Boarderlands * * * * *

This s another MUST GET for the 360 owners out there. As the cover suggests, this game will blow your mind! The gameplay is a first person shooter with a skill tree and leveling up. It meshes an RPG and a First Person Shooter flawlessly! Picture Fallout 3 without all the conversations.

Its gunplay plays like Halo 3 with an open world, missions and a loot system added. The loot system generates BILLIONS of guns shields gernade mods and characer mods. This is where the RPG aspect comes into play. Killing enemys gives you experince and causes randomly generated loot to drop. The loot can be used as in any RPG, but instead of changing your armor you decide what shield you want. there are fast regeneration shields, shields that regenerate health, shields that send out electric/acid/fire bursts once depleeted. Gernade mods give your gernade that extra kick in the pants, you have sticky gernades, bouncing gernades, electric gernades, acid gernades, gernades that pop up and spread out, gernades that explode on contact, gernades that steal health for you, gernades that do two of the mentioned abilitys and many many more! There are vehicles, but I find them best used for travel. You can attack a machinegun or rocket launcher to them, but it is far more effective to plow your enemys down. Vehicles also double as an effective spawn point if you die and the vehicle survives.

It plays well as a single or multiplayer game. If you go multiplayer you get harder badguys and better/more loot. you can also challange your friend to a duel by smacing them to see who has the best loot and skill upgrades. You will be supprised how diferent two of the same character can be!

There are 4 characters to pick from and aside from a basic color scheeme the appearance is not customizable. But that just adds to the fast paced nature of this game. You have the "assasin", the "tank", the "mage" and the well... soldier I guess.

The "Mage" is a female character that phases out of the regular plane of existance and moves faster for a limited time. When she leaves and comes back into enemys vision she causes an electric field that causes prolonged damage to all enemys arround her. This is the player I have goten the farthest with and depending on the skills you persue you will find that you have diferent abilitys. The way I have gone I catch on fire whenever I kill an enemy so anyone arround me takes fire damage. She specalizes in elemental wepons that cause reidual damage such as electris, fire, acis, and explocive damage.

The Assasin is a sniper character who has a ravin that goes out to attack for him and gathers loot/health for you. Im only a level 10 so Im not too sure where he goes when he gets stronger.

The Tank goes into a rampage mode where he does lots of damage, gegenerates health and takes less damage. I havent seen him in action, but I know he specalizes in rocket launchers and gernades.

The soldier is another character that I have yet to play, but he sets up a shielded turret that protects him while attacking for him or with him. he specalizes in rifles and shotguns

Visualy this game is gold. Honestly when I first heard about this game using cell shading I was a bit put off, but the graphics are outstanding!

Closing coments: GET THIS GAME NOW!!

Dragon Age Origins *

Wow! What a crapfest! I wet myself in anticipation for this game for 3 straight months. The reviews were all good, the gameplay looked fantastic so I scrimped and saved for it and all I can say is DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME OR MONEY! If you like games with a LOT of talking This is your game. But if you like playing your vidiogames this is not for you. Im 3 hours into it and 15 of those minutes have been easy battles, with 1/2 hour or so wandering arround looking for my quests as the quest marker will not appear unless you are on the map that the quest is on. So if you don know what map you are suposed to be on you are screwed. Also note that I use the term "quest" lightly. Most of these "Quests" have been talking to people. Now dont get me wrong, the conversations give you a ton of choices as to what to say (well 4 things to say and 2 paths to take depending on what you say) and what you say affects the story, but just go get yourself a pick your own adventure book instead of this game.

There is not even an open world. You travel from city to city with random enemy battles rarly thrown inbetween citys. That makes a large portion of the game looking at loading screens. And if thats not enought loading screens the auto save feature kicks in between groups of badguys. So you only get badguys an rare occasions, just to have the action broken up again for a saving screen. Than being said, the combat and abilitys are fantastic for the brief moment you get to use them.

To add insult to injury there is word that they will be charging us in the future for a download to enable multiplayer mode in a game designed for and advertised to be for 4 players. Also the game had additional content avalable for purchase one day BEFORE the game came out. I dont know about you, but if the content is avalable at launch it should be avalable on the disk. Added content is intended to add to the game after you have had a chance to play the existing content. But it has turned into a way gor greedy mony grubbing game desighners like EA and Lion Head to squeese every penny you have by selling you content that would normally come packaged with the game.

CLOSING REMARKS:

Audio is average

Graphics are a bit below average with steller cut sceenes

Game Play is fantastic when you get to it but its mostly non existant

This is a game to avoid at all costs. A good replacement game is probably Skyrim

Fable II game add-ons * *

Both can be summed up with two simple words, OVER PRICED. They sell at this time for 800 microsoft points each. That translates into a $10.00 price tag. So heres what you get...

Knothole Island

First I have to point out, this game expansion came out ONE MONTH after the launch of the game. This leads me to believe that it was ready for launch but the greedy Lionhead studio people need to get every penny they can squeeze out of us by selling it as an add-on instead. Further evedence of this being a launch ready feature is that they advertised changind seasons, a feature that appeared NOWHERE in the game but oddly enough is in this expansion.
So what isthe expansion all about? Its an island that is having problems with the weather. Your gopal as the adventuror is to set right the ballance in nature by "solving" 4 easy short temples full of so called "puzzles". I beat the whole thing in one sitting. Dont get me wrong, it does come with sone new weapons and armor so you can look like a regal knight or a rocker with a guitar ax. And it gives you some new potions to better controll your characters appearance by altering height and weight.

SEE THE FUTURE

The 2nd expansion is a lot like the first in the aspect that the "puzzles" are all too easy and the overall game is way too short. It also came out a short 4 months after the original game launch. The story here is to fight the curse off of 3 cursed items. Unlike Knothole Island however, this has a little replay value. One of the curses you fight brings you to an arena that is better than the one featured in the original game that you can come back and try to top your last score. The upsides for this expansion for me again are the new character customization oprions. You can get a royal outfit complete with a crown. A pompus french panzy complete with powderes wig, white face and mole, and my fav, the crow, evil clown and other face paint! You also get 4 villan costumes and 3 new dog breeds.

....

Well, there you have it. Are they worth the $10.00 price tag? Ill have to let you be the judge of that. But if you dont care about character customization Id suggest you save your cash.