LogFAQs > #940689137

ZenOfThunder posted...

I can't even imagine Shepard doing the suicide mission planning scene with just those three in the room, that's nuts. Jacob would have to lead the fire team I guess. I think Mordin and Miranda die regardless if you do their loyalty missions if you put them on hacking/barrier because they are not suited for those tasks. not 100% sure on that one though

Yeah, that's right. Miranda's biotics aren't powerful enough for her to succeed at the barrier part. I'm not certain about Mordin but that would make sense given that he's more specialized to the medicine end of tech. If we follow my analysis on the themes of Mass Effect, I would say that's a good thing since it means the mission gets compromised when Shepard is unwilling to build alliances with the other species.

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I wanted to give the game's sidequests a shot, so I did one mission about finding a missing Cerberus agent, which was just a single shootout really, and then the Overlord DLC. The DLC was more extensive with some exclusive mechanics, notably an open-ended area and a vehicle section, which I'm a little bit surprised Bioware had the guts to include after the Mako was so poorly received. The basic mechanics of this glider thing are definitely better than the Mako's, but I wouldn't say I was particularly impressed with it. The more open area also feels like something of a wasted effort since nothing goes on there and you only commute to three different places through it. Otherwise it's just more shooting. There is a section in a virtual space near the end that has some neat visuals, especially "corrupted" versions of effects like the door icons, but it doesn't change the game mechanics. Most of the enemies here are Geth which gave me a nice chance to try out Shepard's AI hacking skill, which turns one enemy on the others for a few seconds. Usually this led to the turned enemy immediately getting mowed down by multiple guys at once, but it was still kind of funny. Higher ranks cause it to give the hacked enemy a shield, which is kind of odd because the fact that the others will kill it isn't strictly a bad thing.

The story for Overlord appears to be another take on the rogue AI concept at first but turns out to be about abuse of people with disabilities (though that isn't the most accurate term,) when we learn that the Overlord project's director forced his autistic brother David to fuse with AI. This understandably caused the poor guy to go berserk and hack the automation of the facility to kill the other workers. Shepard has to slowly fight her way to David and when we finally do meet him he's naked and hooked up to a machine that deliberately looks like a torture device, with tons of needles in his skin and his eyes forced open Clockwork Orange-style. They definitely did a good job making that horrific, but then oddly the give you the option to leave him like that! Because it was part of an effort to develop technology that would avoid war with the Geth, I guess the question it poses is whether torturing someone can be ethical if it saves more lives in the end, but I don't think anyone I know would choose that and I would probably distrust anyone who confessed that he did. You can also have Shepard ice David's brother, which I admit I was tempted to do, but the call of Paragon points prevailed in the end.

On a lighter note, I had some chats with Jacob and Mordin. Jacob seemed to think I was flirting with him but I tried to steer the dialog options away from that, because I have my eye on someone else already. Mordin shared a bit of his past working with the Salarian Special Forces team to modify the Krogan Genophage as the Krogan were evolving enough to render the original disease ineffective. This of course led to some disagreement between him and goody two-shoes Shepard, but Mordin stuck to his guns at least for now.

You get a lot of resources at the start of any given file if you've beaten the game before, which is nice because it reduces the need for the very tedious planet scanning minigame that you have to do for upgrades. Nonetheless, I did a bit of planet scanning in the systems I had to travel to for a mission, and it was boring as ever. I doubled my stores of Platinum and Palladium, so I can probably leave off on it for a while. I think I'll recruit Grunt next time I play.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect 2