I finally started playing Mass Effect 2 Saturday evening and so far I am loving every second of it!
Just over two hours in and I am in love with #masseffect2. I already don’t want it to end!
So far I’ve done very little fighting and a lot of exploration. The following are some of my thoughts and they’re completely spoileriffic, obviously.
Knights of the Old Republic is the game that got me into gaming. I remember playing it at work [in Spanish!] not understanding a word and not really knowing what was going on. All I remember is walking around in a beautiful environment talking to people and completing missions. Shortly after its release I bought an Xbox with the game and played it for about a week until finally completing it. I remember being stuck on Korriban [that freaking pillar!!], dancing on Taris and the big twist. A rainy Sunday afternoon that’s forever in my memory. The game had such an impact on me that I also watched Star Wars for the first time as I’d never been exposed to it as a child.
Jade Empire and Fable were the next big role playing games. The dream sequence in Jade Empire initially made me angry until I realised how well it worked with the story and I didn’t know anything about Fable beforehand either apart from Peter Molyneux’s promise of ‘growing a tree’ and ‘decisions that will impact the world’ neither of which were actually in the game. I still enjoyed every minute of it though.
Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords on the other hand was spoilt for me early on. Prior to the game’s release I knew who the main bad guy was and whilst I still loved the game [Yes, I love both KotOR's equally!], it wasn’t the same experience as being able to experience everything myself.
Mass Effect came out in 2007 and I tried my hardest to stay away from any videos or articles about the game, until I caved two days before its release and ended up watching all the videos Gametrailers had of it which was quite a lot! I saw how the different classes affected the gameplay [not that it matters seeing I always play a soldier anyway!] in an area I now know to be on Virmire shortly before encountering another beacon and every time I get to the area I think about watching the videos, even on my just completed sixth playthrough.
I’ve mentioned how many things I know about Mass Effect 2 so far in this post and there are only a few more things I’ve read on Twitter about it, such as a character called ‘Subject Zero’, loyalty and crew missions and how annoying the mining is. Of course I have heard how everyone loves the game, but I didn’t expect anything else!
As I am typing this, the second Mass Effect 2 disc is installing on my 360’s HDD. I’ve completed my sixth Mass Effect 1 playthrough a few hours ago and finally have the character I want with all sidemissions bar those pesky collection ones completed.
Ciara Shepard, Earthborn level 60 paragon soldier with Assault/Sniper Rifle specialisation and sole survivor of Akuze, although based on a later sidemission that is obviously not true. Her love interest is Kaiden Alenko and Ashley Williams died on Virmire having been with the Salarian troops when the last geth staged an attack. Decisions made:
I’ve also found the shifty looking cow twice!
Time for Mass Effect 2!
Just like my previous post I’ve again reached the point where my Firefox is slowing down due to the high number of open tabs with things I’ve been meaning to blog about in ages! Most of these are gaming related this time.
In no particular order:
iPhone Sleep Cycle: my nights with a strange bedfellow [Guardian]: Sounds like a great iPhone application. That and some games make me really want an iPhone. Damnit!
Cutting to the choice [EDGE]: Great post about multiple choice in gaming.
New Xbox Live Indie Game explores Office Politics [Joystiq]: This post pointed out Indie games to me and I’ve played many great ones since. Office politics is simply brilliant. Tumblr post one and two.
The player: cheat codes [Guardian]: A post that’s proved controversial in the comments. Personally I think it’s up to everyone whether they want to use cheats or walkthroughs. I’ve only ever used cheats a handful of times, but regularly rely on walkthroughs or internet searches.
Oblivion: RolePlaying [UESP.net]: Found in the comments from the previous Guardian post. I’ve used uesp.net myself plenty of times and I’ve posted about Oblivion a lot. This is taking the game to a whole new level though!
Eat three meals a day at the appropriate times (or less if you are poor). Breakfast should consist of grains, rice, bread or fruit. Lunch can be more bread, fruit, and vegetables. Save the meat and potatoes for dinner, along with your character’s preferred alcoholic beverage.
A post from the producer of Splinter Cell Conviction regarding the lack of a multiplayer versus mode [Ubisoft forums]: I am really disappointed with that. Whilst I’ve always liked the single player of Splinter Cell games, like SCDA, it’s the multiplayer that’s always shone through. Yes, a co op mode is great, but is that going to keep me playing for months or even years after it’s release? SCDA was released in 2006 and it still has a fairly active community and I’ve played it almost daily since last November due to it being different. Very unhappy about their decision and it’s made me reconsider if I really want the game day one.
Gamesradar’s Assassin’s Creed 2 review and guide: Loved this game a lot and I’m very much looking forward to the DLC, although that will have to wait until after Mass Effect 2!
Assassins Creed 2 glitch [GameSpot forums]: As much as I liked Assassins Creed 2, this nearly turned me off the game minutes after it started. Thankfully that was the only major glitch I encountered and was fixed with a simple reboot.
Blood sugar sex magik: examining Dragon Age’s Morrigan [Destructoid]: Great post!
I was never quite sure how to feel about her — and I mean that in the best way possible. She’s extremely useful in combat, but she’s also the most unrepentantly amoral character in the entire game. Her sarcasm and occasional (and very, very brief) moments of goodness makes her strangely likable, yet I never, for a second, trusted her.
Chasing Alistair [EDGE]:
It’s no secret that I love Alistair and this column makes me realise I’m definitely not the only one!
I don’t know how it’ll work, or what I’ll do with it when it comes. But I do know one thing: I’m in love with the next king of Ferelden, and before this is over, he’s going to make me his Queen. Or he’s never getting his armour back.
Space Cow and Shifty Looking Cow [Mass Effect wiki]: Came across the space cows randomly during one of the sidemissions and googled it just to find out what they are. Made it my mission to find the shifty looking one and was successful after over thirty minutes! Time well spent? I don’t know.. However, I absolutely love this description from one of the designers on the official Mass Effect forums:
I love the history of the Shifty Cow easter egg. When the character artists designed the space cow with two extra arms, Preston, our lead designer, was a little creeped out. His comment was “You can’t trust any animal that can milk itself.” Those extra little hands look so… grabby. So Preston came up with the idea of Shifty Cow. Turn your back on him, and those creepy little hands are going to go to work. Kiss those credits goodbye.
Progress made, now down to only 14 tabs! Back to Mass Effect I go!
It’s only eight days to go until Mass Effect 2 is released and due to it including a character import I’m playing through the first one again to create the ‘perfect’ save. Ideally I want my character to be a female level 60 soldier with paragon alignment and all sidemissions [bar the planetary collection ones, but including the party member ones] complete. In addition I would also like to complete the game on hardcore and insanity difficulty which means it’s even going to take longer.
I’m currently on my fifth playthrough since the game’s release, although only the second one on this 360 as I sold my original one back in 2008 and had to delete the saves. I still love the game as much as I did when I first played it and when I first completed it, but there are a few things I would like to see improved in the second one. Perhaps some of these improvements have been announced before, but I haven’t read or watched anything about the game since last summer due to not wanting anything spoiled with the exception of the ‘fishtanks’ article, the one announcing the celebrity cast, the news that Jack Wall will again be scoring the game and the save import.
In no particular order:
It’s week two of my Project365 and another week featuring mostly pictures taken in and around the flat. The few times I have left the house I didn’t come across much worth taking a picture of and twice I nearly forgot to take one alltogether which explains the pictures of whatever I was watching or playing at the time!
The next few weeks will be busy with several things going on in my life and I’m hoping I’ll still remember to take the pictures!
The images and additional explanations of them can also be found on cat on tumblr:
Project365 is an attempt to chronicle my life in 2010 by taking pictures for every day of the week which I already attempted in 2009, but didn’t progress beyond day 19. Weekly updates will be posted here using the Project365 category and all new pictures are uploaded to my tumblr using the Project365 tag. If you want to find more pictures by other people, do check out the @365_Project Twitter account.
PCurd: @craigyd I bought Torchlight in it off your recommendation :) Also Kotor as I’ve lost my pc copy. #
carocat: @PCurd KotOR again?! Aren’t your saves on the Xbox though? #
PCurd: @carocat I have saves on 1.0, 360 and pc. Can never remember which is most advanced but I was playing on pc before I lost the disks. #
carocat: @PCurd That’s just insane. Question is just if you’ll ever finish it! #
PCurd: @carocat I think it’s unlikely. I don’t finish games, as a rule. #
jamesbmarshall: @PCurd @carocat One of the only games I’ve ever actually finished is Metroid II: Return of Samus. It took me about 2 years. :$ #
jamesbmarshall: @PCurd @carocat I’m amazed I completed Metroid tbh. Most games fizzle out about 3/4s of the way thru for me. They become ’samey’. #
I wrote a blog post in November last year which summed up a few reasons on how my usage of online media has changed over the years due to necessity rather than by my own wishes [which was also linked to with a great post!]. It received several comments which I didn’t reply to at the time as I didn’t want to basically repeat my post and wanted to see if I could get any more inspiration from the comments.
Here are some of the comments and thanks to all the commenters!
From @Pewari:
It’s a tough dilemma, and it is THE main reason why I no longer blog. The problem is, how do I then maintain my online friendships? The most important ones I keep in contact with via IM and Twitter, but certainly the level of communication is much less.
That is one of the main problems I’ve got as well. I’m missing the interaction and the useful tips, especially when it is something personal and I could get a second opinion that way.
From @sarahfenn:
I know totally what you mean about Twitter. My neighbours have a young baby that cries constantly. I can’t complain on Twitter because my tweets auto populate my Facebook status. My neighbours don’t follow me on Facebook but friends of theirs do. Complicated, but I have remember to self censor.
Perhaps that’d be a good Twitter tag-line, ‘remember to self-censor’ ;)
I really want to say don’t worry to much though. We’re all human. There are things we’ll say that people will love and things people won’t like at all. You are you and you’re loved BECAUSE of the way you are. Don’t hide it too much. Don’t be ashamed of things you thought/said in the past. Don’t drive yourself crazy trying to self-censor. Be yourself. There’s a reason you make new friends from your tweets and blog posts :)
I like that, thanks!
From Jennifer:
The real-time, location-based stuff gives me the creeps. I wish there was a way to set a time delay before it goes “live” somewhere.
I’m very conscious of all the times I publically mention my location. Tweeting about where I am going for coffee is fine provided I’m with a group and I’ve only got close friends on services like Foursquare which also hides my location from others.
From EllaElla:
Excellent post and some real concerns and consequences. I’ve gone so far as to create free email accounts to give to people I know in real life who don’t know about my blog and I don’t want them to know.
I’ve been thinking about doing that for a good couple of years now for the same reasons and I do have various different email accounts. However at the same time I’d like to be found by some people I may have lost touch with over the years.
From sulz:
someone i know who uses her blog as a place to vent said if you don’t like what i have to say here then don’t read it. to a point it does make sense… celebrities are in the tabloids all the time and reading some interviews it seems that after a while they train themselves not to read the papers anymore.
but we’re not celebrities and though we have a right to express ourselves, is it fair to hurt the people we write about? i guess blogging is like journalism to a small extent – you have to be responsible for what you write for and back it up with facts in order to have a clear conscience!
otherwise, one can always master the art of vague remarks that doesn’t reveal too much. then again, it doesn’t make you feel like you vented properly too!
Just the other day several people reacted apruptly to one of my posts on my tumblr. People I only know via the internet. My first thought was that it doesn’t matter to me and they should just stop reading it as it’s a scrapbook/place for me and not anyone else. At the same time I realised I had over 500 followers on there and really didn’t care about it.
I wish I could adapt that mentality to my real life friends as well, but most of them don’t use the internet much or don’t share anything and see this only as an affront to them which obviously it’s never intended to be. I would never post anything that could possibly identify them either.
—
One of the reasons behind the original post was to gather ideas on how other people manage to balance their internet versus their real life activities and based on feedback I’ve read here and on other places I’ve posted excerpts at, it doesn’t seem there’s much solution apart from just avoiding sharing things on the internet alltogether.
Surely there has to be a better solution out there?
It’s the first week of 2010 and it’s been snowing for most of the time which has left me unable to leave the house due to living on slopey road and appreciating both my life and intact bones!
The images and additional explanations of them can also be found on cat on tumblr:
*Snowmagedon stolen from @chrisbrownsell!
Project365 is an attempt to chronicle my life in 2010 by taking pictures for every day of the week which I already attempted in 2009, but didn’t progress beyond day 19. Weekly updates will be posted here using the Project365 category and all new pictures are uploaded to my tumblr using the Project365 tag. If you want to find more pictures by other people, do check out the @365_Project Twitter account.
#In2009 is a hashtag that’s been popular on Twitter the past few days and it’s been interesting to see what other people have done in 2009. I posted a tweet as well, but feel like I want to elaborate a bit more. My tweet:
#In2009 I moved back to Reading #rdg and realised a lot about myself. I think I’m finally growing up! #
There are a few more things to mention, but they’re all a bit more detailed:
And I also just realised that I really will need to blog more frequently to make these things easier. My memory isn’t all that any more!
On to twenty-ten!
BioWare’s writing has always been brilliant and Dragon Age is no exception. In addition the voice cast is the most divers and almost best out of all their games. It would have been the best if Raphael Sbarge [Carth Onasi, Kaiden Alenko] had a part, but I digress..
Apart from the well written main quest and the conversations and the general tone, there are conversations between different party members along the way. KotOR did this and Mass Effect tried to make the long elevator rides more bearable.
Alistair early on seemed interesting and quickly became my favourite character, although he’s fairly useless in battle next to my warrior. The best party conversations so far have all involved him, however, and I wouldn’t want to miss out on them, even though I still don’t fully like his actual voice.
Talking to the witch:
Alistair: “Why do you always go on about how stupid I am? I’m not stupid, am I?”
Morrigan: “If you need to ask the question…”
Alistair: “Because it hurts my manly feelings you know. All one of them.”
Morrigan: “Then I’ll be sure to write you an apology once all of this is over.”
Alistair: “I was educated by the Chantry. I studied history. They don’t make stupid templars.”
Morrigan: “Then I must have been mistaken. I’m very impressed.”
Alistair: “No you’re not. You’re not even listening to me.”
Morrigan: “My, you are smarter than you look after all. Your Chantry must have been very proud!”
—
Morrigan: So you met this sibling of yours?
Alistair: Half-sister, but yes.
Morrigan: And she turned out to be an insufferable hag?
Alistair: You’d have liked her. You two have a lot in common.
Morrigan: And you let her berate you? Without punishment?
Alistair: It’s moments like this when I truly appreciate the difference between you and me.
Morrigan: (Scoffs) ‘Tis moments like this when I truly wonder at the difference between you and a toadstool.
—
Morrigan: You… do not truly think I look as my mother does, do you?
Alistair: Have you really been thinking about that all this time?
Morrigan: I am simply curious.
Alistair: And not insecure in the slightest, I’m sure.
Morrigan: I think I look nothing like her.
Alistair: I don’t know. Give it a few hundred years and it’ll be a spot-on match.
Morrigan: I said that I look nothing like her!
Alistair: All right. Got it. Totally different. I see that now.
—
Chatting to the dwarf. Think Gimli, just drunk:
Alistair: What? You’re… you’re drunk, aren’t you?
Oghren: Eh? Was that a question? It didn’t sound like a question.
Alistair: How in the Maker’s name do you manage to be constantly drunk? Are we even carrying that much alcohol with us?
Oghren: Jealous, huh? (Laughs)
Alistair: A little, yes. Why can’t I be drunk all the time? I never get to be drunk.
Oghren: You know, if you drank more wine, you would whine much less.
—
Talking to Zevran, the guy with an Antonio Banderas’ accent:
Zevran: So are you a very religious man, Alistair? I am curious. I believe I heard you say you were raised in an abbey?
Alistair: I was raised in a castle. I was schooled in the abbey. As far as being religious… I don’t know. Not especially. What about you? Not in your line of work, I expect.
Zeveran: Why do you say that? I happen to be quite devoted, in my way, as most Antivans are.
Alistair: Truly? But you kill people. For money.
Zeveran: And I ask forgiveness for my sins from the Maker every chance I get. What manner of monster do you think I am?
Alistair: But… you ask forgiveness and then you go right on with your sinning?
Zeveran: The Maker has never objected. Why should you?
Alistair: I… have no idea.
Zeveran: Well there you go. Perhaps you ought to think about asking for a little forgiveness yourself, hm?
—
And after ‘experiencing the thrill of romance with Alistair’:
Oghren: So. With the boss, aye?
Alistair: Pardon?
Oghren: You and the boss. Rolling your oats.
Alistair: I don’t know–
Oghren: Polishing the footstones.
Alistair: –what you’re–
Oghren: Tapping the midnight still, if you will.
Alistair: what are you going on about?
Oghren: Forging the moaning statue. Bucking the forbidden horse. Donning the velvet hat.
Alistair: Are you just making these up right now?
Oghren: Nope. Been saving ‘em.
—
Zevran: Might I offer you a bit of advice, my good friend Alistair?
Alistair: I like my hair the way it is, thank you.
Zevran: Truly? As you wish… though my advice is regarding something else completely. It has to do with your recent… exertions with your fellow Grey Warden that I overheard.
Alistair: My…? Oh.
Zevran: It did seem as if you just got going when all grew quiet. You are… feeling all right, yes? Perhaps you are tired?
Alistair: We aren’t talking about this, are we? Did I hit my head?
Zevran: I have some roots from home that you may chew if you need energy. As for volume, perhaps you ought to try arching your–
Alistair: Whoa! Whoa! Awkward!
Zevran: You Fereldans are so finicky. How will you ever learn how to pleasure each other unless you talk about it?
Alistair: not listening! La la la la la!
—
And then there’s this..
Alistair: Do you really know what’s going on here? The Blight, the civil war… I really wonder how much of it you understand.
Dog: (He wags tail happily.)
Alistair: We’re all special… big parts to play. Even you. Especially you, in some ways. You are the mabari. You guard one of the most important people–
Dog: (Excited Bark)
Alistair: What?
Dog: (Excited barking!)
Alistair: You… you want to play? But I’m talking. Why doesn’t anyone want to hear me talk?
cat on tumblr Project365
