I started playing a new game of Dragon Age 2 last night after about five months of not playing it. As I play through it again, I can’t help but get frustrated all over again with the laziness shown in the game. I thought the game was okay, but like many fans of Dragon Age Origins, DA2 didn’t feel like a proper sequel. There are so many little details that add up to make it seem like the developers were either incredibly rushed or thought the fans were idiots. Lots of things in the game give the feeling of rushing you along, instead of making you want to pay attention to detail and immerse yourself. The lack of item descriptions, for example, along with boring item names. You find dozens of Rings, Belts, and Long Swords, items with completely generic names like that, and items in DA2 have no description, unlike in Origins, so I tend to disregard them as soon as I get them. In Origins, even if I got a plain amulet or a wimpy mace, it had a bit of descriptive text that I wanted to read. “This mace is deceptively heavier than it looks”, something like that, so that even everyday items encouraged a second look before confining them to the junk heap.

I had my Master’s defense this morning, and I’m very glad it’s over. It went well, but one of my committee members was seriously making me nervous with all his very specific questions. I suck at theoretical stuff, and he asked questions like “did your tool produce 2ⁿ or n! pages?” and “can you give a proof why this language is not regular?”. The more I gave him “I dunno” answers, the more grim he looked. I was mentally kind of panicking, with thoughts along the lines of “does he hate my project? he must think I’m so dumb”. After they kicked me out in the hall and my advisor called me back in a few minutes later, though, the committee members were all smiles and congratulations. Pfhew. Now I just wait to receive my diploma in the mail this August (unorganized me didn’t submit the paperwork in time to get the degree this month).

Arrgh, all I want to do is relax by playing Dragon Age II, but I’ve been struggling for twenty minutes plus with stupid PS3 updates. I wanted to get my free DLC stuff in DA2 that I got from ordering off of Amazon, so I registered my game online and it should just show up in-game. I figure it has to be online to do that, in order to see that I’ve registered and maybe download the content. But I couldn’t sign into the PS network because Insight is a shitty ISP and we constantly need to reset the router. So I do that, my PS3 is able to get online again, and it immediately tells me there’s a system update so I can’t log into PSN yet.