First off, I hope everyone had a great holidays. Enjoyed your Christmas, revelled in new years and generally took it easy.

With my time of I decided to finally start up the game I was scared off. Dragon Age. Scared because I know what I am like with Bioware games, I stop all required functions to survive to play those games as they take over my life. So I picked up a copy when the game came out but waited, left it sitting there taunting me. I needed time when me disappearing from reality would not be so detrimental.

I am glad I did. I started Dragon Age last Thursday, now on Monday my stats are showing I have put a shade over 60 hours into this game. Sickening? maybe… worth it? Totally.

I will not gush fanboy style over it, as I can easily see its faults. However this is easily the game of the last year. No question. The other thing it should be is the poster child of gaming. This is what people should associate with gaming, this grown up, adult story of grand fiction. Filled with care and depth that extends past most novels. With characterization on such levels that sometimes I had to just stop and walk away, unable to continue the conversation.

Instead we get Modern Warfare 2. MW2 is what is the public face of gaming and that makes me sad. When MW1 came out it was a big hit, you could make the argument, rightly so.  Not to get onto my PC gaming is king spiel, but what made MW1 so popular is that it feels right, the movement, the aiming and the shooting are all spot on. You know, Counter Strike for the console generation. So after the popularity of MW1 we got a slew of games that suddenly had to be like Modern Warfare, copycats if you will. Now with MW2 reaching such heights of exposure you can bet your ass people are going to copy…oh what’s that? Medal of Honour the big competing console franchise is shifting its focus of Warfare into the Modern era? Really?…..

These are the two big games of last year and the influence on them is easy to see. They are both trying to achieve the same thing, an immersive, epic experience for their players. But they are coming from two different directions, MW2 has looked at the money and popularity of movies and gone “We can do that better”. Hence it playing like a summer blockbuster, exciting and noisy but when you scratch away its surface you find it hollow underneath. Dragon age comes from books and storytelling so it is unapologetically involved. The sheer amount of history and writing involved is scary to think of, designing a whole new world with a coherent power, economic and religious structure.

As I said before it is not without its faults. They are mostly on the technical level, the camera is like a wayward child who has gotten drunk out the back, the fact it starts up and goes “here is the world… have fun!” Not hand holding, no real tutorials, it is a PC-assed PC game. I had played for 30 hours before I found out I could pick pockets, or that = would select my entire party.

Sure gaming has a long way to go to be grown up. But it will be games like Dragon Age that will be maturing the field, companies like Bioware that will expand on what is possible.