Dragon Age 2

After playing the first Dragon Age and not really enjoying some of the aspects of the game, I thought that the new improvements to the Dragon Age game play looked pretty sweet. I enjoyed the original DA until I got about half way through and found my self not really liking the repetition in game play and the very long dialog. After reading many reviews of the improvements to the combat system  and overall game play, plus watching a ton of videos, I was looking forward to playing DA2.

The long dialog sequences are still there…  actually, they even seem longer.  I feel like I watch more cut scenes than actually playing the game. No wonder it takes 50 hours to play the game. The combat system does seem a little more fast paced and more controlled, but I still find it a little confusing to which bad guy I am attacking. Also the massive blood over lay (which was in the first one), I find, is very pointless.

Now, just to be all fair, I have only played about 2 hours of the game, so correct me if it does get better.  I just can’t seem to get into the game and find myself more bored with the repetition. And I am a big RPG fan (my favorite genre) and I love a good story line, but it feels like I am watching an animated move with occasional game play.

BioWare’s other big titles, Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, I loved and finished both, but I just can’t seem to get myself to like DA2.

L.A. Noire

Of all the games that were coming out this spring, this title I was looking forward to the most. Trailer and gameplay videos looked awesome and the facial animations were incredible. I pre-ordered L.A. Noire and really anticipated its May launch.

I am a big fan of Rock Star games, including the Grand Theft Auto series, Red Dead Redemption (which was, in my opinion, the best title for the 360 last year), and even Table Tennis.  This game was an immediate hit to me and I had to play it.

At first I was loving the game.  I could not quite figure out how to tell if someone was lying or not, but I was still able to solve cases and move up.  The side tasks were fun at first, but they became very repetitious and the aiming system really makes shootouts pointless. I also found that the cases were very repetitious as well.

This was another game where I felt like I was watching a movie most of the time. I really like the genre, so the sense were nice and entertaining, but I found that the game play was very simplistic. Also, the driving controls are way to touchy and I found it very hard to drive without running into other cars and people.

This game is beautiful and if you like the noir genre, it is entertaining, but again, I found myself getting bored with the story line and repetition.

Everything was great with the whole 360 experience until May 13, 2011. This is when I woke up and noticed that my account had some unauthorized charges and my Live account was converted to a family account. I called customer support as soon as I realized what happened. It was about 4 hours after the charges were on my account.

The customer service representative was very nice and helpful. She told me that they would be able to get my account back to the way it was and the charges reversed, but it would take about 7 days. I said no problem, I can live without going online for 7 days. In the meantime, I changed my password and removed my credit cards from my account.

After 7 days, I realized that nothing had happened on my account and so I decided to call back and just get a status update. When I called this time, I was told that I needed to wait and that it took 14 days to get everything resolved. Still, no problem at this point because I know these things take some time.

After 14 days, again, nothing had changed on my account, so I decided to call back to customer service. I was told that my ticket was closed on the day that I opened it and that they would have to open a new ticket and start the process over again. Here is my first point of frustration…  why didn’t the customer service rep. that I called before tell me my ticket was closed. I got a little upset, but these things happen, let’s just make it right from here.

I don’t want to do a complete time line since it is pretty long, but let’s just say that I have made quite a few calls to customer service to try to resolve this issue.  Each time I call, I have been told that someone from the fraud department would call me on X date, but no one has ever contacted me.

Today is July 18th and it is still not resolved with the exception of the reversed charges on my account for the fraudulent charges.

So, you may be saying, ‘You got your money back, where’s the problem?’ The problem is that I paid for 2 years of Xbox live using the promotion Microsoft had last November. Also, prior to any unauthorized access, I had purchased points and had 1000 points left. Microsoft has canceled my Live account and removed my points. I had 18 months left on my account and points are as good as money.

So how is this stealing? Well, they way I see it, I am out $67.50 for 18 months of service I paid for and about  $12.50 for the points I paid for. As of right now, I don’t see this issue getting taken care of, so the swindled me out of $80.

You may now be asking, ‘What do look to gain from this?’ Hopefully, I can get some people to read this and possibly look into why customer service cannot help Microsoft customers. The way I see it is that the real problem is that when I have an issue like this, I can’t talk to anyone that can help me. Customer service representatives are very nice and seem to sympathize, but they cannot talk to the fraud department and resolve these issues.

I hope this is not the normal behavior of Microsoft customer services, and please correct me if I am wrong. It should not take over 2 months to resolve this issues. It seems very cut and dry on how to fix this issue, but it seems that the simple solution is not easy at Microsoft.

Now if you made it this far in the story, I would like to say thank you for reading. There is more to this story and if you want to hear more, please feel free to email or call me personally.  My Xbox live account name is Quanack…  you know how to reach me.

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Update:  The original post was made on Jul 18 at 4:29pm EST. I also craft this post in an email to Steve Ballmer at 4:23pm (although I am sure he did not read this… maybe he did).

At 5:33pm, I received an email from Sebastian at customer support saying that they received my email and would like to call and work things out.

Hello Jason,

I am emailing you regarding an e-mail I received.

I am currently reviewing your issue and will contact you in the next few hours. Please let me know if you have a specific time you would like to be contacted, and I will attempt to reach you during your preferred time. For your convenience my contact information is included at the bottom of this email.

Thank you and I look forward to discussing your issue.

Regards,

Sebastian

I sent him back an email and told him I am available anytime.

At 6:26pm, Sebastian did call me back and was very able to get me taken care of very quickly. At 6:42pm, I had code to get my points and time back, plus a little extra time (although I was not looking for anything extra).

I can’t believe that I had to send off an email to the CEO in order to get something resolved that should have been resolved in a few days, but I thank Sebastian for helping me out and taking care of business.