Dragon Age: first look

Where AGE is the operative word and I feel like a 120-year old trying to run a marathon in under 6 hours. These last few days have been quite busy, to say the least, so when DA:O hadn’t shown up by mid-afternoon yesterday I was a little peeved but not really surprised, and possibly a tad relieved. Yesterday was “develop interesting new aches and pains day” for me too, for some unknown reason, so I spent most of it working around groans and grimaces.

All of which to say that Sod’s* Law is still alive and well: the second we decided to just slob it out, forget about DA:O and order pizza, the damned UPS man showed up with our Collectors’ Editions.

And again, I find myself wondering why I splurge on these CE versions. The cloth map smells funny, is vaguely waxy to the touch, and is a massive 12″ x 8″. Haven’t done anything with the in-game or downloadable goodies yet. Oddly enough the most impressive thing about it was the cool tin, which not only closes nicely but also holds the two disks in a neatly stacked but easy to get to way. Plus it has red artwork on it.

Oh yeah, and there’s some kind of a bonus disk too. To me, that almost always ends up meaning “Here’s some crap we threw together so we could charge you more for this package. Aren’t you glad you’re a consumer?”

But when the most impressive thing about something is the packaging, it might be time to realise that you’re not the type to buy collectors’ editions. I’ll know for next time. (I should also have done my research. The contents of the preorder CE have been known for some time:)

After all that, when we caved and did install the game on my machine, the character I made in the downloadable character creator imported just fine but looked nothing like the character I actually made. So, yeah… that wasn’t impressive, though certainly not game-breaking. For someone like me though it’ll be time-consuming to have to make her all over again; I’m the type of person who can spend an hour fiddling about with eyebrow sliders, and when I have a character in mind then that character is going to end up as close to mind’s-eye-perfect as I can get it.

And then the intro sequence started, and lo it was quite impressive, but verily we were extremely tired by then and, sadly, we wimped out and stopped. Another interesting thing to note is that while you can select interaction options during the intro sequence, there’s no way to quit the game. Well, other than the tried-and-tested ALT-F4, which worked like a charm yet again.

Today starts with a visit to the vet (for the dogs, not me!), then walking said dogs, then working, then spazzing out because I got no NaNoWriMo done yesterday either (even though I actually have a vague outline of the plot now — whew) and must try to get some in today around all the other stuff going on.

Oh yeah, and we’re trying to move to Albuquerque. Try saying that really fast 8 times in a row. (No prizes! Just personal satisfaction.)

So maybe after all that I’ll get to spend my 3 hours in the char creator and THEN finally get to try this game. I’m exhausted already just thinking about it.

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* Sod is Murphy’s nastier cousin from England.