30 Days: Best Story

This is one of a series called “30 Days of Video Games“, an exercise on daily writing.
Follow the link for the full list.

Diablo!

I kid, I kid.  Diablo’s video game porno – set the scene, get some plot lines laid down and start with the um, action.  The most frequent complaint about Diablo III?  Too much story, of course.  It reads like a bad soap opera, which, I think, if you tried to lay down too much plot in a porno, you’d probably get the same result.

Let’s diverge from porno, shall we?

Er, or not.  But, thumbs in alternate erogenous areas aside, my selection for best story is Dragon Age 2.  And this is probably not the first choice for many – a lot of people found fault with the second installment of the “New Shit“, mostly due to the overly repetitive adventure areas, though.  That aside, I really enjoyed the story of Dragon Age 2; it was not an epic tale like Dragon Age: Origins – we can’t all be Grey Wardens, after all – but the life of times of the Champion of Kirkwall made for an amusing “choose your own adventure” story.  I would have liked some alternate endings, but you can’t have it all, I guess.

30 Days: Favorite Game Franchise

This is one of a series called “30 Days of Video Games“, an exercise on daily writing.
Follow the link for the full list.

ZELDA!

Yeah there’s really not a lot of doubt here, is there?  I have professed my love for the Zelda series time and time again on this site so we don’t really need to go too in depth here, do we?  Instead, with that out of the way, I can spend a bit of time on other franchises that I’ve loved throughout the years.

The first that comes to mind, and really, has made a strong running to displace Zelda is Civilization in all its glorious incarnations.  Civ games always have a high replay value and some of my best memories in gaming are finally pulling off that grind of domination game, or the abject terror of a Zulu army hell bent on my destruction.  It’s hardly surprising that given my love of history and geography that Civ would rank so high, and the latest few releases’ habit of hiring great voice actors to deliver the quotes attached to each technology (and, in Brave New World, to read the Great Works of Writing) have really brought an incredible touch to the series, a real connection to the history that the series is built upon.

There are many other franchises that have come and gone over the years, Mass Effect was an amazing drop into world building, Dragon Age to a lesser degree as well.  Mario of course is perhaps the best loved and longest tenured franchise out there, but its appeal has waned for me for a while now.  Prince of Persia was a series that drew me in early but lost me with the more recent releases.  Knights of the Old Republic and its various spin offs were enjoyable, but nothing ever grabbed me as much as the first did.  Warcraft was almost the opposite path – it took me a while to get into the series but by Warcraft III, and of course, World of Warcraft, I was hooked for a long time.

It does dawn on me, that while the Zelda series will always hold that special place in my heart, that maybe, just maybe, Sid Meier stole it out from under me.