaged them in battle.  I didn’t even bother setting up a shield generator or a phaser turret.  In fact, some of my away team were still stuck in another room, their pathfinding algorithms locked in a never ending slow motion run on the doorway of the previous room.

I selected the first Orion I could target and then activated sniper shot.  My phaser bolt hit true, and then—

—My screen froze.  And I nearly yelled, save for the fact that shortly afterward, the display corrupted.  And then, I actually yelled.  It was something incoherent, something to the effect of, “gwaaugh?!”  Followed shortly by an incredulous sounding, but no more coherent, “whauh?”  My brain had blue screened.

The Star Trek Online client had crashed.

It had crashed hard.  I sat there and looked at the screen.  My palms instantly struck both sides of my forehead in utter disbelief.  I stared at the screen for at least ten seconds.  This was a betrayal.  One of the highest order.  There is a tier in Dante’s hell specifically for this.  I sat there for another ten seconds, listening to the sounds of phasers firing and computer warnings about enemy combatants being in close proximity.

Then it hit me.  I was so awestruck at the irony of the moment that I did not notice.

I hit the one key to fire my phaser bolt rifle, and I heard the telltale sound of a phaser firing.

The client was still running.

It was still running.  Even though the display had crashed, it was receiving keyboard input and acting on it.  Desperate, I hit my keybinds for “target nearest” and “all allies attack my target.”

Then I fired that phaser bolt rifle for all it was worth.  Just for good measure, every now and again, I hit the two key.

This went on for an excruciating two minutes.  Without any visual indicators, I must have selected the strongest enemy combatant, probably an Orion Matron or a fully shielded Brute.  My team had no shield generator in place and my science officer was shield damage focused—not a doctor.  With no way to regenerate shields or health, I feared a total wipe.

Then it happened.

There was a triumphant sounding noise amidst the phaser blasts.

Then words.

“Congratulations Lt. Commander.”

I immediately hit the enter key and typed in, “/quit” quickly logging me out of the server and quitting the client.  The noises of battle stopped.  It was silent. I rubbed my face with my hands.  Regardless of what time it was, I was now more than wide awake, and on top of that, I needed a glass of water.  My mouth was dry.  My hands were jittery.

My desktop never came back.  It was a hard display crash.  I had to turn off my computer.

I haven’t logged back in since.

Update: I’ve since logged in and I got my science vessel.

Captain’s log, supplemental.

Our assignment was simple, scan Gorn facilities in this remote asteroid belt to make sure that they weren’t stockpiling weapons of mass destruction of any sort.

The Gorn, of course, were having none of it, and we found ourselves on the receiving end of a volley of disruptor bursts after attempting to scan the first outpost.  Calling on my background as an engineer I rotated the shield frequencies before the impact.

The Lockheed’s shields held gracefully. Rotating the frequencies had the desired effect and managed to mitigate most of the damage to the shields.

But there were still three ships.  I ordered engineering officer Ensign Kort to reroute EPS systems to boost the shield systems while I sounded the red alert.

Shields were holding, but I could see that there was another incoming volley of disruptor fire, plus photon torpedoes.  I reinforced the fore shields and told tactical to open fire on the lead Gorn cruiser.

The Lockheed’s heavy disruptor cannons locked onto the Gorn ship and opened fire.  Their shields dropped quickly, and without shielding the disruptors quickly ate through the rest of their hull.  The Lockheed was too close, and the shockwaves from exploding cruiser shuddered through the ship.  Thankfully there were no major casualties.

We moved to three quarter impulse and engaged evasive maneuvers.  Full power to starboard shields soaked a torpedo volley as we brought the Lockheed around in an arc to end up behind the second cruiser.

My science officer Ensign Sadi jammed the targeting sensors of the third Gorn cruiser, preventing them from targeting us for some of the fight although she warned that it was but “a fleeting dream that wouldn’t last forever.”  She could have just told me nine seconds.  I forget that her previous host was a poet.  Note: I need to speak with her regarding combat expediency.

My tactical officer, Ensign Noros prepared a high yield torpedo burst to impact just as their facing shields were dropped.  Commendations for Ensign Noros for her impeccable timing.

To this day, many Starfleet officers protest the academy’s admission policies from some of the more controversial systems, such as Ferenginar, but every day, new recruits like Ensign Noros continue to prove them wrong.

One on one the last cruiser was no match for the crew of the Lockheed.  We scanned the installation and moved on, although it was not the last of the Gorn we would see that day.

Considering that she’s an ensign, it looks like Starfleet academy started offering courses in Astroasskicking.

Upon her return to the Sol System, Admiral Quinn expresses his confidence in her and in a surprise move that shocked viewers everywhere, promotes her to Lieutenant and assigns her as the permanent captain of the Lockheed.

It’s yet another Cryptic Studios product, (City of Heroes, Champions Online) and a lot of their usual design can be seen throughout Star Trek: Online.

The ship to ship combat is a lot of fun.  There is something satisfying about rerouting power to the starboard shields and coming about to give them a broadside from both phaser arrays that takes down the facing shields just in time for a high yield photon burst to strike the unshielded side of an enemy vessel.

Away team missions are your standard MMO fare, with a third person point of view and a the usual take out X number of enemies or interact with Y, then report to Starfleet.  The ground combat tends to focus on the various firearms and their abilities found in the Star Trek universe, although that may be because I didn’t roll a tactical officer.

I’m playing the beta when the servers aren’t flooded, but so far I’m having a good time.

Protip: Enemy ships explode, and can destroy your vessel.

Specifically, in this case, Borderlands.

In order to start a multiplayer game of Borderlands on the PC.  I had to remember my GameSpy account.  And that was a pain.  Then there was something that I had to do on my end, either placing my game machine temporarily in the DMZ or port forwarding.  Then there was the bit where I had to double check windows firewall rules and it still didn’t work.  Eventually we figured it was the GameSpy network itself, because a couple of hours later, it was working.

I know it’s not the same, but the ability to send an invite in game and then just have the other person pop in is worth the $50 a year to me.  When I want to start playing a game with my friends, I don’t necessarily want to spend a half hour troubleshooting connectivity issues before we even get started. That’s what makes the xbox live work so well is the drop in and drop out functionality.  When you send an invite, it’s the same method for each and every game you play.  You hit the jewel, see if your friend is online and send the invitation.  They accept it.

I remember when that half hour troubleshooting was the first part of playing video games with your friends.  The half hour was spent was setting up the computers and configuring them to use the same network.  Additionally, they were all in the same room you were playing in.  None of this headset stuff, you just yelled at them for camping the spawn.

Or better yet, actually walked over and threatened bodily harm.

Ah, the good old days.

On the other hand, I picked up Torchlight which is basically Diablo, right down to the Soundtrack, much more streamlined, and not as annoying.

But, I’m going to talk about Borderlands now, and the references to Diablo aren’t completely apparent until I talk about guns and equipment.

Borderlands has four classes, 50 levels, and about 87 bazillion guns.  The equipment is procedurally generated, so there’s no real set list of equipment, merely modifiers for elemental types of damage, manufacturer, type of gun, magazine size, burst fire rate, melee damage bonuses—the list goes on, but you can see how you would end up with lots and lots of different guns.

Borderlands is so much fun that I have beat it.  And gone back to play it again on the harder difficulty.  I have 90% of the Achievements for it for the Xbox 360 version, including the ones for the Zombie Island DLC.  That almost never happens.  I’m also playing it again on the PC with some friends who only got the PC version.  So it’s kind of embarrassing how much I’ve been playing this game.

It does not have the most critical acclaim for the best story, nor game mechanics, nor the graphics.  What it does have is solid, fun, and engaging gameplay.  It’s well put together.  To be honest, I think they could have gone back and actually touched the main character’s back stories a lot more.  It’s just that once the main storyline starts, it’s just a rollercoaster ride because you finish quests quickly, and often.

Spoiler alert.  You may want to not read this.  For courtesy’s sake, I’m putting in a cut and all story related issues will be afterwards.

It’s not that I dislike Dragon Age: Origins.  In fact, I really like the decision making.  They have done a great job with setting up options that do not fall into the Moralistic Good and Diabolically Evil categories.  Most of the time, they merely present you with possible solutions.

And it’s hard to say where the paths will lead.  Sure, you could solve a problem the most expedient way, but there may have to be sacrifices.  Alternatively, you could solve the problem in a Chantry approved fashion and, well, there may still have to be sacrifices, but at least you did it in such a way that the Maker approves.

I applaud them for that.  It makes the virtual decisions feel like they have true impact in the virtual world.

All right.  It’s going to get very “in game” with terms and story so don’t continue if you’ve got a thing for spoilers.

The case I’m referring to is this particular scenario.  A demon has crossed over from the Fade to take control of a ten year old boy.  The demon is already responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people in the village.  All this came about because the boy had magical ability and all potential mages are taken away by the Circle of Magi and kept prisoner taught how to control their powers.  Except in this case where the mother used her influence to hire a secret tutor for the boy in the hopes that he could hide his power from the Circle of Magi.

Your options are:

1. Kill the boy.
2. Use forbidden magic that will kill the mother, but possibly save the boy by facing the demon in its home realm.
3. Go to the Circle of Magi who can perform a ritual to send someone to face the demon in its home realm, but there and back is two days of travel.

While this may be my stopping point in the game, I will admit that this this is a fun decision to have to make in the game.

Clearly, killing the boy doesn’t actually kill the demon, but it gets the job done and you’ve saved the village.  On the other hand, you’ve killed the only son of one of the nobles that you need to enlist to fight the Darkspawn.

Saving the boy but killing the mother saves the village, but might possibly get you into trouble with the Chantry for using FORBIDDEN BLOOD MAGIC.

And of course, doing things the “right” way would mean that the demon is running loose for another two nights.  The village only survived the night through your incredibly well timed intervention.

So, I ask myself, “What would Han Solo do?”

And then I remembered that Han shot first, so that means my decision is clear.  I’m probably going to take the expedient route and save more lives right away.

While I do like the stories, it’s quite often that I’ll get about 14 hours in before I find that I’m no longer engaged, and the gameplay isn’t enough for me to continue.

This has happened to me across all platforms and all varying types of RPGs.  It’s happened with Mass Effect, Fallout 3, Chrono Cross, Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, The Legend Zelda: Majora’s Mask, Final Fantasy VIII through XII*, Brave Story, Rune Factory: Frontier, Persona 3, Baldur’s Gate, Oblivion,Fable II, The Witcher, Shadow Hearts, and whatever top rated, critically acclaimed or friend recommended game with the RPG acronym as one of its genre descriptors you want to add to the list, it’s probably on there as well.

And it’s not that they are bad games, but I think it’s the amount of time I have to devote to them.

And so begins my Dragon Age: Origins experience.  I purchased it in a moment of weakness during the insidiously compelling Steam Holiday Sale.  Even knowing my own gameplay habits with RPGs, I really wanted to play Dragon Age: Origins, mainly from the good word I’ve been hearing about as well as the critical reviews and the fact that my entire Xbox Live friends list is playing it.

In short, the purchase of Dragon Age: Origins was inevitable.  The Steam sale was just the tiniest of straws on an already overloaded camel’s back.

While it’s not the Xbox version that everyone is playing, it is the PC version.  The PC version is the one generally regarded by most critics as being the superlative version, and the one that has hooks to the Dragon Age website, where it takes screenshots and chronicles the adventure of your character.

So far it’s chronicled the whole 25 minutes of Aedan Cousland, the human noble that I’m hoping will develop into some sort of incredibly overpowered Bard Assassin that sings enemies to their untimely deaths with his dulcet tones—although right now he’s just a Rogue.

Hopefully, I haven’t decided on a character path that will leave poor Aedan unable to accomplish anything in combat.  Although in a way, that would be kudos to Bioware allowing the player to really roleplay instead of putting them on a linear path.

The Chronicle of Aedan so far reads like your stereotypical fantasy adventure game.  He has fought some giant rats that his dog chased into the Cousland castle larder and that’s about it.  There’s also a screenshot featuring Aedan, Aedan’s father, Duncan the Gray Warden, and one Arl Rendon Howe of Amaranthine, a nobleman who attempted to hook Aedan up with his underage daughter.

Not the most compelling of stories, so far, but all journeys start somewhere.  I suppose killing giant rats with one’s dog Mabari War Hound is just the first step.

So the story:  At some point in the past blah blah, mankind dealing with powers it can’t possibly comprehend, blah blah four centuries since the last Darkspawn attack, blah blah old guardians not being listened to.  All kidding aside, it seems like it is at least trying to be different than your standard fantasy story with elves and dwarves.  First off, the elves are the lower class.  Apparently, the humans destroyed the Elven civilization, took their lands, and then relocated them in reservations “alienages” where they remain second class citizens to this day.

Too subtle, Bioware.  Seriously.

* Quick note:  This is not including the MMO oriented Final Fantasy XI but including the Pretty Princess Dress Up oriented Final Fantasy X-2.  Also not included are a multiple of Strategy RPGs, Farming simulator RPGs, don’t get me started on Disgaea, and anything brought over to the United States by Atlus.  The current exception to this rule is Borderlands by Gearbox, and I have sunk a lot of time into that game.  It’s a First Person Shooter RPG, and I’ve nearly all of the achievements for that game, including the additional achievements for the Downloadable Content, and I plan on purchasing the additional DLC as soon as it drops.  Also, somewhat annoyed that it’s DLC instead of just DC, but I guess that is a crowded acronym space.  Additionally, just realizing that this really no longer counts as a quick note.

For the Sega Dreamcast.

A revolutionary console at the time, it had the unfortunate timing of being released within a year of the PlayStation 2’s North American release.  It really heralded the dawn of Online Connectivity.  It shipped with a modem and I eventually upgraded mine to an Ethernet module.  Now it’s hard to imagine a modern console without an online component.

But there I was, lined up in a food court with about a hundred or so other people.  Then midnight came and the line was processed entirely within a couple of hours.  I came away with the Dreamcast itself, a copy of Soul Calibur and the Sonic game, a Visual Memory Unit and a second controller for Soul Calibur.  I have some fond, fond memories of Soul Calibur.

Sonic, not so much.

Waiting in line for midnight launch of a a new piece of hardware was just one of those things I did when I was in my mid twenties.  Now, it’s not something I’d do again, like sleeping on the street for the release of a movie.

With video games, I feel like I’m not that crazy, although there are friends of mine who will disagree.  These are the same friends who, thankfully have not scheduled an intervention.

Sometimes, when I look at the receipts from those days, I wish they had.