Rated M for...Massive amounts of blood

God of War 3 seems like something you sort of have to play if you own a PS3. I had played both of the previous games on my first Sony system a few years back. The series has been so well done that it's sort of spawned a genre of God of War clones. So how would GoW3 hold up compared to all of the imitators? Pretty well, I'd say.

Minor spoiler paragraph:
I don't remember the first two being so much like this, but in GoW3 Kratos kills EVERYONE he meets except for the lady he gets it on with. Even people that help him end up dead. Also the ending was a bit strange, but seemed like a pretty good cap on the trilogy.

If these next sections are a bit disjointed, it's because it's pulled together from the few sentences I jotted down during the 8 or so hours while I played through this over a couple of weeks. The first annoyance that I ran into was that New Game was the top option in the main menu, even after I had a save file. I mention this since it meant I had to interact with the menus more than I wanted to continue my game. Once I got going I had to start over shortly after since the difficulty was a bit weird. I picked the normal difficulty thinking I could handle it, and I'm sure I could have, but it was just frustrating dying without really knowing why if I wasn't blocking or avoiding hits all the time. This is the type of game I just want to sit back and enjoy being a badass without really thinking too much about strategy.

I ran into a few very video-gamey things that kind of amused me. More than once I was on an elevator of some kind where an endless stream of dudes to kill dropped down from the sky until the elevator got to the top. I had a heck of a time with the double jump mechanic. It took me falling into a pit about 8 times before I got it right (hint, it's jump, jump--HOLD).

But the strangest video-gamey moment was what I like to call Music Box Hero. To open up some passageway you have to push buttons in time with symbols that scroll across the screen. The symbols are the 4 iconic PS3 buttons. Nothing too weird there, but the controls that Kratos sees in the world are also the 4 PS3 buttons. Odd.

A big improvement from the previous games are the quick time sequences. If you have to press the top of the four PS3 buttons, it's at the top of the screen. The bottom button is on the bottom, and so on. So you can actually focus on the action that's being presented for you and the interactions are secondary. This made the great looking cutscenes much easier to follow.

So it was an enjoyable ride with great graphics. The environments were well varied and you certainly feel like a badass as you dispatch hundreds and hundreds of dudes in a shower of blood.

Dragons and aging

Dragon Age: Origins is your typical story-heavy RPG with obvious PC roots. It's the sort of game where you choose a class and start out killing rats as you begin on your long quest to upgrade your character. Later, other people join your party. Typical stuff. That said, it's fairly well done.

I played it on PS3 and could definitely tell that it would make more sense on a PC. I also wasn't all that impressed with the graphics. Not bad looking, but sort of your standard looking medieval settings and characters. I probably played somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 through the mage questline before I got bored and sent it back.

So not a great game for me, but not a terrible one either. I've also been playing Puzzle Quest 2 on XBLA and Red Dead Redemption on 360. More on those later.