Kingdom of Amalur Demo and Mass Effect 2 DLC

I downloaded the Amalur demo a day or two ago (on Origin, boo hiss ) to grab the ME3 extras. You get some for starting the game, and some for finishing the demo.

Kingdom of Aaaaaghh

I have to agree with a comment I saw by Epantiras that it does indeed look very Wowish in style (hello huge weapons and bright colours).

The demo itself is a decent length, though a bit buggy. When I went to create a character I was instantly struck by the idea that I would LOVE to see those heads ( the female elf heads anyway, I didn't look at the others) popped over into NWN2. Seriously, NWN2 needs some decent looking heads, and they seem like they would fit pretty well style-wise too (alas I have no idea how to do such a thing). The hair could probably be used as well.

Anyway, the game itself... Combat is pretty easy, nice and speedy too, though it has an annoying auto-targeting thing that makes it really difficult to smash boxes in the town (because your character keeps wanting to kill chickens). Options are pretty limited, though it is really nice having a persuade percentage there. Using the mouse scroll wheel to change weapons is pretty handy, though having F as the access everything button is a little annoying (enter or space may have been better). The story itself seemed okay until you became 'special' in a way not linked to your being alive. Still, they might have a good reason for that, specialness can be done well.  As with a lot of RPGs these days not all corpses drop loot (it seems the Elder Scrolls games are one of the few where you can yoink the armour and weapons right off a corpse), and although that weapon stand looks to be full of weapons, it really just had a shield... (yay... ) Lockpicking makes me scream 'Skyrim!', and indeed a lot of things remind me of many other games (skill tree looks Diabloish).

I got through the first dungeon and up to where you get 45 minutes to do whatever you want (which is really nice in a demo). I wanted to heal the damn Fae, so I traipsed through the forest killing anything that popped up, talked to another Fae (black eyes!), went to the town alchemist who complained about a problem and then said she wasn't a charity and wouldn't give me the potion I needed for the Fae (I may have thought something unkind about her then) I went to buy it but it was worth about 1000 gold, I guessed that she might give it to me after I did her quest, but I didn't know how much time I had left. So I sneaked around, did some stealing trials on a few things (they went fine), then of course when I stole the potion suddenly everyone knew and went hostile (Fffff.... ). Sneaked out, and there were a bunch of hostile guards outside. I slaughtered them, went to the inn where the dude was with the Fae... And everyone there was hostile too. So I killed those who attacked me, which made dude come and attack me (don't know where he put the Fae), so I killed everyone there, except this guy who had plot protection. I kept killing him and he would stay down for a minute, then get back up at full health again. Eventually I left and decided to kill the alchemist out of spite for starting all this in the first place. Then! I went and killed the other shop keepers because they'd had chests and I wanted to see what was in them. The demo ended when I opened the last chest there

Bugs:
-I think this is an Origin problem: When I had it downloaded and tried to install it I got an error about DirectX. After hunting around I found a solution (thank you Battlefield 3 for being our Origin guinea pig). Go to C - Program Files - Origin Games - Kingdoms of Arglebla Demo - _Installer - directx - redist. Then remove all the .cab files, you should be left with DSETUP.dll, dsetup32.dll, and DXSETUP.exe (or at least I was). Try installing again and it should work this time.
-The Inventory option in the menu is very difficult to click sometimes. You can click 10 times in a row and it won't respond. Then you can click 20 times and get popped through to changing your primary weapon. It's very annoying.
-When you equip a shield it will go through your neck. Not to worry as it'll be gone after you exit that screen.
-Sometimes characters will stop moving their mouths when they're talking to you (they're practising to be ventriloquists)
-Dead guys sometimes have spazzy hands.
-Sometimes it'll freeze a little bit at the start of or during combat. Just continue mashing the attack button like mad, auto targeting means you'll probably still be hitting something.

Mass Effect 2 DLC

I finally grabbed all the ME2 DLCs a while ago, but didn't actually get around to playing them until a week or so ago. Probably contains spoilers.

Kasumi, Stolen Memory: I wasn't sure what to think about Kasumi, but after her Loyalty mission I do quite like her. So you get to mingle at a party, job in high heels, and ransack this guys rooms. I loved the bit where Shepard exclaims about finding a credit chit, it gives me this amusing image of Shepard being a huge scrooge despite be loaded with all the loot from missions. It was nice how you had to get into the vault in a non-violent way by hunting around for the various things.In the vault itself they made a booboo where you grab the box and yet it is still sitting there on the table. Hock (was that his name?) didn't impress me much, but the big end fight went well. Except Kasumi went a little anime with her jumping skills, I can understand jumping fairly high, but not that high. But it was good to get the gunship down. The end choice was interesting, my paragon went with destroying the thing to protect the alliance from it coming back to bite them (my renegade will of course do the opposite).

Firewalker: This wasn't as bad as I'd expected it would be. Not being able to save while in the vehicle is quite annoying (who is the idiot who keeps thinking that taking away the save function anywhere in a game is a good idea? Because it really isn't. Oh how I miss NWN1 and even being able to save during combat). The jiggling around on the collection points is okay... Except on that one point which is half in acid, because the vehicle loves jumping into that stuff. A handy tip: When you land on acid or lava mash the float and speed up keys as fast as you can towards land, more often than not you can jump off the lava/acid and get back to safe ground. Also bouncing appears to help when encountering enemies, especially if some are on higher levels than you as you can nail them from a distance. The volcano bit that starts sinking was my least favourite, because I hate timed things and always have to get everything.

Overlord: Now this is where the Hammerhead can't save feature gets extremely irritating, and to make it worse once you exist the first area and get onto the planet what do they do? They shut the F-ing door behind you so that you can't go back there to save after you've collected all the things. Brilliant idea there! Come here person who thought of it so I can gleefully strange you. Then you have to go through some happy lava hoping that you don't die on the way (though I think there's an auto-save point somewhere?) and can make it to the actual base so you can finally save. And if the lack of saving hasn't bothered you too much by then, the lack of a decent map anywhere (and no the radar thing does not count as a mini-map: it doesn't show any map features, just enemies) might succeed in finally driving you bonkers as you drag yourself around the planet looking for everything. Ahem. Aside from the Hammerhead bits this DLC is decent, though I found the way David was able to mimic Geth speech a bit silly (seriously, he copies them perfectly when human vocal chords probably shouldn't be able to do that, if he's communicated with them via a computer or something it would have seemed a lot less silly). I liked seeing and exploring the Geth ship. And destroying every single security camera that I saw.

Lair of the Shadowbroker: Shepard gets to have fun rifling through someone elses apartment again, and with an asari helper too. Unfortunately no credit chits found this time. Then you get an exploding building, and I admit when I heard the asari (forgot her name, oops) say 'And here is the Shadow Brokers private army!' or something I thought she was betraying me (as in 'bwahaha! Here's an army for you to deal with while I carry out my evil evil plans!', because I was kinda waiting for her to betray me since I first met her). Then Shepard asked her for help about something (I went 'wait, what?'), and then she really betrayed me. So it all worked out in the end. Poor Shepard getting dumped in the biotic jump (death seems to have made Shep more reckless, what does she expect to be raised every time she ends up dead?)... And then there was the car chase scene. I had to restart that chase about 10 times in the first half because it was just running so slow, the car wouldn't speed up, I didn't see the little tunnel to the side and thoguht you might be able to go above or under a wall, etc. It was sucha relief when that chase was over. And when we finally caught up to her the lady made a very bad mistake twice: She appeared right next to my soldier Shepard, who had a machine gun ready. And then spammed the fire key. You can guess how well that went for the asari

You talk with Liara and a paragon gets to give her a lecture about how renegadeish she's being, I don't think a renegade gets to lecture (or praise?) her? Then we got to jump on the Shadow Brokers ship. Of course with all our helmets on... Except Liara. Apparently she can breathe in weird atmospheres like that. The way it went as you went over the ship and stuck to it was a bit strange, but those lightning things were great for taking out enemies. I just shot the things every chance I got, mmm roasted Shadow Broker troops. For some reason the drell guy looked familiar. It might have been because he had Thanes face (poor Thane doesn't get to be unique like your other alien crew members even though his son does) We chatted, he gurgled, and we ran off to have tea with the Shadow Broker. Turns out he got to have his own unique race, fancy that. And I had completely forgotten that you even could hit someone and not just shoot at them, so this fight made me remember something (useful if you run out of ammo). There's a lot of interesting information found here afterwards. Kasumi has a crush on Jacob, the security footage shows you who Liaras dad is, I bet you could even find out what everyone has for breakfast. Oh, the drell and Liara live there now, too. Shepard gets a new toy ship too.

Arrival: A solo mission, so you don't have to worry about what crew members to bring (not that any of them make any comments during the other DLCs, except apparently Legion in Overlord). You can do it the sneaky way, or the kill everything that moves way (you can guess which one my renegade will do). So you get in, save the lady and she reveals to you that she's a Mary Sue who wants to steal Shepards whole vision thing (I went 'noooo, don't be dummmbb'), but they fixed it because the thing that gave her visions is a reaper artifact (which is always bad). You skip over to her base, and have this massive fight where you have tons of enemies to wipe out on your own. The pyro troops are really annoying, and you may have to reload several times, but it's very satisfying to be able to make it through that big fight You wake up and the reapers are coming (which is a bit odd, because wasn't the ME1 and ME2 end stuff supposed to have been to delay them a bit? And if you don't do this DLC... The reapers don't come early? ) So of course you have to stop them. Good thing the crazy lady told you all of the plan she'd had before she went crazy (I still don't get why she told Shepard, that was just dumb of her). Off you go to slaughter a whole system. But they're Batarians, so I imagine that Shepard with the slavery history wouldn't be terribly bothered about the choice. Crazy lady is annoying and tries to stop you several times along the way (Shepard! Haven't you heard of a sniper rifle? Shoot the woman from a window and stop her messing stuff up!). Then you end up with even less time and just manage to make it out of there in time after having a nice little chat with a reaper first. Those reapers and crazy people should really just learn to not take Shepard back to their base. Or put stuff everywhere, that's the best way to delay a player.

These DLC were certainly better than the ME1 and DA: O ones, apparently you can get slightly different reactions in some of them depending on when you play them. I did them all after my finished game.