Shut the front door!

Or open it, whatever! Something amazing just happened! Dragon Age: Origins was just announced as coming to the Mac! I am half excited for the game itself and half excited that the “coming to” length is just around the corner, as in next week. That means it made its way to the Mac in a month’s time. Impressive! This might be a new record for a game that was not originally announced for our “man eating, 27 inch, four core, aluminum clad” beauties!

You are thinking, “surely, Brice, you must be incorrect?” or “maybe you read wrong and it is actually next December that it is coming to our platform”. I assure you friends, it is true. Read it from the horses mouth, here.

Believe me now? Okay, good. So what’s the catch? Well, it depends what you define as being “catchy”. For one, it’s being ported over to the Mac via TransGaming’s Cider technology. They take the PC version, wrap it in some specially baked code, and whalla, you have the game for Mac! To be honest I have never played a Ciderized game before and am not really sure what to expect. I have heard that sometimes the result is less the stellar in regards to performance and bugs. With that said, I will wait to draw my own conclusions on that matter.

The other info snippet that caught my eye? It will be available via download only. Great for those plastic tree huggin’ Mac users out there, but considering that the game requires 17GB of install space, that may not be so good for the rest of us. I have to wonder what my ISP will have to say about this. They don’t usually impose limits, but then again I have never downloaded that many gigabytes of data at one time before. But again, I will wait to see what comes of this.

What am I looking forward to? It’s a Bioware game. Much like Blizzard, if they touch it, it will turn to gold. So the experience, I anticipate, will be of the highest quality. The reviews for the PC version already attest to that. Reports speak of the game offering an astounding one hundred hours of gameplay. I don’t plan on spending that much time in the game, but I do hope the story engages me and I find myself wandering off the beaten trail if only for the sake of seeing what else the world offers. Furthermore, I enjoy RPGs, but tend to favour ones that allow me to play without a “party” (ie, Fallout or Oblivion), I look forward to seeing how the game pulls me into that particular aspect.

The timing of this announcement is a curse and a blessing. I have a ridiculous number of titles I am working my way through, both for myself and for the site. Having a title of this caliber and with such great depth isn’t going to be easy to tackle. On the other hand (bonus points if you instantly thought of Fiddler on the Roof with the beginning of the sentence) winter has settled in for us Canadians. It’s been -35 Celsius (that’s -31 Fahrenheit for you Yanks, whom by the way are only one of two countries in the world to insist on holding on to the archaic and bewildering Imperial system. I equate it to trying to eat poutine with your elbows.. it can be done, but boy is it awkward and unnecessary) this last week, and the snow keeps on coming!

Wait for it…wait… so I’m looking forward to “shutting the front door” and spending some time with Dragon Age this winter! Did you see what I just did there? Oh yes I did just do that! I am sure the English world has a special word for that sort of thing, like onomatopoeia, except, of course, not onomatopoeia, because that’s a word for something else.

With that, I bid you adieu.