I’ve been playing some games since finishing Ratchet and Clank, mostly Borderlands, Torchlight, and Dragon Age: Origin, before that Demon’s Souls, and it occurred to me in all of these games I spend an awful lot of time looking over my loot trying to decide what to drop. I understand that this comes part and parcel with RPG games… but still this isn’t a fun part. None of it is in a Resident Evil kind of way where the limited inventory is supposed to be the option between healing items or other items, but more in a you’ve “got all this cool stuff that you’d like to keep, but if I can’t keep it I’d like to sell it, too bad there is no shop near by” way… frustrating. However, it does give me a platform to talk about these games.

Borderlands: I’m at about 90% complete on my first play through on this, and I’ll likely finish that sometime this weekend. I’m having a lot of fun, and I would definitely give this one a game of the year nomination. It’s not without it’s flaws clearly, but despite the flaws you have a truly unique, fun, challenging, experience, in a style that suits it. I’ll obviously go into more detail when my review comes out next week, but consider this my advice to not delay in picking this game up.

Torchlight: I haven’t talked about this one yet, but it completely snuck up on me. I caught a friend of mine playing it on steam, I looked it up, looked interesting from the description and screens, it clearly aroused the “loot whore” in me. If you haven’t heard tell of it yet, this game is Diablo… it was created by folks formly of the Blizzard North team responsible for the original Diablo. It seemed like every design choice in that game has been successfully carried over. The loot seems to come at a pretty steady pace, the story wasn’t really compelling, but the style of the game was easy on the eyes and the dungeons so far, have been fun to explore. The give you a companion as well, either a dog or a cat, and you can feed your pet to buff it, or change it into some other beast to help you in combat and what not. Your pet also has equipment (rings, necklace, and 2 spell slots), an inventory, and a handy button to tell your pet to run back to town to sell everything in the in inventory at the cost of your pet being MIA for 1 minute. The pet is really cool, especially when you teach him to summon skeletons… (you really should do this, it’s fun to watch). The pet controls are standard… agressive, passive, defensive stances, but they really don’t seem to make him act differently. Anyway, if you’re looking for something to spend some time while you wait for Diablo 3 with this isn’t a bad choice. For $20 especially, I can definitely see me playing through a couple times with different characters.

Dragon Age: Origins: I’ve only just started playing this one, the pace is pretty slow so far but I think it’s really the fault of having to introduce and entire world, and I’m hoping it picks up later on… I’m still learning how to be effective in combat, I really think it’s going to be more about setting the tactics to suit your style more than skill or anything else. So far the story has been interesting despite being slow, and the voice work has been good so far, which really helps make the pace more bearable. I played through the first real boss, the battles are somewhat thrilling, there were many near death experiences, doesn’t seem like there are much room for error. My basic strategy in combat so far has been more or less using Line of Sight pulls (ala World of Warcraft) when I enter a room, to bunch everything up, and using my mage’s “Walking Bomb” ability as the only area of effect spell I have at the moment, and just sort of deal with whats left.