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Phantom Blade Zero’s Combat Is So Good, You Won’t Care The Story Makes No Sense

Phantom Blade Zero’s Combat Is So Good, You Won’t Care The Story Makes No Sense https://ift.tt/KPSX6di S-Game, the Chinese studio behind Phantom Blade Zero, clearly understands the core tenets of character-action games. If your melee combat isn't tight, responsive, and oozing cool, then what's the point? Some games might have better combat, but few can match Phantom Blade Zero's style.  Every moment feels like you're in the middle of a Chinese martial-arts movie, pulling off moves that shouldn't be feasible--moves that go against what we expect from third-person action games--yet are baked into the mechanics. The game is not without issues, and they do hold it back from reaching the genre's upper echelons, but the highs are stratospheric. Character-action games aren't typically known for telling riveting stories, and Phantom Blade Zero is no different. You play as Soul, a stoic assassin who dies in the game's opening moments when a sword tears t...
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Dragon Age Origins Wasn't Just Horny--It Was About Sex

Dragon Age Origins Wasn't Just Horny--It Was About Sex https://ift.tt/KjZqB49

Dragon Age Origins is celebrating its 15-year anniversary today, November 3, 2024. Below, we examine its role as a daring, if awkward, attempt to use sex as a central theme and mechanic.

Sex and video games have always had an uneasy relationship. Playing smut on the Atari 2600 feels like looking at middle-school scrawlings. Much of the pornography peddled on Steam is embarrassing and unattractive. Even more mainstream games in the modern era have had a fraught relationship with sex. The tame scenes in Mass Effect infamously got a paranoid Fox News report. Recent years have seen recording romantic scenes in Baldur's Gate 3 net players temporary Xbox bans. In such an environment, it is hard to imagine a mainstream game having a bold depiction of sex. But 20 years ago, Dragon Age: Origins took a daring, if flawed, swing at it.

Dragon Age: Origins is still a weird mix. The basic plot is downright Tolkien-esque: a fellowship of warriors from across the land are driven together to stop "the blight," a horde of demon creatures dedicated to destroying all free life. In practice, however, the game takes most of its dramatic cues from A Song of Ice and Fire (the books, not Game of Thrones). Nobleman Loghan leaves boy king Cailan to die, triggering a violent succession crisis. Magic, while more commonplace than in Westeros, is marginalized, feared, and policed. Even the blight itself resembles the white walkers, i.e. a fundamental existential threat from the natural world.

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