Baud Attitude

Let me start of by saying very clearly: I am not disappointed with Mass Effect 2, the video game. Rather, I started it intending just to see how it tied into the first game and then played for six hours straight, which is a pretty good sign that I consider it an excellent game.

I was extra glad to find out that the thing I’d spoiled for myself accidentally is a thing that takes place (and is explained) in the first hour or so of play, so I don’t need to sit in my chair wondering when I’m going to get hit with it.

What I am disappointed in is that the villains have changed – not the Big Bad villains, but the minions that are presumably working for them. This game introduced a new kind of minions, and honestly I’m not really disappointed in the new minions either – they’re nicely creepy and it’s good when your bad guys aren’t too familiar.

The only reason I’m disappointed, then, is because I had planned to title a post “Mass Effect 2: Geth Again” and it doesn’t look like I’m going to get to do that since the Geth don’t seem to be in this one.

I guess I could complain that they changed the key bindings around and I’ve had a couple of deaths due to mixing up the functions of space and left shift, which were swapped for no logically explained reason, and changing quick save from F6 to F5 also makes no bloody sense, but uh. That’s pretty pathetic stuff to gripe about.

Short version, then: the graphics are better, they’ve sanded off some of the rougher bits of the original, and I was able to import my save from ME1 and have it pick up on all of my story choices, and it really feels like this is My Story as a result. I’ll just have to work a little harder when I make up a funny title for the next post about it.

The problem with games with morals systems is that I only ever really see the nice guy path. I mean, sure, it might be fun to see a bit more of the, let’s say, “morally ambiguous” path, but when the mouse pointer is hovering over the “throw the puppy into the blast furnace” option, I can never bring myself to click it.

I blame Lord British, to be perfectly clear. I played Ultima IV at a young and impressionable age and was uh…

…impressioned? I’m going to call that a word, anyway.  Having to play a game by a set of eight virtues is pretty heady stuff for a 12-year-old kid, particular after the empty-all-the-chests-kill-all-the-guards gameplay from Ultima III.

But enough about old Origin games and more about something a little more recent:

I’ve been putting off starting Mass Effect for a few years now, for a variety of reasons – no controller support in the PC version, knowing that the trilogy was unfinished, not wanting to commit quite THAT much time to an RPG in favor of playing quick-to-finish action games – and I probably would have kept putting it off except for recently needing to stay up for about 32 hours to set myself to Japan time before getting on a plane.

Since I started Mass Effect about 24 hours into this, my memories of the earlier bits of the game are a little fuzzy.  Mostly I have vague memories of following objective markers across alien planets and feeling completely outgunned most of the time.

I made the mistake, you see, of not having anyone in my away team with the skills to open all of the assorted secured lockers we were walking past, so I wasn’t getting money or upgrades very often.  Once I figured out that, hey, I should have a tech guy along, the game got WAY easier.  Not that I didn’t still die an awful lot, because apparently I love the spicy taste of plasma cannon, but I stopped dying quite AS often.

Anyway, I played the second half while NOT sleep-deprived, and had quite a good time.  I’d MOSTLY managed to avoid being spoiled, though I did ruin at least one plot point for a later game for myself by foolishly browsing Amazon’s selection of related plastic trinkets, but that’s all on me and I can’t fuss too much about it.  Mostly all I knew going in was that a) the first Big Bad Guy I met wasn’t the REAL Big Bad Guy, and that b) it had managed to make the pearl-clutching set clutch their pearls all that much more tightly by including girl-on-alien-girl romance action.

It gets significant points for occasionally having solutions to conflict that did NOT involve insert bullet A into mook B, and getting to skip one boss fight completely purely on charm brought back happy memories of talking my way through the final Big Bad Encounter in Planescape: Torment.  I will take some points OFF for being able to accidentally gimp myself by forgetting a tech guy, but not many.

Mostly I play RPGs to get to feel like The Badass Guy (or Girl) who gets to save the world, drive back ancient evils, and generally secure a bright future for people who never appreciated me along the way.  This one gave me all that AND let me romance a blue alien girl with tentacles, so I will mark it off as mission accomplished and try to get to the sequel games before I forget everything that happened in the first one.

Believe me when I say that it took a conscious effort not to title this post something along the lines of “Game Over, Man!”, but that’s a shot so easily taken that even I can’t stoop to it.

So.

Aliens: Colonial Marines, the long-anticipated and widely-panned sequel to Aliens, the Last Best Hope for fans to ignore that Alien3 ever happened.  Advertised with tremendous hype, launched with a resounding thud, purchasers later received an apology by way of a massive patch.  I think there were also some lawsuits aside and a developer went out of business or something?  I don’t pay a lot of attention to industry drama most of the time.

I’m quite the fan of the Alien series, even the later ones  (Let us not speak of Requiem), so I was intensely curious about the game despite its reputation – not, you know, curious enough to spend any significant amount of cash on it, but curious enough to drop the two bucks on it during an Amazon sale, install it some months later, and give it a fair chance to succeed or fail as a game.  I have, after all, managed to enjoy some games that were objectively awful.

I also figured that, if nothing else, I’d probably get a snarky blog post about it, and In that regard it met expectations.

I can’t compare it to how it was before patch – I’ve heard that it was an ugly mess with terrible enemy AI – but I can talk about how it is now, and it’s not good.

I played for about two hours – first on “Soldier”, which is the Normal difficulty level, and then on “Recruit” which required a restart since you can’t adjust the difficulty on the fly.  I had to quit “Soldier” because, well, dying was amazingly annoying.  Not only did every death come with its own little “here’s how the alien killed you” sequence, but it meant a long trip back to the last checkpoint.  Apparently the developers reacted to complaints that the game-as-released was far too easy by cranking the difficulty up to 11.

I eventually managed to complete the first level, and then I uninstalled it.  It wasn’t just the difficulty or the checkpoints or the annoying death sequences, mind you – what finally did it for me was getting a message halfway through yet another replay of the level that I’d leveled up and unlocked the tactical shotgun, at which point a tactical shotgun suddenly appeared in my inventory for use.

This sort of thing has been part and parcel of the multiplayer component of any FPS since, roughly, 2007, but it’s not something I expect to see in the single player campaign.  I’d expect to, oh, find a weapons locker and find a tactical shotgun in it, not hear a magical “ding” sound and suddenly realize that I’ve been carrying one in my backpack this whole time.  Coupled with the “you died! how about a little time-out before you respawn?” death sequences, it felt like the thing had been designed as a deathmatch game and got nearly to the point of shipping before someone slapped their forehead and realized they’d promised to deliver a story mode as well.

So… I wasted two hours but managed to satisfy my curiosity about the thing.  I guess that’s a fair tradeoff.

I’m kind of tempted, now, to find a copy of the Xbox 360 or PS3 version, disconnect the console from the internet and play the game without the balancing patch to find out if it’s any less brutal.  I’ll put that on my to-do list for 2019 or so.