Dragon Age 2 Review

My first review will be on Dragon Age 2 which in my opinion sucked pretty badly being a horribly dumbed down game compared to Dragon Age: Origins

The first aspect of the game I will touch is the new combat system which is actually quite nice and a step forward from Origins. It looks nice and the characters of different attack animations depending on where you are initiating you attack which is kinds cool. The only flaw to the combat system is that you just mash the X button the whole battle which can become annoying.

The Story is terrible I don't even know if I encountered a story and I am at act 2 with around 15 hours put into the game I would expect a story by now. The only thing this game has me doing is collecting money via boring quest and then collecting more money.

The quest I mentioned are incredibly bad and after a few hours I was getting this feeling as if I had been to these places before... which I had because in Dragon Age 2 the creators just kept reusing the same maps and designs for all of the locations. The actual quest are just as bad as where they take place and only involve talking to ALOT of people and then a little fighting at the end after the fighting you get to talk to some more people to finish them.

The characters in this game are mediocre at best and have no development what so ever. In Origins the character development was amazing and there was changes between characters in just idle talk which was humorous and interesting as well as being able to talk to the characters individually. In Dragon Age 2 you barley get to talk to the characters and they all have very uninteresting personalities. The only character that I somewhat liked was Merril with her naive out look but I wish I could talk to her more than they let me. Romance with the characters is barley noticeable and the few times you can use it just appear very strangely in conversation.

The skill system is the only part of the game that benefited from being dumbed down and is very easy to use.

The inventory was decent and with it being organized much better then in origins but the variety in items and armor took a hit. Hawke is the only character who can equip different armor and all the other characters have unchanging armor. It also seems that the weapons have less variety with no difference between choosing a great axe or great sword as long as they are both 2-haned.

The setting of the game sucks with all of the maps and scenery being copied as well as the main portion taking place in one city that you probably have been in 90% of the game being of all the going from person A to B quest in the game.

The last part of the game I would like to address is the dialog system which along with the rest of the game sucks. You only get 3 choices most of the times which are normally always good, humorous (which is a lie), and forceful . The actually conversations are not actually changed by choices as well with normally only a one line response to your choice and then back to being a record player.

At the end of the day I would give this game a 4/10 and suggest that if you are going to buy it have not yet played Origins go buy Origins and don't bother with the sequel.

3.60 + PSN Spoofer + No Video Response Fix

I have been a break for around a week and during this time quite a lot happened. The new firmware totally revamped the security of the PS3 so I would not be expecting a new CFW anytime soon so if you are still at 3.55 I would stay with it (plus 3.60 really doesn't have much improvements that directly effect you), and don't worry because along with the update many may think that PSN access is lost but on the same day that the update came out a useful version spoofer came out.
Team Rebug who has steadily been releasing homebrew for the PS3 devolved a version 3.60 spoofer which allows PSN access and extremely easy access as well. If you though fuckPSN was easy compared to the old methods then you will be shocked by the simplicity of this. All you need to do is install the pkg and run it and hit the X button to install the spoofer. It does take a while to install the spoofer and there is no sign at all when it is done so definitely wait a while so you know its done. When its done just exit the spoofer and sign in that easy.
3.60 version spoofer found here - http://rebug.me/?p=412

If you messed up the spoof install and your PS3 stops sending video input to your TV (this happened to me) you have to start your PS3 in recovery mode and your TV will receive input. Next you will have to reflash your PS3 to OFW 3.55 and then back to your preffered CFW. If you do this all your account info will be lost and saved files. If you want to avoid a loss in saved files you need a spare 2.5 inch SATA hard drive. Reflash your PS3 with the spare HD then after you are done put your old HD back in and your files will still be there, but your PSN account info will not but you can just enter that again.

New Games Requiring 3.56 Firmware

Two new games that have been leaked early both require Sony's latest 3.56 firmware. The first title is Dragon Age II which is a much anticipated game for many including me.Dragon Age II has been leaked onto the internet even though the release date is March 8th, which allowed hackers to figure out ways to run the game on 3.55 firmware. Apparently simple modifications to the PARAM.SFO and a repackaged EBOOT.BIN made the game compatible with 3.55. There is a fix available but to avoid encouraging piracy I won't lead to the download link.
The second game is MLB 11 The Show which also is scheduled to be released March 8th but was leaked online. MLB 11 obviously has not been looked at as much as Dragon Age II which is probably due to the popularity differences in the two games. I am pretty confident though that MLB 11 will be able to run on 3.55 with time though as amazing things can happen with time.

Sony is in a lot of Legal Trouble

The notorious iphone dev, geohot (George Hotz), has been in the processes of fighting Sony in court over the jailbreak he made for the PS3 recently. Sony's defenses are very weak and I believe geohot has a good chance of winning and a few days ago he started to accept donations to hire more lawyers to fight Sony. Sony's reasons for suing geohot consist of reasons according to geohot that "they allege I did things like play "super mario world, an unauthorized game" on MY PS3. And access MY PS3 in an unauthorized way." Obviously everybody who bought a PS3 should have permission to do whatever they please with it once it is theirs. I do not see Microsoft suing anybody for running programs they didn't develop on computer because that would be outrageous, and this is pretty much what Sony is claiming. Geohot was able to get enough donations to afford more lawyers to even the playing field with Sony's 5 lawyers, and Sony should watch out because this case doesn't seem to favor them.

Besides just having to worry about their case against geohot, a new case has been filed against them where they are ironically charged with breaking the same legal acts as geohot did. Because Sony removed the PS3's OtherOS ability they are being accused of breaking the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, because Sony gave the decision to either keep the OtherOS and loose PSN or loose OtherOS and keep PSN the consumer looses system functionality both ways. It seems that Sony has their hands full of legal issues for a while and we will just have to wait and see how things turn out.

New Ways to connect to PSN on 3.55 with Kmeaw's CFW and new a CFW by Naima

To Connect on Kmeaw's CFW
eth0 has created a very simple guide (here) at psx-scene.com to get onto PSN with kmeaw CFW. It is not working for me but many people seem to be having success using it. My problem seems to be in running eth0's ps3dns program but I dont mind not being connected to PSN that much.

New Method Using Naima's CFW
Naima released a firmware just recently that lets users access PSN without following as much guides. It is basically Kmeaw's firmware with added PSN support and comes with the modified SSL certificates. The use of Charles Web Debugging Proxy is still necessary but this firmware will make it much easier to access PSN. I am downloading it now and am going to update my PS3 with it and test out if I can get on PSN agian

Kmeaw 3.55 can connect to PSN again

Apparently Kmeaw 3.55 CFW can connect to the PSN again using a SSL thing which I am not to sure how to do. I am going to try it later though and if I can figure it out I will post a guide on how to do it.

DNS Trick for CFW 3.55 Stopped Working PS3

The DNS trick that has been keeping many people connect to the PSN even without updating their PS3's has finally been blocked by Sony. This means people such as myself either have to play offline or upgrade to ofw 3.56 for now. I have heard about using the proxy trick and am going to try that out but I have to wait for my USB wireless adapter. I order one which can also be used with Backtrack 4 to crack WEP and WPA which is kinda cool. I will just be playing my PS3 offline for the next few days which will also give me sometime to play Red Dead Redemption which i just started yesterday and I am having a blast playing it.