Board 8 > Exdeath Plays Every Game in the GotD 2020 Contest

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LinkMarioSamus
05/29/20 9:09:15 AM
#101:


The thing is, the game seems to dip into other genres as a means of mixing things up and keeping the player on their toes. I really like that overall, but most of those other gameplay styles feel like Mario Party rejects.

And the enemies that show up in random encounters are weird with a capital W. How do you even conceptualize most of this stuff?

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BetrayedTangy
05/29/20 9:35:20 AM
#102:


I'm with you on VII's minigames, but the random encounters are great. Them being so weird just makes them memorable.

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Evillordexdeath
05/29/20 9:39:53 AM
#103:


Mass Effect
Release Date: November 20, 2007
I Will be Playing On: Playstation 3

Previous Experience with Mass Effect: Played the whole trilogy
What I Expect from Mass Effect: A shooter with good dialog.

Mass Effect was a favorite of my little brother's back in the day, so I was honor-bound to hate it. You can't imagine the sadistic glee I felt upon finding out that Mass Effect 3 had a reviled ending among fans - and then hearing him scream in dismay about it from two rooms over. Come to think of it, that might be my fondest memory of the entire franchise.

I kept maturing, and eventually became ready to give Mass Effect a shot on its own merits. Unsurprisingly for a kid who had loved KotOR growing up, I found a lot to like about Bioware's galaxy-spanning sci-fi trilogy, and I still have fond memories of characters like Garrus, Mordin, and EDI. It was one of my first experiences with the existential questions that more thoughtful science fiction can raise.

For all that history, though, I have my qualms about revisiting it. I have a little bit of beef with Mass Effect for being part of the process of 'dumbing down' the AAA Western RPG. I especially remember the customization choices you make upon level-up not having much impact. I'm not sure how I feel about the whole Paragon/Renegade dichotomy either, because I'm concerned that I'll be tempted to pick whatever dialog options give me paragon points instead of what makes sense for my character - particularly given that important rewards, including the lives of your party members, are wrapped up in that system. Of course, it's not as though ME invented moral choice systems. Even KotOR did the same things!

But really, that's a lot of grousing over the minutia of an otherwise-great series - and God knows there's been enough of that around Mass Effect since ME3 released. Of course I'm being flippant calling the game a shooter up above. Mass Effect is an RPG, even if some of its trappings could use fleshing out.

My goal for this playthrough is to do as many things as differently to last time as possible. I played as a man and went renegade before, so I'll begin by reversing those two choices - as worried as I am that playing Paragon will be a lot less fun. Look forward to the adventures of Agrafena "Grushenka" Shepard, starting this evening.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect
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LinkMarioSamus
05/29/20 11:18:40 AM
#104:


BetrayedTangy posted...
I'm with you on VII's minigames, but the random encounters are great. Them being so weird just makes them memorable.

Hey yeah, tells you how much I like the game for that to be one of my "complaints".

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Gall
05/29/20 12:40:17 PM
#105:


I would agree that VVVVVV hasn't held up as well as some of the other early indies in the bracket. For example Super Meat Boy, which came out the same year and has similar gameplay, blows it out of the water in terms of production value. It's good that VVVVVV exists but it's not a must-play.

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LinkMarioSamus
05/29/20 3:57:03 PM
#106:


VVVVVV felt like one of those games installed into a space station you play up there.

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Evillordexdeath
05/29/20 10:20:20 PM
#107:


Played the first two hours of ME1 today, stopping at the part where we go to a bar on the citadel to track down Garrus.

I choose the Space and War hero backstories and Infiltrator for my class, because last time around I was an adept so it felt natural to go from specialized biotics to joint tech and weapons. I put max points into Charm right away and then focused on pistols to unlock the Sniper Rifle specialization and the lockpick equivalent skill, whose name escapes me at the moment.

By navigating through the game's slightly stilted dialog system (making sure to diligently pick the top option every time for those juicy paragon points,) we learn that humans are the new kids on the intergalactic block trying to make a name for themselves, much to the annoyance of some of the older species, and that Grushenka (aka Commander Shepard) is being considered for a position on a para-legal peacekeeping organization called the Spectres, which would make her the first human to join and help to legitimize the status of humanity. A guy named Saren screws it all up for us and we tattle on him to the intergalactic powers that be, rather pitifully. It's to the point where we resort to using a dream Grushenka had as evidence, which unsurprisingly gets dismissed. We also meet two party members in Kaidan and Ashley, both of whom no one likes.

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Currently Playing: Mass Effect
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BetrayedTangy
05/29/20 10:40:42 PM
#108:


The coolest thing about ME1 is how fast and easy it is to jump into the lore. I think it's the only game where I was eager to learn about all the different aliens and events.

It's just a shame that tutorial is pretty slow paced and it's easy to soft lock yourself if you don't think to save before the first Bypass and fail.

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Evillordexdeath
05/30/20 10:22:14 AM
#109:


BetrayedTangy posted...
The coolest thing about ME1 is how fast and easy it is to jump into the lore. I think it's the only game where I was eager to learn about all the different aliens and events.

It's just a shame that tutorial is pretty slow paced and it's easy to soft lock yourself if you don't think to save before the first Bypass and fail.

That happened to me! I failed at the little simon minigame. You can get out of it by converting some of the weapons you've found up to then into omni-gel and 'paying' 25 to get through the door.

I think Mass Effect was the first, maybe even the only, game where I actually spent time reading the in-game glossary. The idea that Solarians think at a much faster rate than humans is one little tidbit that stuck with me. I almost found the idea intimidating, when I was younger. Dealing with someone who can brute-force through you is one thing, but someone who can easily outpredict and out-think you like that can be really dangerous.

Probably the highlight of my replay so far was getting re-introduced to the Elcor. They are mostly a one-joke species but they still make me smile.

What always bothered me a little, and is now becoming apparent again as I explore the citadel, is that a lot of the side-quests feel kind of dull. I have one where the goal is to purchase a permit for public speaking! I don't know if I could come up with a more boring sidequest if I tried.

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Evillordexdeath
05/30/20 11:59:21 PM
#110:


Before leaving the Citadel, we go through a short story-arc that introduces us to three new party members: Garrus, Wrex, and Tail, all of whom will end up being series staples and are among the more beloved characters. I like how elegant this section is story-wise. It manages to wrap up all three characters in one short plot that still feels natural. We also now have access to some of the best dialog in the series:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5Fjc1hBwuE

Our last party member, Liara, will be joining us shortly, and for the record I'll probably use her and Garrus most of the time.

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Currently Playing: Mass Effect
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#111
Post #111 was unavailable or deleted.
Evillordexdeath
05/31/20 11:41:15 PM
#112:


UltimaterializerX posted...
Wait, you're playing games you've already played?

That's crazy.

Yeah! If I skipped almost half the games I'd feel like I was only doing this half-way. I'm interested to see how my opinion might have changed over the years on some games, too.

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Currently playing more ME. I'm mostly just posting now because it's almost midnight and I want to be able to say I updated every day. Expect a more substantial update later on.

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Currently Playing: Mass Effect
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pezzicle
06/01/20 8:16:42 AM
#113:


Do you have an estimate on how many hours this will be?

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BetrayedTangy
06/01/20 9:15:05 AM
#114:


It wouldn't be too hard to calculate, just go to HowLongtoBeat and add up the averages.

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Congrats azuarc! You crushed it in the GotD2 Guru challenge!
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LinkMarioSamus
06/01/20 9:20:34 AM
#115:


Thinking of getting the Crash Bandicoot Trilogy on Switch.

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Evillordexdeath
06/01/20 10:56:24 AM
#116:


pezzicle posted...
Do you have an estimate on how many hours this will be?

Nothing more precise than "way too many." I haven't taken the time to add up the average length for the games like Tangy suggests, just because for 129 games it would take a while and that's time I could spend playing them instead. VVVVVV was only 2 hours and a lot of the other indies should be short, but on the other hand there are tons of very long RPGs including Persona 5 which took me 100 hours on its own last time I played it.

LinkMarioSamus posted...
Thinking of getting the Crash Bandicoot Trilogy on Switch.

Cool! Tell me what you think of it. I've never played much Crash but I did like the Jak and Daxter trilogy.

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Evillordexdeath
06/01/20 10:56:33 AM
#117:


Okay, I stayed up all night playing ME1. Now that I don't feel so rushed, I'll talk about the game, and what I'm doing in it, with a little more detail.

I'm playing on Normal difficulty with the aim-assist off. I initially picked this because I'm really not confident about my skill in shooters. It is definitely a baby difficulty where a lot of the enemies will just stand still and fire, making themselves almost brain-dead easy to hit. I thought about bumping it up to hard, but have refrained so far because the long load times and need to repeat dialog makes the times I do lose really annoying, so I don't want it to happen any more often than it needs to.

I remember the second and third Mass Effect games having really simplistic level-up systems, but the first one isn't so bad and does give you some ability to make meaningful choices. I would rather struggle a bit more with the combat than be locked out of story content, so I made sure to level electronics and decryption to the point where I can do the hard difficulty skill checks, and then put as many points into Charm as I could, before leveling up my combat skills. I've managed to max out Shepard's Sniper Rifle skill despite that, as of now.

There's not much reason to vary up your party members. Most of the time I've gone with Garrus and Liara. I've built Garrus to be kind of tanky and maxed out his Assault Rifles, and as for Liara, I've focused on her offensive biotic skills. I haven't taught her Stasis or put many points into Barrier. This is one of two possible teams you can have with Infiltrator Shepard that's completely balanced. The other is Kaiden and Wrex. I don't think there's any special reason to go for high balance, though. There aren't any enemies I know of that badly need to be countered by tech or biotic skills specifically. Sometimes I bring Tali if I expect to fight a lot of Geth, because she has an AI Hacking ability that makes them attack each other.

I don't really like how the game makes you pick a class at the start and binds you to it. I think a system like Fallout's where you can freely select skills would be better. This system is unnecessarily restrictive. It would be nice to be able to play as a tech/weapons character but train in assault rifles and shotguns instead of sniper rifles, but there's no way to do that in this game.

I finished up what there was to do on the Citadel and then hurried to the story mission where you recruit Liara, and otherwise spent a really long time doing side quests. God knows why - at this point I feel qualified to report that ME1's side quests are almost all pretty lame. This is partially due to the heavy presence of the Mako, Shepard's seemingly weightless tank. The Mako is pretty widely reviled by Mass Effect fans, and after spending some more time with it I remember why. It's a huge part of the game, but nothing about it really works from a gameplay standpoint. Most of the non-essential planets you can go to are just 1 square kilometer of empty terrain with a couple points of interest scattered at the edges. You have to ride the Mako around lots of steep hills and cliffs to reach them. The Mako can scale most cliffs but if they're too steep it doesn't really work out, and there's no clear visual indication of which cliffs aren't worth the effort. So a lot of the time the mere act of traversal between these points of interest is kind of annoying, and the reward is usually playing a crappy version of Simon for a few seconds and then getting some useless gear dumped into your inventory. Mako combat doesn't really make sense either. Most enemies on these little planets stay in a single area and won't pursue you if you leave it, and the Mako's shields are powerful but slow to regenerate, so the most effective way to clear them is to fight until you're out of shields, kill a few enemies, and then back off and wait for several minutes on end until your shields recover, then rinse and repeat until all enemies are dead. I've only really needed this technique the once, so far, but in principle the Mako's design makes it impossible for the vehicle combat to be challenging, really. It can only be tedious.

A lot of the optional stuff is as dull as surveying minerals or picking up identical medals or old books that you can't even read. It definitely gave me the feeling of "why am I spending some of my finite hours on this Earth doing this inane bullshit?" The worst one yet was about retrieving a data cache from some monkeys. You have to drive around to multiple different monkey colonies and check each individual monkey one by one for the damn thing. Whoever designed that should have been fired.

One sidequest that I did like involved getting an old artifact from the Asari Consort on the Citadel and using it to unlock ancestral memories in a Prothean relic, about the Protheans messing with mankind's ancestors. That lore was interesting enough to justify the car ride. I also did a longer quest-line on an asteroid nearby a major human colony called Terra Nova, which had a decent payoff with some info about an old war between humans and a minor species called Batarians and an interesting choice between bringing down a terrorist and letting him go to save hostages. Naturally, I picked the latter option and raked in a nice windfall of sweet, sweet Paragon points. I'm almost halfway to the max value by now!

I notice that a lot of the time the dialog options you're given are just three different "flavors" of the same response, and likewise, although there are definitely times when this isn't the case, sometimes being a renegade means doing the same things as a Paragon, but just being a bit of a dick about it. Also, after having to re-try the fight against the Krogan Battlemaster when you first rescue Liara, I learned that sometimes you're presented with two dialog options that lead to Shepard saying the exact same thing!

This is something I never really realized until now, but when you're asked to look for a missing person in Bioware games, you almost invariably find his corpse instead of being able to rescue him alive. A weird amount of their storytelling is accomplished through data files found on dead bodies. I think that's too bad, really, because encountering a living person is usually both more interesting and more rewarding. Getting to meet and talk to a character I helped is somehow much more special to me than the millions of off-screen lives the game tells me I've saved.

The game's lore is definitely interesting and I found myself spending a while just reading through the journal entries about the major species and their history. That and talking to my crew members between missions are probably my favorite parts of the game.

This post has been mostly grousing, but I just sat down and played the game for like ten hours straight without really wanting to stop, so it's definitely doing something right. I think I'm side-quested out for now though. Mass Effect fans: Are there any sidequests in the first game that you think are particularly good, or that lead to interesting payoff in the later games?

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Currently Playing: Mass Effect
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LinkMarioSamus
06/01/20 11:23:46 AM
#118:


If I end up playing it, I'll probably just write about the game in this thread rather than creating a new topic.

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pezzicle
06/01/20 12:18:55 PM
#119:


Evillordexdeath posted...
Nothing more precise than "way too many." I haven't taken the time to add up the average length for the games like Tangy suggests, just because for 129 games it would take a while and that's time I could spend playing them instead. VVVVVV was only 2 hours and a lot of the other indies should be short, but on the other hand there are tons of very long RPGs including Persona 5 which took me 100 hours on its own last time I played it.

Cool! Tell me what you think of it. I've never played much Crash but I did like the Jak and Daxter trilogy.
If the average game is 30 hours it comes out to about 4000 hours lol

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Evillordexdeath
06/02/20 9:55:20 AM
#120:


pezzicle posted...
If the average game is 30 hours it comes out to about 4000 hours lol

Sounds about right. I think the median would be below 30 but the mean might be above that due to some of those Persona 5s and Witcher 3s bringing it up. That puts me at about 0.1% of the way there so far!

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Since Bioware's games are so heavily character-focused, let's go over some of the major characters in Mass Effect 1:

- Commander Shepard: An RPG-style player-insert character, at least in theory. Many parts of her identity and broad personality are up to the player, but most of her actions are essentially set in stone by the game. In a lot of WRPGs the ultimate course of the narrative and main character's journey can be decided by the player, but Mass Effect is an exception. Shepard always hunts down Saren and wages war upon the reapers, and she's always a strong-willed commanding war veteran. Bear in mind that this isn't necessarily a fault of the game's. Bioware had a more linear story that they wanted to tell and chose to make an RPG with more restrictive player choice in service of that goal. Whether that is good or bad is a matter of perspective.

- Saren: Probably the main antagonist with the most presence out of any in this trilogy. Like Darth Malak in KotOR, we don't learn much about him early on, except that he's menacing and temperamental, which kind of feel like standard bad guy traits. He apparently has a hate-on for humans. If this character reveals more dimensions later on, I certainly can't remember them. More on this guy later.

- Kaidan Alenko: Shepard's first party member, and a potential love interest for our female Commander. Most people find this guy bland. Most of his backstory involves being a '2nd generation' biotic who gets migraines as a side-effect of his implants, as well as his general mistreatment as a child by a biotics company called Conatix Industries. I don't mind that backstory itself - it ties into some interesting-enough lore for the rest of the series - but I think the problem with Kaidan is that his moment-to-moment dialog doesn't convey much personality. It's never very compelling to bring Kaidan along on a mission and find out what he'll think of the things you see along the way, because his commentary is just kind of dull.

- Ashley Willaims: Our second human companion, who helps us narrow down this game's general rule for character classes: girls are specialized, boys are multi-talented. Her main thing is that she's racist against aliens - for this reason, she's one of the most hated Mass Effect characters. To both her credit and the game's, she isn't some ranting, uncontrollable xenophobe. She distrusts your alien allies because she thinks they will always place their species' interests above any alliance with humanity. That idea is in contradiction to the series' main themes, and Shepard can argue about it with her in most of their dialog.

This game gives you the "Sophie's Choice," of whether to save Kaidan or Ashley near the end. I picked Ashley the first time around, after which she had almost no impact on the rest of the series. You briefly meet her at one point in Mass Effect 2 and talk for a minute, and then she rejoins as a squad member in the third game. At some point she asks to transfer to a completely different unit, which I allowed, and then I never saw her again and didn't care.

- Garrus Vakarian: A Turian, and our first alien friend. Garrus is easily the squad member I feel the most attached to from my previous playthrough of the trilogy, and I like to include him on every mission. It felt kind of strange running into him again for the first time and having him react to Shepard as a stranger. He's a party member in all three games, so you really build a relationship with him by the end.

At this point in his life Garrus is just a high-ranking C-Sec (essentially the Citadel's police force) officer who is fed up with the red tape. He has a sense of liberation - almost of fun - when he's working with Shepard for this reason, and generally his situational dialog is more enjoyable than that of someone like Kaidan. When I first found out about the monkey quest, for example, he sarcastically said "This will be fun," which neatly mirrored my own thoughts. Then when I accidentally ran one of the monkeys over in the Mako he remarked "Guess the little beast had it coming."

Urdnot Wrex: A member of the dying Krogan race. He has a major role in the overarching story, but only actually accompanies Shepard in the first game. The whole narrative of the Krogan being uplifted by the Salarians, used to fight in the Rachni wars, rebelling, and then being crippled with the Genophage might be the most interesting part of Mass Effect's lore, so it's nice that Wrex gives us his perspective on it. As a character, though, I'm not in love with him. He's okay, don't get me wrong, but his brand of honor-focused militarism is just kind of overdone in sci-fi.

Tali'Zorah nar Rayya: Quarian and dedicated tech caster, and only character besides Garrus who comes along on the ride for all three games. Tali is probably my second-favorite member of the ME1 squad, but there's a significant gap between her and Garrus. I admit I have a hard time remembering what I like about her. I remember her loyalty mission in ME2 pretty well and found it interesting, and I guess I like the sort of youthful enthusiasm that she brings to the crew in this game. She's the techie type and spends most of her time hanging around in the engine room studying the Normandy. She's also our introduction to the Quarian/Geth dispute, which is another of the cooler storylines in the series.

Liara T'Soni: Asari, biotic caster counterpart to Tali as well as scientist in a different field - mostly a historian and archeologist. Liara has a personal investment in the plot of the first game because her mum is one of the primary antagonists, which gives a narrative incentive to bring her along on certain missions. She's also a love interest for both male and female Shepard due Asari being a mono-sex species. In fact, I romanced her the first time around, mostly because my only other option was Ashley.

Like Tali, I remember feeling pretty attached to Liara by the end of the third game but I can't remember what I liked about her character very clearly. I know that she's important to one of the more popular DLCs in the second game, which I played and remember thinking was alright. Maybe it's just that she was one of my first romantic partners in a video game, and you don't forget that kind of young love.


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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect
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Evillordexdeath
06/02/20 10:18:56 PM
#121:


Completed the Feros section of the game today. We shuttle down to help a human colony under Geth attack, only to eventually learn that it was the base of operations for a corporation called Exogeni who take some cues from Weyland-Utani of the Alien franchise, and are deliberately infecting the colonists with spores from a giant mind-controlling plant called the Thorian for the purpose of study. Along with a lot of riding around in the mako, this meant fighting some zombies that slowly walk toward you while you pop them off with no threat and incapacitating mentally enslaved humans with grenades, which was kind of annoying since you can only carry 6 at a time, but with a couple of reloads I managed to get the full +32 Paragon points for that section. I feel jealous of people playing renegade, since slaughtering all the colonists would've been much easier and more enjoyable from a gameplay perspective.

After all that, we deal with a long "boss fight" where you run around a room shooting wall-mounted plant tendrils in between rounds against the same Asari clone and a bunch of useless Thorian Creepers, and finally we learn that Saren contacted the Thorian to gain Prothean ancestral memories and then tried to destroy it so we couldn't do the same, but a released Asari sister of Liara's shares those memories with us and Saren's plans for this area are (somewhat) foiled.

On the whole, this part has a lot of missteps gameplay wise but was intriguing enough as part of the story.

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Currently Playing: Mass Effect
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LinkMarioSamus
06/03/20 3:14:49 PM
#122:


Got the N. Sane Trilogy on Switch and started Crash 1. It's a fairly basic linear 3D platformer. It does do a lot well, namely how it successfully replicates the feel of a classic 2D platformer in 3D, the variety in environments, and the steady introduction of new mechanics, but the game largely feels unremarkable so far. I got a few levels in, past the first boss, and my gameplay started out careful but then gradually got more and more lax to the point I got a game over. Lost a lot of lives on the first hog level, that was pretty annoying.

Thankfully I hear the other two games are supposed to be better, which is a good sign. I suppose I should also mention that I do really like the presentation of the N. Sane Trilogy!

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Evillordexdeath
06/03/20 10:19:30 PM
#123:


LinkMarioSamus posted...
I suppose I should also mention that I do really like the presentation of the N. Sane Trilogy!

That's one thing I can definitely attest to. They put a lot of effort into the animation and the sense of character it conveys.

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After clearing out Ferros, we get to go back to my unironic favorite part of Mass Effect: talking to all our crew members. The theme this time around was family: Ashley, Wrex, and Tali all fill us in on their relationships with their dads. I think I liked Ashley's dialog especially, because hers was the one that gets away from the general single theme of her previous conversations, which was distrust of non-humans. Tali's and Wrex's dialog was nice, but still tied into the concepts of Quarian Pilgrimage and the need for reform among Krogan, which makes them come off as a little bit less multifaceted than Ashley in this particular case.

Kaidan and Liara both made it very clear that they have the hots for Shepard, and I made her flirt with them both because I thought that was funnier. Wrex and Garrus also gave out sidequests that are tied into their characters.

I must have some kind of crippling video game sidequest addiction, because I spent most of today on optional stuff. I did the mission where you disable a rogue VI on the moon. It gives you an important in-game reward in your secondary class specialization, but it's pretty lame: three copy-pasted room where you fight drones and then spend way too long breaking down a total of 24 unmoving AI clusters. I picked the weapons specialization because I'm finding that my spell damage isn't really useful and sniper rifle shots are much more important. I also took the time to do the quests Garrus and Wrex gave me, which were short and sweet enough that I didn't mind.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect
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LinkMarioSamus
06/04/20 11:17:01 AM
#124:


I beat the level I finished off on yesterday, but I got I think four or five game overs in the process, not kidding. Thankfully the level in question (Native Fortress I think it's called?) had a ton of extra lives right at the end, as if anticipating how difficult players would find it. I went into this session planning only to beat the one level, but I felt so good afterwards that I went right on ahead to the next one, which I finished without much hassle. Then Ripper Roo kicked my ass all the way to Sunday and I decided to stop here for now.

I don't know entirely how to put this, but the takeaway from this session for me is how good it can feel to know the specific sequence to take and execute it closer to perfection each time. It may involve a lot of trial-and-error, but the feeling of accomplishment is worth it. That said, the thing that tripped me up the most was not really knowing how to make longer jumps. XIII_Rocks told me in a PM he finds the controls in the collection overly responsive, which I might agree with. I hear the other two games are easier though, so another good sign.

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ZenOfThunder
06/04/20 11:52:13 AM
#125:


do you feel the vehicle sections significantly hinder your experience?

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Evillordexdeath
06/04/20 10:18:06 PM
#126:


ZenOfThunder posted...
do you feel the vehicle sections significantly hinder your experience?

Yes, but it's mostly my fault for doing too many sidequests and subjecting myself to a lot of them. If you mostly stick to the main path, which is what I would recommend, they are no big deal. You can usually drive past all the enemies that appear and get out of the Mako quickly.

---

Barely had any time to play today. I cleaned up a couple more sidequests, one involving an Asari diplomat's missing sister, who turned out to be a bandit leader, and one small obscure sidequest that I remembered and wanted to revist because, as far as I know, it's the only mention of the Cerberus corporation that occurs in this game. Cerberus, of course, will be very important later.

I've increased the difficulty to Veteran for now. I was mostly hoping to get more complicated enemy AI out of that, but for the most part that doesn't really seem to have happened. It's mainly a health boost for most enemy characters.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect
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Evillordexdeath
06/05/20 10:21:16 PM
#127:


Okay, with yesterday's sidequests out of the way, I can finally get around to the main story. Ooh, but there's a mission to help some embattled soldiers, wouldn't it be nice to save them...

NO. I'll just arrive to find their corpses anyway, and I don't want to waste any more time on this game's half-baked sidequests.

So we set off for Noveria and arrive to learn that matriarch Benezia is on the planet. I've been using Garrus and Wrex as my squad-mates lately, but had Wrex hit the bench so Liara can be around when we confront her mum.

The opening social section on Noveria is deliberately set up to give you a little sense of catharsis by having a Salarian businessman be a complete dick to you and then letting you help take him down. There are also a few optional missions involving helping some corporations with illegal espionage, but you can get paragon points for turning them down, which I call a win/win!

During this section we also fight an Asari biotic who functions as a sort of miniboss, but after she cast her initial spells she just stood still firing a pistol at Garrus, allowing me to easily activate my Assassination ability and then kill her with a single sniper rifle shot. Hard mode, ladies and gentlemen!

The vehicle section in the blizzard was the first one to escalate from annoying to straight-up broken. Twice in a row I hit a tiny bump in the road and this caused the game to stall for a moment and then the Mako would spontaneously combust and send me to the game over screen. That was a treat. I went into full drive past all the enemies mode to try and get out of there as soon as possible. It worked. I had to repair the mako twice, but I have tons of omni-gel from getting rid of all the useless items the game loads you with, so the cost was irrelevant. I'm at the point where I actively avoid picking items out of crates so that I don't have to bother with the tedious inventory management as often, incidentally.

The enemy groups here mostly consist of Geth and Rachni. The second are new and usually throw a wave of suicide-bomber drones at you followed by some stronger soldiers. The little drones are troublesome for a sniper-rifle class, so for the first time in a while I took out my pistol to deal with them.

At this point I'm about 80% of the way to the full Paragon meter and have the maximum 12 points in Charm, so although I'm not 100% sure this is how it works, I don't think there's much point to farming any more, at least for dialog checks. That's a relief.

I have the sniper rifle and spectre training skills maxed too, and I'm working on the Commando skill for decreased cooldown on Assassinate. I think Sniper Rifles might be overpowered in this game, and never really bother using my Tech skills any more because the damage they deal is so paltry in comparison. I'll have nothing else I actually want to spend points on once Commando is maxed out.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect
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LinkMarioSamus
06/06/20 3:36:10 PM
#128:


Was just skimming through your Mass Effect write-ups and now I actually remember watching a Let's Play of the game way back in 2012.

I returned to Crash Bandicoot, got FIVE Game Overs in the process of fighting Ripper Roo, and then the next level promptly kicked me something good again. Part of me feels like the level design might be improving, but I'm not entirely sure. I think most of my difficulty with this game comes from getting used to the jump physics - this feels A LOT different from the Mario and Sonic platformers I typically used to play. Doesn't help that I used to have similar problems with the 2D Mario games when I was younger, until from 2010 onwards I somehow no longer had them.

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Evillordexdeath
06/06/20 9:49:54 PM
#129:


I got roped into an overtime shift tonight, which turned a weekend where I was hoping to finish ME1 and make some headway in the second game into one where I'll be lucky to complete the Virmire section.

Finished off Noveria today. After the build-up for Matriarch Benezia, the fight itself can't help but feel like a case of story-gameplay disconnect (or 'ludonarrative dissonance if you insist.) An Asari Matriarch is one of the wisest and most powerful creatures in the galaxy, or so Shepard says, but once she became vulnerable (you have to take down some minions before you're allowed to hurt her) I killed her in one Assassinate-empowered shot.

If there are any ME veterans reading this, is the Sniper Rifle this OP in the later games? I feel like I should change classes in ME2 for the sake of more challenge. For what it's worth, if the AI would just move around a little more I imagine I'd be ham-handed enough with the aim that it wouldn't feel so strong.

More interesting than Benezia was the encounter with the Rachni Queen. Of course I chose to free her. Besides the Paragon points, it's just more interesting story-wise to have her still roaming around.

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Currently Playing: Mass Effect
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LinkMarioSamus
06/07/20 11:51:23 AM
#130:


Okay, I cleared The Lost City with minimal trouble (though I was on my last life when I cleared the stage), had even less trouble with the next stage (though I lost a bunch of lives at the end for god knows what reason), and then got a Game Over on the next level and decided to call it quits for then, albeit mostly because I had only just figured out how to clear one particular obstacle.

Is it just me, or is the difficulty in the game out of whack?

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Evillordexdeath
06/07/20 11:56:55 PM
#131:


After the Noveria mission, Kaidan confronted me for hitting on both him and Liara, forcing me to choose then and there between seeing his fat ass and getting some nice girl-on-girl action with Liara.

So I picked Kaidan. This choice was mainly decided by the fact that I romanced Liara last time around. What I do find kind of funny is that this potentially comes up before the mission on Virmire, so you can lock yourself into romancing Kaidan and then choose to get him killed to keep Ashley alive. At times like this you wish there was a better female equivalent to the phrase "bros before hoes."

Virmire is probably the shortest world yet, and definitely the most focused. There are no real sidequests or hidden areas, it's all just about one high-octane mission to take down Saren's base.

We find another Prothean beacon, and with its help we know enough to speak to Saren's ship, which as is well known online these days turns out to be a living reaper. It turns out he's kind of a bore. He just drones on about how superior he is for a little while and then we hang up on him.

This is where the choice between Kaidan and Ashley comes up. Only one of them can make it off Virmire alive. As with most of my choices in this playthrough, I chose to save Kaidan because I picked Ashley last time.

You know, now that we're looking back on her, I actually thought Ashley was a pretty good character this time around. She had a lot of different subjects to talk about and her whole beef with aliens wasn't as over-emphasized as I had remembered. I would say I at least like her better than Kaidan, but I don't like her so much that I'd save her again and deny myself the chance to see what kind of difference it makes.

We have our first proper encounter with Saren, who tells us that his whole scheme is to submit to the reapers as organic life's only chance of survival. He's clearly indoctrinated, because placation has never worked in politics and even I know that. There's a parallel between himself and Benezia in that they both sign on with a greater villain to try and reform him a little but get consumed by his influence. I don't think there's any way to talk him out of a boss fight on Virmire, and in contrast to Benezia he took 3 shots to bring down! Then he escapes as we nuke the base, and we return to the citadel to give a report, whereupon the council locks us down and we have to mutiny to get back to chasing Saren. This is another cathartic moment because we get to watch Ambassador Udina, who has spent the whole game being a dick, get clocked.

Before our last big mission on Ilos, the planet where the all-important Conduit turns out to be, we get our 3-second sex scene with Kaidan. It's not especially titillating. You get to see the side of one of Shepard's butt cheeks. More interesting than that was our last on-ship chat with Garrus, where he talked about coming over to Shepard's paragon ways over the course of our journey and even brought up that sidequest I did for him. That was a nice touch, and made the previous conversations I'd had with him feel impactful.

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Currently Playing: Mass Effect
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LinkMarioSamus
06/08/20 9:35:01 AM
#132:


Another two levels done in Crash for me, "Road to Nowhere" and "Boulder Dash". The former level is predicated on crossing a rickety rope bridge with lots of missing floor panels, panels that fall off shortly after contact, panels ready to break at the slightest jump, slippery inclines, hogs crossing, it's basically a test of how well the player knows the game's jump physics. And I think I'm starting to get the hang of it, and it feels great! Boulder Dash was much easier by comparison. I once again stopped when I got a Game Over on the following stage.

The question that comes to mind the fastest is why so many games from this time felt the need to replicate the boulder chase from Indiana Jones. I guess it's an effective setpiece that communicates the idea of what to do very clearly and is instantly recognizable? I know at least Sonic Adventure did it as well just two years later.

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Evillordexdeath
06/08/20 10:15:53 PM
#133:


I slept in way too late today, which left me with about 25 minutes to squeeze in a short session on ME. After dying once to a Geth Armature, one of the enemies who can 1-hit KO you in this game, I only had enough time to make my way to the security station on Ilos and listen to an old Prothean recording about their civilization getting reaped.

Last night I neglected to mention that Saren was developing a cure for the Genophage on Virmire, which we destroyed. Wrex was understandably upset about this, but you can talk him down. I think this is usually one of the primary reasons to farm Paragon/Renegade points in this game, along with one other dialog option yet to come. If you can't talk him down, you'll be forced to kill him instead. As a somewhat lame form of branching storytelling, in the next two games he'll be replaced by his brother who does most of the same things he would, but I think it locks you out of some of the 'best' options for resolving the situation with the Krogan.

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Currently Playing: Mass Effect
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LinkMarioSamus
06/09/20 7:48:54 AM
#134:


Another level in Crash down plus Koala Kong defeated. This session I managed only two Game Overs total - one while fighting KK and the other in the next level after that after which I decided to stop.

This game is growing on me. I think it takes me back to the kinds of games I used to play when I was much younger. I'm also really starting to like the rhythm of getting a good run through a level and how the levels feel like the ramp up as they progress on (talking individual levels at least). Game just feels really good to play, at least when it's not kicking my ass. And sometimes even when it is. I take back what I said about this game being unremarkable. It's not amazing or anything, but I'm coming to like it quite a bit.

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davidponte
06/09/20 9:01:20 AM
#135:


Tag

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I was the final Undisputed Champion in UCA history,
but azuarc was our Guru Champion!
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Evillordexdeath
06/09/20 7:32:40 PM
#136:


The point I stopped at last night was the beginning of the last stretch of the game, and now I've finished Mass Effect!

All that was left to do on Ilos was drive down a long hall and get stopped at one point to talk to an ancient Prothean VI, which tells us about the history of the planet and gives us the last tools we need to stop Sovereign. It's an effectively harrowing story, really: the last surviving Protheans going into Cryonic sleep to hide, power slowly failing, and the life support systems being shot down one by one, until, when they finally emerge, it is too late for their species. I also like the idea of the Citadel being a trap. I thought that was kind of clever.

The last gameplay sequence is on the Citadel itself, and was kind of long and tedious. It's an area where the game's autosave system can really let you down, and two of my deaths resulted in a lot of lost time playing the same dull shootouts again. I had to resort to manual saves, but found that the area was so full of enemies that finding a time when the game relented to save, given that it won't let you do so in combat, was a struggle.

Bioware's main trick for ramping things up for the final area is to re-purpose enemies they designed for mako combat for the purpose of fights on foot. The main source of potential frustration is the Geth Heavy Turrets near the end, which quickly launch rockets that would kill me from full health and shields, and had enough armor of their own to survive being pumped full of laser. The solution I found was to duck behind cover in the right place, so that they would uselessly fire their rockets against the terrain, and then slowly snipe them down from long range.

Once that was finally out of the way, we had our final confrontation with Saren, and in standard WRPG tradition we talked him into suicide. Interestingly, you get Paragon points for doing that! I admit I miss the old days of 'social boss' encounters where you had to try and figure out the right dialog options logically instead of just immediately picking the ones that are highlighted in blue.

Not so standard is the fact that you have to fight him anyway, as a sort of husk that plays a little like the Geth Stalkers. Hey Bioware, I invested all those points into Charm because I wanted to skip the combat! He reminds me a bit of Infermon from the Digimon movie in this form. At least I can say this boss fight took a reasonable number of hits to go down. He also pulls the very cheap move of making us watch a cutscene mid-battle, so that his shields can regenerate over how much time it takes.

In case you're curious, I chose to save the council. It's a fairly political move, and they rewarded humanity accordingly by letting Shepard appoint a human councilor. I picked Anderson mostly on the basis that Udina is a dick. Shepard vows to continue fighting the reapers, and that's where the game ends.

I admit I'm looking forward to moving onto the second game. Hopefully it will be a little more engaging on the gameplay front.

Commander Shepard will return tomorrow, and so will I.


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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect 2
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LinkMarioSamus
06/10/20 4:19:53 AM
#137:


At least you aren't going straight to Mass Effect 3.

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ZenOfThunder
06/10/20 8:02:25 AM
#138:


I need squad mate tier list

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LinkMarioSamus
06/10/20 8:03:48 AM
#139:


Three more levels in Crash Bandicoot done plus Pinstripe Potoroo (a Kangaroo doing his best Tony Montana impression) defeated. I cleared all the Industrial levels without much trouble, so either I'm getting better or this part of the game is somehow easier. Then the following level, "The High Road", was another bridge level so of course it kicked me something good because I can't judge how far to jump off those turtles!

I also managed to destroy all the crates in two of the levels, which is noteworthy because otherwise I seem to be missing a ton that I never see. Presumably in the earlier levels I just have to explore more? Doesn't really matter since I'm going straight to the other two games after I beat Crash 1.

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BetrayedTangy
06/10/20 8:22:58 AM
#140:


ZenOfThunder posted...
I need squad mate tier list


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Congrats azuarc! You crushed it in the GotD2 Guru challenge!
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Evillordexdeath
06/10/20 9:20:29 AM
#141:


Final Analysis: Mass Effect

What I thought of Mass Effect: A decidedly mixed experience
Would I play Mass Effect again? Twice was enough.
Did it deserve to lose in Round 3 (and 2?) Earlier, if anything.

Mass Effect is not that old. Try going back and playing Super Mario Galaxy, which came out the same year. Apart from readjusting to the motion controls, you'll probably find it to be a tightly designed, deeply payable, even good-looking game. If it came out today, it would still earn review scores of mostly 9 and above.

The same definitely cannot be said of the first Mass Effect. This game is janky, stiff, and frequently annoying. In many ways, a game like Halo: Combat Evolved, which came out six years earlier, was much more advanced.

As a shooter, Mass Effect is repetitive and unengaging. Even on a tuned-up difficulty setting, the enemies largely stand still and slowly fire, allowing the player to line up easy shots in quick succession. With a pistol, it was usually sufficient to stand still, hold down the fire button, and duck into cover when my gun started overheating. With the sniper rifle, what changed was that I pressed the button only once. As the game progressed, the majority of enemies became so nonthreatening that I could stand still and tank their shots without risking death. What challenge there was mostly came from instant-kill rockets and the occasional charging Krogan, and with the long load times, lackluster autosave system, and repetitive combat dying once in ME was more frustrating than a hundred deaths in VVVVVV.

The vehicle sections in the mako are so commonly complained-about that Bioware had a character joke about it in the second game. As poorly designed as the tank's core mechanics are, an even deeper problem is that there's nothing interesting to actually do in the Mako. Mass Effect's sidequests feel like they were made by a poorly-programmed level generator for a one-man indie game. They mostly consist of rolling around endless empty terrain doing completely inane tasks, usually a crappy version of Simon that doesn't even test memory skills. Truth be told, even just pressing a button and having Shepard do whatever hacking or scavenging task was at hand would be preferable to this!

Equally as uninspiring are the rewards for these quests. Mass Effect has my least favorite type of inventory management in an RPG, where all equipment is found randomly, the vast majority of it is worthless, and as much time is spent exchanging it for materials or money as using it. This kind of system does not add more depth of choice to equipping your squad. It merely adds more tedium as you're forced to sort through each new load of worthless guns in case you miss the rare good ones. There was a point when I just gave up, decided my equipment was good enough, and never bothered picking up new items until the game ended. My pistol at the time was called Raikou, and for the rest of the playthrough served as a grim reminded of an obligation ahead of me in this project.

As an RPG, it's one of the more shallow games I've played, with non-combat solutions to problems being rare, a dialog system that makes you guess how Shepard will interpret your choices (and most choices being controlled by the Paragon/Renegade meters anyway,) and a level-up system that feels unimpactful most of the time. In what I fear will become a recurring theme of this decade-long retrospective, the much-touted story choices don't amount to much difference either.

I found a lot to complain about in the first Mass Effect, and going over it all like that, ripping the game half to shreds, was definitely a cathartic feeling. But here's the point where I start feeling a little bad and patch it back up: Mass Effect might have the most interesting universe and lore of any game I've ever played. Its various species and factions have long histories and complex politics. Reading about conflicts like the Skyllian Blitz or the Krogan Rebellions made me wish I were playing a game set in those stories instead - or at least that one existed. Likewise, the characters and dialog were largely dynamic and compelling enough that my favorite part of the game was wandering around the Normandy and talking to the crew.

Mass Effect has the distinction of being the game of this project that I played the longest in a single session. I spent a Sunday night and much of a Monday morning playing almost half the game at once, and that's definitely a testament to how it does some things right. For all the tedium and drudgery of the gameplay, I never felt tempted to give up. The depth of the worldbuilding and characterization was enough to keep me pushing on.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect 2
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Evillordexdeath
06/10/20 9:42:41 AM
#142:


ZenOfThunder posted...
I need squad mate tier list

Okay, I'll oblige. I wanted to talk about the principle characters again in any case:

Top Tier:
Garrus

High Tier:
Wrex
Liara

Mid Tier:
Tali
Ashley

Low Tier:
Kaidan

Garrus: By far the guy I brought along the most. I remember liking Garrus a lot as a Renegade, but the contrast between him and a Paragon Shepard was especially fun. I liked seeing him grow to respect Shepard, and her way of doing things, over the course of the game. It really built a sense of having a relationship with his character.

Wrex: Another character built on contrast, Wrex's distrust and cynicism made his dialog with Garrus a lot of fun. Wrex feels a lot more fleshed-out than the majority of other squadmates, in part due to a sidequest revolving around him that feels like a sort of proof-of-concept for ME2's loyalty missions. Slowly winning the trust of a curmudgeonly character like this guy felt rewarding, and helped sell the impressive charisma that most characters see in Shepard.

Krogans were usually the most dangerous enemy type, and gameplay-wise Wrex might be the best squad mate you get. There were times when he would tank up absurd amount of enemy ammunition, leaving me free to bring the enemies down as he did.

Liara: The naive scientist type. Her good-natured party dialog can play off against the others well - I like how she admonished me for running over a monkey in that one stupid sidequest. Liara benefits a lot from three games worth of character development, but in the first game is particularly held up by the stakes she has in the story, particularly her encounter with her indoctrinated mother on Noveria.

Tali: Placing this character so low, and especially in the same tier as Ashley, is probably the most controversial part of my list. I'm just not sure that Tali is all that great in this game specifically. There was even a point after one mission where everyone but her unlocked new dialog. I mostly left her in the engine room, and she just felt a little like a hanger-on - but at the same time, her role in this trilogy is only just beginning.

Ashley: I remember Ashley being a reviled character when this game was younger, so I was surprised to find myself kind of liking her this time around. At least, I think she's good enough from a narrative standpoint. I can understand why some players were impatient with her human-centric attitude, but I found it understandable for a story where humanity is still coming to grips with other sentient races - and is still reeling from a brutal war against the Turians.

If we return to the idea of contrast, what's interesting about Ashley is that she opposes what I would consider the general theme of the series, which is the need for co-operation between different peoples. A more developed Ashley could have made an enjoyable intellectual sparring partner for Commander Shepard.

Kaidan: This guy was a kept man in my playthrough; I never brought him along on missions. Really, he's not so bad - his backstory develops the lore and relates to those human/turian conflicts again - but he's ultimately the biggest bore of the squad. He's developed as a contrast to Ashley, which makes him totally non-challenging to Shepard and her views. Perhaps relatedly, I have to say he made a deeply unsexy love interest, quickly following up any would-be romantic dialog by whinging about how the army has regulations against fraternization.

Other character I liked: Captain Anderson
Characters I was let down by: Sovereign, Benezia, Saren (to a lesser extent)
Characters who only exist to be disliked: Council, Ambassador Udina

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect 2
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Evillordexdeath
06/10/20 9:49:49 PM
#143:


Mass Effect 2
Release Date: January 26, 2010
I will be playing on: Playstation 3

Previous Experience with ME2: One complete Playthrough
Expectations for ME2: ME1 but more polished

One theme that I noticed looking over the early games of this project was "fallen giants." Bioware is the first example we come to. At the start of the decade they released this 1-seeded division winner, yet by the end they were putting out mediocre sludge like ME:A and Anthem, the latter of which they will be chained to for a long time, trying to slowly fix it No Man's Sky style.

Perhaps we can say that Bioware made a deal with the devil, since they sold themselves out to EA around the time of ME1's release. The extra funds from such a large-scale company may have helped create a game like ME2, but eventually the devil must have his due, and Bioware has given up its soul by now.

I remember think 2 was the overall best game in the Mass Effect series, mainly due to lacking the major flaws of the others. I'll be glad to have the first game's inventory management and vehicle sections behind me, and I'm looking forward to catching up with old friends like Garrus and Mordin.

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Currently Playing: Mass Effect 2
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Evillordexdeath
06/10/20 9:52:42 PM
#144:


Unfortunately, I've let time get ahead of me to the point where I don't have time to get through ME2's intro and initial cut-scenes tonight, so I'll just play some Pokemon today, and we'll get to that game when the time comes.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect 2
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ZenOfThunder
06/10/20 10:19:39 PM
#145:


Do you have all the DLC

Dont do zaeeds loyalty mission until you max our paragon or renegade

I wont give any other advice

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LinkMarioSamus
06/11/20 6:33:39 AM
#146:


Ex-BioWare staff have complained about the planning stages for their games consistently being a jumbled mess from what I've heard. They attribute their older games being so well-received to some kind of "BioWare magic" where everything just comes together late in production, which obviously hasn't been kicking in as of late. So apparently it's not ALL EA's fault.

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wallmasterz
06/11/20 10:09:50 AM
#147:


Tag

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I need to update my signature.
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LinkMarioSamus
06/11/20 10:17:29 AM
#148:


For some reason when I tried playing Crash today I was horrendous at depth perception and I took a few Game Overs to get anywhere in The High Road at all, forget about beating it!

Will probably return tomorrow anyway.

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pezzicle
06/11/20 4:42:01 PM
#149:


LinkMarioSamus posted...
Ex-BioWare staff have complained about the planning stages for their games consistently being a jumbled mess from what I've heard. They attribute their older games being so well-received to some kind of "BioWare magic" where everything just comes together late in production, which obviously hasn't been kicking in as of late. So apparently it's not ALL EA's fault.
They def haven't made a good game in a long time tho

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Tribe Time!
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Evillordexdeath
06/11/20 6:42:23 PM
#150:


ZenOfThunder posted...
Do you have all the DLC

Dont do zaeeds loyalty mission until you max our paragon or renegade

I wont give any other advice

I think I do. I have the 'collection' on PS3 that comes with the whole trilogy, which I know includes a lot of the DLC for 2. I did the Shadow Broker DLC and recruited Kasumi last time I played.

Do you have any recommendations about which DLC and which non-loyalty mission sidequests are worth it?

LinkMarioSamus posted...
Ex-BioWare staff have complained about the planning stages for their games consistently being a jumbled mess from what I've heard. They attribute their older games being so well-received to some kind of "BioWare magic" where everything just comes together late in production, which obviously hasn't been kicking in as of late. So apparently it's not ALL EA's fault.

I can believe that, honestly. Admittedly I didn't do a lot of research on that ME2 post.

pezzicle posted...
They def haven't made a good game in a long time tho

Yeah, probably not since ME3 or DA:I. You could go back even further if you don't like either of those, which isn't a particularly uncommon opinion.


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