But you don't look sick...

I haven’t needed to bandage my wrists or my fingers in several months, so I forgot that I no longer have any tape. Somehow today, while wrastling my new baskets (which don’t fit where they were intended), I’ve sprained the third finger of my left hand and it won’t freaking shut up about it.

I’ll take this as yet another reminder to sort out an actual first aid kit, like I’ve been meaning to since I moved in ten months ago (yipes!), but I know I’ll forget again when it comes to actually doing my shopping.

Blargh.

I’ve been playing Bioware’s Dragon Age II (the PC version because my TV broke and my backup won’t take the PS3) for a month and a half. It’s fun: I chose to play as a comedian, so it’s pretty cool when cutscenes incorporate his wise-ass attitude. Most of the stories and quests are interesting, too, from Aveline’s face-palming romance to Merrill’s head-desking naivete.

But I think the game’s designers got lazy. I read in reviews before I bought the game that the environments were repetitive, but I (mistakenly) assumed they just meant the feel of them. They didn’t. They meant that the exact same dungeons are used over and over and over — and over and over and over — again.

Some of this can be explained as playing in a fairly limited area. Kirkwall’s not that big nor its architecture that varied, so at first I thought maybe things just felt samey, or maybe even the Coterie used the same hiding spot as the anti-Qun zealots. (The game covers quite a big stretch of time, so it stands to reason a building might be repurposed once you’ve turfed out one lot of bad guys, right?) But, no. Even the mansions are identical, from the place Fenris appropriates to the Dupuis estate. And by identical, I mean identical — right down to the placement of the corpses and location of treasure in what are supposed to be two entirely separate caverns!

In a game that already means visiting the same locations again and again for various quests and stories, you really begin to notice the sheer laziness of the game’s environmental design — even though the rest of the game is superb. It’s a shame, because the characters are all interesting and most of the play-through is really fun. (I say most because some aspects, such as the romance aspect, seem quite childish in some ways.) I haven’t stopped playing and I’m looking forward to finishing, but you really do feel cheated when you realise that — Oh, wait, this is that exact same spot, again — for the hundredth time.