Mass Effect 2
I’ve enjoyed playing the first Mass Effect game a while back, and just finished Mass Effect 2.
The short version?
I like it! Possibly better than the first, although I was kinda disappointed that only such a small section of the citadel is accessible.
Which leads me to the one thing that did bother me throughout the game… Like so many other games, it suffers from what I call the Pokémon effect. Every object, every character, every place you encounter is there for a reason. Aside from general things like NPCs that run a store, EVERY character you can actually talk to or who makes remarks you pass by, is there for one assignment or another. Every door, corridor and room exists for a specific reason, and more annoyingly, nearly every object placed in those rooms as well. Specifically I’m referring to objects that can be used as cover during a firefight (or objects that can be used to your (dis)advantage, such as the explosive containers), because those kinds of objects are only found in the locations where you will be fighting, and just by looking what objects there are ahead of you makes it really easy to predict if/when you’ll be attacked. Also the game world is very linear; yes, you can fly your ship around in between missions, but once you’re on a mission there is only the correct way a head and every other path is conveniently blocked by stacks of crates, a door that cannot be opened, or debris (except for the occasional sideroom that’s got a few goodies you can pick up).
A good example of a game that doesn’t have this problem would be Oblivion. For instance, there are lots of houses you can visit, with one or more people living in them, that aren’t of any real significance. Occasionally you need them for a quest, but otherwise they’re just decoration (yes, you can rob them or use them as food if you become a vampire, but otherwise). Even during a quest you’re mostly free to move as you like rather than being forced along one specified route.
The tons of voiced dialogue and voice acting were outstanding, and is something I can really appreciate in a game. They could have come up with a few more lines for teammates to shout during combat though; when you hear the same lines five times over during each firefight, they tend to get boring (even annoying) quickly.
Nevertheless – Pokémon effect aside, I can definately recommend ME2. Oh, and this time around I am going to make sure I keep the save game to import it into the 3rd installment of the Mass Effect games 
Games
I’m not much of a gamer person. I do enjoy the occasional game every once in a while, but many games can’t really keep my attention for long. Occasionally there is a game that does manage to do just that, and if there is it’ll quite often keep my attention for a wee bit too long (the “oh crap, it’s 5 AM and I have to get up at 6:30″ kind of too lon), but luckily that only happens a few times a year.
One such time has just passed. The game in question is Dragon Age: Origins, which is a very nice RPG from Bioware. Even the main storyline alone is really really long, but it’s also really really addictive (those two don’t mix well together if you want to avoid the 6:30 problem I mentioned earlier). I just finished playing the game today… it took me about 60 hours to get through the entire main quest (without doing too many sidequests, but not always taking the easiest route either). It generally ran smoothly on my PC – which is not known for its awesome performance in the graphics department – and there are just so many things I like about the game. For instance, I like how you can make all sorts of decisions that can affect the game world in a fairly important way. I like how one of the characters in the game is voiced by Claudia Black (also known as Vala Mal Doran in Stargate SG-1), which is particularly fun because those two characters are quite much alike in terms of personality (and if you know the Stargate character, you know how much fun that can be ^^)). I like… well, there isn’t a whole lot not to like actually.
I did also play Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (yes, on easy, because I suck at shooters big time 
). Went through the campaign in one day and thats pretty much the only interesting bit to me. It was pretty good though.
For the rest… I got myself a copy of DCS: Blackshark, which is pretty cool, a hell of a learning curve though (but that was to be expected). It’s not that I’m doing badly at it (actually I’d say its not bad at all considering my all of perhaps 2 hours in the game so far), but it’s just the getting used to the million different keyboard commands (which often involve ctrl/alt/shift keys, and even more so you need to specifically use the left or right one, because otherwise you’ll probably activate something entirely different) and procedures that makes it difficult.
On an entirely unrelated matter, I just came accross this little Flash game. It’s a Hitchhikers-themed game where you’re destroying as many Earths as possible. It’s quite entertaining to play for a bit (random tea breaks? what the hell? ).