I played far enough into Dragon Age until Morrigan joins my party. That's about 3-4 hours in? I think I'm going to give up. The story is compelling enough, but I can't stand the combat. Everything feels so floaty, and none of my party is doing what I'm telling them to do. The tactics system bills itself as easy to use, but I fiddled around with it for quite awhile before I just gave up. Here's what would normally happen in combat, maybe someone can help me out.

1.) I tell all my party to attack one target.

2.) I tell one of my party to use a special attack.

3.) I may queue up other special attacks from other party members during paused time.

4.) After someone performs the special attack, they just sit there and don't move, leaving me to tell them to resume attacking the target they were just attacking.

This was especially frustrating during the first boss fight. No matter how hard I tried to get my party members to keep attacking the boss, they would just stand their twiddling their thumbs after Shield Bashing or Growling. I really hoped that the tactics page would fix this, but I can't for the life of me find any command that says "Don't stop attacking something until I tell you to stop."

Oh well.

After the funny and interesting PS3 commercials, Sony has to take another step backwards with their new PSP Go. Do they really think this is the target audience/image for their handheld?

1.) poolside party hipsters
2.) backseat out-on-the-towners
3.) in-between-shoots fashion models
4.) morning-after hangover movie viewers (overlooking the sunrise no less)

I know, it's a bit late, but I couldn't resist.

Sony's PlayStation marketing team has finally come back to making relevant, entertaining, and straightforward advertisments! No more crying baby dolls, floating PS3s, racially charged billboards, out-of-touch "hip" viral campaigns, or the convoluted "this is living" ads. I hope that's the last we see of the "our console is so awesome our ads don't need to make sense" vibe.

"You don't cry during video games."

Film director James Cameron made that comment during a Comic-Con panel, mentioned here. I think he does have a point. While I can't recall a time I cried during a video game, there have been plenty of tear-jerking films out there. However, I'm certainly aware that gamers have been known to shed a few tears for some video games, so I'm not saying it doesn't ever happen.

But this brings me to a specific question, when have you ever cried during video games, specifically, when NOT watching a cut-scene?

The cut-scene is just a cousin of modern film, inserted into a video game experience to help move the narrative along. There are certainly very moving, emotionally, and sob-worthy video games, but it's my feeling a gamer's top ten list of emotional games would be heavily cut-scene reliant. Have you ever cried from the actual stomping of a goomba, drop of a tetris block, or headshot with a sniper rifle? Or do we revert to needing what is essentially a short film to convey emotions in between the sessions of gameplay?

Listening to music, reading a book, watching a film, and even just looking at a painting can move a person to tears. Can we say that of actual gameplay as well? I'd love to hear some examples of this.