It's pretty OK now. I don't go out of my way to use it, but it's unobjectionable and they give out free (older) games every few months or so. Customer support is apparently superior to Valve's, but I honestly rarely use that.

It's an EA thing. They wanted to build Origin to be a competing platform to Steam, and so they put newer releases there. Older games are still licensed to be available on Steam, so they can still be sold there.

On PC, Mass Effect 3 is only available through Origin, as far as I can tell.

This weekend I'll be playing Mass Effect in my run up to Andromeda's release next month.

Completely agree. I find myself wishing the big bad was actually killed at the end of act 1, and the rest of the game was about expanding your power base, resolving the civil war, and dealing with the election of the new Divine. There's good stuff in the margins of the game, but a big stupid ancient evil keeps…

I'll be continuing my journey through Dragon Age Inquisition. I've finished most of the main plot, save the last couple of major missions, and I'm meandering through the DLC, which I haven't played before. Currently on the Jaws of Hakkon, which I'm finding quite enjoyable. One of my problems with the vanilla game is…

Playing Dragon Age Inquisition. Well, I'll mostly be babysitting my niece and nephew, but I'll have Sunday afternoon, at least.

I'll be playing through Dragon Age 2 in my roundabout quest to finally play Inquisition's DLC. I'll probably fail- DAI takes so long to get going, I often lose interest.

They do care about the big picture stuff - the nature of magic and the relationship between the Fade and material world. But Corypheus bored them. What was supposed to be this unfathomable evil you're fighting against became little more than a plot device after Haven. "Why are the Wardens acting crazy and out of…

Aww man, vanguard is CRAZY fun in ME2. But you need to be cautious using it. You can't charge into a pack and blow them all up like in 3. You have to pick off targets at the fringes, blow them away, and pop to cover before you get killed. It's high risk high reward, it'll go spectacularly wrong almost as often as it…

I wish Bioware would stop pretending to care about their big save the world plots entirely. The individual plots in Inquisition are compelling, but they clearly lost all interest in Corypheus halfway through the game. Likely due to them cannibalizing a cancelled DA2 expansion for parts of the plot.

I've never really understood the stance that ME1 was particularly well written. Don't get me wrong - I love it and it does some fabulous world building. But Saren's plot never made any sense. They stuck in jarring characters like a magical alien space prostitute. The major plot worlds existed for the sake of extending…

And you feel that using female/queer characters is maintaining the status quo? Moving backwards?

That is very technical! However, you did use progressive in your original post, so you must have a definition you're working off fo

Do you feel diversity is not a progressive value?

Isn't it sad that games are so homogenized that "has female PC" could qualify as progressive?

The most fun we had with Man of Steel was coming up with horrible, just catastrophically bad advice that Pa Kent could have given. "Play the lotto son! It's a great investment." "Remember - evil triumphs when good men do something." That was the most enjoyment I got out of that grim, dour little lump of coal.

I disagree with categorizing Jupiter Ascending as brainless, but I responded very positively to the concept of genetic recurrence as reincarnation. I may be manufacturing greater meaning to the interactions between the siblings and Jupiter than were intended by the filmmakers.

I watched Jupiter Ascending last Friday, and I kinda loved it. There's something about confident, crazy space opera I find irresistible, and I enjoyed that it was willing to go absolutely nuts in the plotting. More genetic incest space wedding/ business transactions please!

The best film I watched this year I couldn't recommend to anyone. The scene with Jesse on the runway is perhaps my favorite cinematic moment of 2016.